Quick Stats: Grant Reynolds, host, Science Channel’s “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”
Daily Driver: 1970 Dodge Super Bee (Grant’s rating: 10 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other cars: see below
Favorite road trip: St. George, Utah, to Sedona, Arizona
Car he learned to drive in: 1967 VW van
First car bought: 1967 VW van
While they filmed the second season of Science Channel’s “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” in the San Francisco Bay Area, Grant Reynolds had his trusty 2010 Ford F-150 Raptor, which came in handy as the car on the show.
“It’s a 6.2, so I put the big motor in it, and it’s been the best vehicle I’ve ever really owned,” he says. “It’s one of those vehicles I can jump three or four feet off the ground out in the desert and then get back on the highway and still do 90. … It’s unbelievable. Unbelievable.”
He chose the Raptor because it offers everything he wanted. “It is the apocalypse vehicle,” he says. “If you want to cruise at 100, that thing will do a straight line as long as you want it. If you want to go off-road and up the gnarliest hill, it is the most utilitarian vehicle I’ve ever possessed or I’ve ever driven. And I’ve driven military Humvees. You name it, I’ve driven it at some point in time.”
Reynolds, a former Marine who’s owned dozens of vehicles, says he treats the Raptor like a real truck. “I beat the shit out of it, and when I go to clean it up, it’s like, ‘Wow, you really clean up well,’ and you’re happy to see it again,” he says. “It’s like the constant love affair. I keep falling in love with this truck. It’s the best vehicle I’ve ever owned.
Although he loves the Raptor, he still gives it a 9.5, just short of perfect 10, for a few minor things he feels Ford could have done better.
“There’s a couple of aesthetic things that bother me,” he says. “Some of the packaging that they do, some of how they itemize specific parts and then they put it on the car, and they don’t care about how it looks aesthetically. They’ve got such a good, streamlined package on how they did it. It’s such a big truck, but then you see this bar code and a part number and this huge tag sticking out from underneath it, and you’re like, wow, it left the showroom floor like that.”
There’s also the F-150 sign on the top of the windshield. Reynolds ended up taking off all of the logos.
“I even painted the ovals because I wanted it dressed down,” he says. “I wanted it to look like a sleeper Ford, so I took I took off the 6.2-liter badge, I took off the Ford Raptor badge, which is the size of a briefcase. I just didn’t want everybody to know that, OK, he’s driving around in a Raptor. I wanted them to be shocked when I just sped off or when I went off-roading or jumped something. The whole car is that Ford tuxedo black.”
He says it’s got great seats and is such a good product, but he would have liked more attention to detail.
“Coming from SVT Ford hot rod shop, I would’ve thought there would have been a little grooming before it landed to the consumer,” he says. “That’s my own little mini complaint. I don’t have much. It’s been such a good car. Such a good car.”
But Reynolds may trade it for the new one because he would like it to be a bit less of a gas guzzler. “Right now I’ve got that big 6.2, and it tells me I am getting 12 miles to the gallon, and we all know that’s not the truth,” he says. “So that’s the only caveat to all of this, is just it’s a gasaholic, which is beautiful, but when you’re in SoCal and you’re getting the four-plus [dollar] gas stations, it gets a little bit expensive.”
1970 Dodge Super Bee
Rating: 10
Reynolds’ other car, which he’s had for 14 years, is his daily driver in Southern California. “For four years, Mopar was building factory hot rods and delivering them to the public,” he says. “This ’70 is B5 Polyester blue. It’s got a power-bulge hood, it’s got air induction, it’s got a 383 magnum, a 727 transmission, and it’s just set up to do burnouts and be a complete asshole on the road.”
He says he feels like he’s 18 every time he drives it. “It’s a factory hot rod, and it’s just beautiful. Beautiful car,” he says. “Anything I own, I don’t sit around and polish it. Whether it’s a gun, a knife, a vehicle, a motorcycle, if I own it, I’m using it. If it serves no purpose in my life, if it has no employment in my life, if it’s on my list and it’s employed by me, I’m driving it like I stole it.”
He drives it as anyone would their daily driver, including driving his kids to school and even a recent trip to Santa Barbara, California. “I don’t even think twice about it,” he says. “I pull up at the valet, and they’re like, are you kidding me? I take it anywhere, anywhere and everywhere.”
Although it’s not the original paint, it is the original color. “We’ve had a couple of brush ups here and there, but as far as the interior goes, it’s pretty bone stock,” he says. “I’ve got suspender tags. It’s a numbers-matching car. The only thing I’ve done is put on an external tachometer to monitor where the motor’s at, but other than that, it’s pretty cherry.”
