Welcome back to M1 Concourse for another episode of Drive Like You're Alive, where we take you behind the scenes here at M1 Concourse, where high-performance driving, world-class festivals, and a vibrant car culture all come together. And today, we're taking you inside Garage 29 to meet one of the original garage owners here at M1 Concourse. His name is Ralph Gilles, and you're going to see this is more than just a collection of cars. It's about designing them, building them, and sharing them with this incredible community. So, you ready to go drive like you're alive? Let's go check out Garage 29.
Hey, how are you doing, man? Pleasure. This is an honor. I am very excited for this.
Yeah, welcome to my garage. Let's start at the beginning. I'll say that the Giugiaro-designed Alfa Romeo's. This car we call Sergio. It was named after my boss that kind of brought the company back in 2010. Love this car since I was a kid. I've always loved Giugiaro's GTV or Junior, they've called this car as well. And I'm a horsepower freak, so the engine is quite special. I would say a modernized version of the original, so it's still a original block, but it's a 2.1 L. With this company out of England makes a lot of parts for these, so it's called Alfaholics is the name. The engine makes about 225 horsepower, and the car weighs roughly 1,900 lb, so if you just look at power-to-weight ratio, it's quite interesting. And I'm a wheel freak, as you can see from the Charger, I love wheels, and I had these wheels custom-made. They never came on the car, but they're reminiscent of the wheels from the Type 33. The interior is a little bit of a take on the original, but I've had the gauges custom-made, so it has a little bit more modern gauges. Just beautiful. And the rest I did myself, adding the carbon fiber inlays. I did my first ever headliner. I did the engine calibration. Blew it up a few times.
You built this car from scratch.
From scratch, yeah. And if you look at the car, in my opinion, still looks good, you know, almost 50 years on. It's like art. It's timeless art. And that's me. The obsession is art and design, and also I love driving.
One thing that I noticed that I think we share, and literally, I remember when I first saw this car when I was a kid, I think it literally brought me to tears. I literally like because I remember telling my dad, I was like, 'What is that?'
Yeah. I fell in love. Same. And in 1976, if you think about the car in '76, it was the oil crisis, the OPEC crisis, cars were getting a little funny-looking, especially in America. This thing comes along, and it's just sexy as ever. The minute I saw it, I stopped me in my tracks, and I said, 'One day.' And again, like you say, it's like it has a face. I love cars that kind of look back at you when you look at them, and this car does that.
Yeah, always. And by the way, still to this day. Yeah, and we still refer to this car. This was my on literally a poster in my bedroom when I was, you know, 8 years old. It was a gas car. I actually converted it to electric, so this is actually driven by a dual motor Tesla drivetrain with LG batteries, so 0 to 60 is like 2 seconds.
This is a light. It's electric. Yeah, it's converted to electric. It's a real 930, it's not a look-alike, so that's kind of sacrilege in the Porsche world, but I still have the original powertrain somewhere, but I like it the way it is. But I have yet to lose a traffic light race.
At 2 seconds, exactly. This is beautiful.
Yeah, and then there's a little weirdo over there, that's my 205 Peugeot. There's probably only 15 of them in the US. They never sold in the US, and I did an internship in France when I was a young designer, and my manager had one and gave me a ride in it. I'd never felt a car, you know, pull G's like that, the roundabouts and the mountain roads. No one gets this car, only a handful of people understand it, but it's fun to drive. It's my pizza delivery car. I love it.
And we can't talk about my life without talking about the Viper.
This is my 2013 GTS, so number two off the line. I came to Detroit in 1988 as a designer, and I saw the original concept in '89 at the motor show. Fell in love with the company and the car and the whole idea that a design could do that, could just change a conversation of a company in one fell swoop. Very proud of this car. There's a lot of meaning behind this car, but really wanted to do something that was evocative of the previous generations, but very very modern. I learned a lot of stuff from motorsports, so the team came up with this crossbar, which we found really improves handling of the car. We wanted this generation to be like a go-kart, you know, much more predictable. Still runs like a top, I love it. I think I have like 17,000 mi on this one, so I drive it a lot. And one of the most special parts about the car is not even to do with the car itself, but when I picked this up at the plant, the team surprised me and the entire SRT engineering team and the manufacturing people at Conner signed the back of the car for me. And it means a lot to me. I get emotional every time I open this up and I see all my friends on there. And without them, the car wouldn't exist. And that's named Storm, so after Halle Berry's character in X-Men.
And this car almost didn't happen.
Yeah, yes. We had no right doing this car at the time. It was so important in the history of Dodge. To show the world that we were back, you know, in many ways. Dodge is Dodge in Chrysler in general, and I remember the CEO writing to me his thoughts about the car when we finally were going to show it, and he says he wanted to give me a motivation to tell the world that we did this cuz we could, not cuz we had to. He knew that we were going to pull out of the bankruptcy, and this car to me symbolizes that. I mean, it's these are like historic moments on the road.
Yeah, exactly. And it's hard to part with these cars cuz there's a story behind each one. It's like different pieces of artwork.
And finally, there's Hallucination. So, this is my 1968 Charger. I've been in love with the Charger since I was a kid. It's been in movies, and I grew up watching Dukes of Hazzard, it's been in Bullitt. This one shocks a lot of people cuz it just looks like a black lowered Charger. You get up to it, and you realize it's made of carbon fiber. This is beautiful. And I've always loved the pop-up headlights, what they call the devil's eyes, you know what I mean? So cool. There's only three of these in existence. I like modern cars the way they drive, I like the style of the old cars, it kind of mixes all of my favorite things.
And again, that's the funny thing we share that, like watching Dukes of Hazzard cars flying over, but like you'd see the big hood, like, you know?
And I had already bought the engine before the car. So, I bought the first elephant engine, 1,000 horsepower, all aluminum 426 supercharged engine. And then, of course, being a designer, I worked with the team at SpeedKore about all the details. Bad Boys Customs helped with the interior, this gray color with the orange stitching, which matches the orange on the Brembo brakes, which are the same brakes we put on a modern-day Challenger and Charger SRT. And if you notice, there's an SRT logo in the middle of the wheel, which was designed to mimic the hurricanes that were on the General Lee in Dukes of Hazzard. I actually drive it. I have close to 8,000 mi.
Really? Yeah. Do you drive them all?
Yeah, I do. And another thing about my garage is all the artwork you see has been done by designers, so I like to represent them and support what they're doing. There's more of those upstairs as well.
Sure, let's check out those.
Yeah, let's go. Let's do it. Check it out.
Oh, wow. Yeah, so this is... Yeah, this place relaxes me. There's something about the lighting, I really like the way the light comes in here. I use this area to paint sometimes. I put my easel out and paint. And then again, the artwork that you see is all done by fellow designers. We'll look at Pardo's piece here, beautiful. Then my racing, I've done quite a bit of stuff with the Viper, I've actually driven my that's number one ACR.
Yeah. Yeah. Look at that.
Yeah, right. Wow. It's actually a wildlife photographer that happened to be there that day, and he caught it.
Here's the wall of pain, so that's my trophies from racing. I race in the Radical Cup. And notice there's third, lots of seconds, lots of, you know, I just can't seem to get a win. You're getting wins with customers. Ironically, I have one first-place trophy, I can't find it. This is a real Formula 1 tire. I can't say how it ended up in my hands, but we'll leave it at that.
And then, of course, you have to have a bar and a kitchen, so friends come over and deplete my supplies. We just hang out here. And then, of course, my Voodoo Child, so friends this nickname I got from the Air Force has really transcended everything, so we have... Oh, it's actually full. I didn't realize that.
So, tell me about that. Why that nickname?