It’s also got an old AM radio, which Reynolds disconnected. “I took the antenna off, too, because it’s a little bit too big for that chassis that Dodge was putting out,” he says. He doesn’t need to listen to anything driving the Super Bee. “When you hear the motor, that motor sings to me the whole way. I love the sound of it. I’m kept company by that motor singing to me.”
When Reynolds first saw it, he knew it was his car. “Just because it was muscle, just because it was pure,” he says. “To me it’s a very pure car, and by that I mean, from inception it had one purpose. When you see the way it’s perched, when you see the way I have air shocks on the back and I’ve raised it just a little bit in the back—subtle little nuances really make it look aggressive.”
It’s such a powerful car that Reynolds says as soon he presses the gas, he’s doing burnouts. “I was born in ’72 this car was made in ’70, so we’re pushing a 45-year-old car,” he says. “For the timeframe, I just can’t even fathom the foresight that these guys had, building cars that look this aggressive, that were this big, because it’s so huge and then that fast. They had to put monster power plants in them to get these things up and going.”
As expected, Reynolds also gets a lot of looks and waves as he drives the standout ride. “There’s not too many of them, especially in SoCal. If you’re going to get into one of those kind of boats, you better get used to being waved at by all the other captains.”
Car he learned to drive in
Growing up in Southern California, Reynolds learned to drive in driver’s ed but then had more practice in a 1967 VW van that he bought less than an hour after he learned to drive it. “I had done all the little weird Ford Tauruses that we did back in the day at school, with the two brakes,” he says.
The VW van belonged to a friend of a friend, and Reynolds went intending to check it out to buy it. He paid $1,800 right there in Simi Valley, California. “It was a 1967 VW bus deluxe, split window, safari windows, a 15-window bus, and it was just the easiest thing in the world to work around and to navigate around,” he says. “It couldn’t have been easier. I couldn’t have had a better experience learning how to drive in it. I didn’t tell any of them that I didn’t have a license. They assumed I did.”
He also didn’t tell his friend he had never driven a car with a manual transmission. “I literally learned right there on the spot how to drive stick,” he says. “He told me, ‘Hey man, just get it into first, work that clutch, let it out,’ and he goes, ‘You can skip second and go straight to third.’ The first time I drove this bus, I went first to third, so I skipped second gear. He goes, ‘Oh, nice one!’ and I made it the first time, and the rest is history. I bought it.”
The VW van was his high school car. Reynolds had the money to buy it because he worked for a cobbler as an apprentice. He got school credit and got paid, as well.
“For two years I worked at Cobblers Bench Shoe Repair, which is still there, on L.A. Avenue right in the heart of Simi Valley,” he says. “I would work five days a week there, six days a week sometimes if we were slammed. But we would work barbershop hours, Tuesday through Saturday. Saturday of course was a full day, but I would go after school during the school year and work from 1 to 6. That $1,800 was chump change for me in high school because I was making a ton of money.”
He worked on shoes, saddles, luggage, purses, western boots, baseball gloves, and shoe dying. “I figured if I ever fall on my ass, I better have a good trade to fall on, and my mom and I weren’t getting along very well back then,” he says. “She’s like, ‘You better figure out how to use your hands so you have something to fall on, and you also better get a vehicle that you can live in.’ ”
Since that first car, Reynolds has owned 78 vehicles, about half of them cars and the other half motorcycles. “I used to repair and restore vintage Cadillacs, so I’ve had two ’64s, a ’60, I had a ’68,” he says. “I had a ’59 that I quickly flipped, but it was a four-door. I’ve had the Ford Broncos, Buick Skylarks, Ford Escorts, the S-Class Mercedes, Porsche, G-Wagen. You name it. I’ve had the ’49 Dodge Pilot Cab. Most of them were bought because I just wanted to say I owned one, and then I would usually flip it and make a little bit of money and reinvest into another vehicle. That’s pretty much been the impetus the whole time.”
Reynolds worked on the cars by himself as much as he could, about 85 percent of the time. “I don’t buy too many new vehicles anymore,” he says. “That truck [the Raptor] is probably the last new one I’ve bought in years. All of my Cadillacs, from body work to engine work—transmission work, not so much—but I’ll muck around with the daily maintenance on that thing, as far as the timing goes, oil, plugs, alternator, starter—all the stuff that I can really get into.”
Reynolds loved the 1959 to 1968 Cadillacs. “The body style—that 1960 Cadillac, they put that 390 motor, whereas the rest of them put the big 420 motor in there,” he says. “You could fit three people inside of that engine compartment in between where the radiator fan is and the bumper. There’s a huge one and a half-foot gap in between those two things.”
He remembers working on a 1960 Cadillac that he bought from a friend. “I redid the interior, completely had it painted GM blue with a nice ivory white top,” he says. “To me, those are easy to work on. It was a straight love affair with those bodies, with those lines that they had, the fins, the molding, the telescopic steering wheels, the Hydroglide transmission. They were luxury. And they still are.”
Favorite road trip
Reynolds’ favorite road trip was one he did recently, from St. George, Utah to Sedona, Arizona.
“That is some of the prettiest landscape I can think of,” he says. “This time I was on two wheels. I endured almost seven hours of nonstop torrential, biblical rain. I had never seen that landscape in that capacity before. It’s always been beautiful; it gave such a different perspective this time around.”
He’s done the drive a few times before and loves how large everything is from the road. “You can look at a point of interest or a landmark and go, ‘Oh wow, that’ll only take me 10 minutes to get to,” he says. “Meanwhile, 45 minutes later, you’re still looking and still referencing that same landmark, that same plateau, that same rock formation, and it’s like, ‘Holy cow, how long is it going to take me to get by this?’ It just puts you in the present moment, and after about an hour of doing that, you just let go and go, ‘I don’t care anymore. I’m just going to go along for the ride.’ And then you really start to enjoy the topography, the cloud formations, the way the sun comes in, the way the heat hits you. To me, it’s remarkable, it’s quiet, it’s peaceful and it’s just massive.”
“What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” on Discovery’s Science Channel
Reynolds first met his co-host, Kevin Moore, about eight years ago on the road. “I met him at a dive restaurant, some little café in Utah,” he says. “I was with a friend, and he was by himself, and we had a mutual friend in the group. We were all headed to Sturgis, and we sat down next to each other at lunch and had a great time talking and kind of started up the bromance right then and there. We’ve been pretty good friends ever since.”
They just wrapped the show’s second season. “Kevin is a full-fledged materials scientist,” he says. “He’s a metallurgist, and you don’t meet many of them. He’s a Johns Hopkins PhD scientist. Then I have a weird wheelhouse—military experience from some recourse sniper program into high-risk dignitary protection. I do private security contracting. We both just have two really unique skill sets, and once we put them together, we really found that we had a lot of common ground, but we both approached it very differently.”
They redo videos of science experiments that may not have worked and replicate them in the garage in the Bay Area. “We literally find the tipping point. ‘Aw, they should have done this!’ And then that usually turns into, ‘Let’s build this, let’s do it, let’s prove it!’ The running joke for us is it’s two guys in a garage. We’ve got some pretty neat skill sets that both of us bring to the table. There’s a lot of daredevil stuff going on, a lot of gambling and fun bets that we do. Nothing but fun comes out of that garage.”
This season they worked on an amphibious motorcycle. “We took a YZ250 and put four pontoons on the side of it,” he says. “They were retractable, so once you hit water, all you had to do was deploy them, and you could ride this bike on water as well as land. Aqua bike.” They tried it in the San Pablo reservoir east of San Francisco, and it worked.
“I’ve been mucking around in TV and film off and on for 18 years,” he says. “It’s one of those jobs that at the end of the day you can really go home feeling good about doing the work you did that day. We’re on the Science Channel; we couldn’t have a better home for the platform we’re launching off from.”
He loves being on an educational channel. “To me that’s so cool,” he says. “We really break it down with the thoughtful engineering and the scientific-based approach to what it is we’re trying to do in the garage.”
The show features illustrations, graphics, and formulas to explain how things work. “There’s a lot of telling the viewer, ‘Hey, this is what we’re doing, this is how we got to this point, and check it out; do you think this is going to work?’ ” he says. “So I’d like to think there’s a lot of engaging the viewer from us, and it’s just turned out to be such a fun job that it doesn’t even feel like a job.”
The two hosts work together well with their individual talents. “Kevin’s a wealth of knowledge,” he says. “I think every once in a while I shock him with some random facts or some random experience that I’ve had that I can actually bring to the drawing board and fill in the gaps. Our marriage is just that. Sometimes it’s right on point, sometimes it’s rocky, but at the end of the day, we really do get the job done in a pretty fastidious and brotherly kind of manner. It’s pretty neat to see how it turns out.”
The shows airs its holiday special on November 28. They’ll be making Santa’s sleigh with helium, and the tree will be blasted with compressed air. They also say they will strap on a parachute and launch toys from Saint Nick. The special airs on the Science Channel at 8 p.m. EST.
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Source: Motor Trend
