INTERVIEW: Steve Darnell is ready for more ‘Vegas Rat Rods’

Vegas Rat Rods returns to Discovery Channel Monday, Oct. 19 at 10 p.m. with all new episodes. The reality series, which films most of its action near the Strip in Las Vegas, follows Steve Darnell and his team of auto experts as they customize “rat rods” that wouldn’t be out of place in the Mad Max film franchise.

Darnell, speaking to Hollywood Soapbox, said that the new season will find the Welderup team moving to a new shop with a showroom to display the “cool builds.” He also promised a Vegas-themed car and a train-themed vehicle.

“It’s a train, but it’s a car we built,” Darnell said recently during a phone interview. “It’s a really cool episode that I think is one of my favorites. It’s really unique and pretty different. I mean the guy just came in, and dropped money off and said, ‘Build whatever you want.’ So when you do that, then it gets interesting.”

The need to move to a new venue has some history. The old shop, highlighted on season one, was one of Darnell’s father’s old steel buildings. “We had a steel business here in Las Vegas, and then my dad wound up selling out in 2006,” he said. “Well, this building was vacant because, you know, the market and everything just went to crap in Las Vegas. So that building was just sitting there for years with nothing in it, so we knew the people that bought the building. And they leased it back to us at a really lower rate, so it was really nice.”

The new shop is more centrally located on Las Vegas’s iconic Strip, allowing access for car aficionados. Sin City has always been a car town, whether it be the conventions that come to the city or the constant cruising of cool vehicles past the many casinos.

“I know when I was 15, 16 years old, I cruised the Strip in whatever we could drive,” Darnell said. “I remember cruising the Strip in one of my dad’s old work trucks just so I had something to cruise. I wouldn’t even go home and take a shower because I didn’t want to look like I was clean driving an old truck. So I just looked like I came off the job site and was just cruising the Strip. So, yeah, the car world here is cool. People like to cruise the Strip and have fun. And there’s a lot of Hot Rodders here, a lot of old guys from, you know, back in the old days that built some cool Hot Rods like my dad and all his friends and people he knows. It’s pretty cool. It’s pretty entertaining. There’s a lot of it here.”

Darnell said that when he was young, growing up in Las Vegas, he would sometimes get in trouble and be grounded to his room. While there by his lonesome he would play with random car models that his mother would buy at local garage sales.

“They were just random models,” he said. “I mean none of them matched. I’d sit in my bedroom grounded and build these models that were just crazy. They didn’t make no sense, and they were really cool. Anyway, I think that’s kind of where it [love for cars] started, and then as I got older, I went through a phase where I went rodeo-ing for a while, and actually team-roped, and did a lot of cowboy stuff for a while and used to gather wild cows out of the desert with JR, my friend that you’ve seen on TV last year. But I kind of did that for a while, and, you know, after that I always had cars.”

The turning point was when he put a diesel engine in a sedan. “And then it just kept growing from there,” said the reality-TV star, who has been involved with “rat rods” for 10 years. “I just got the bug for it, and started craving, and building new stuff and seeing how crazy I could go. And here’s where I’m at. I mean it just escalated into this.”

Darnell’s team consists of a group of guys that he would “die for, and they would die for me.” He called them hard workers with hard-working backgrounds. “I mean all these guys were involved in the construction world and the steel world,” he said. “We’ve all been around some pretty hot and heavy work, and so when it comes to having to build one of these cars in a certain amount of time, you know, with very little, it’s challenging. And I don’t think without the work ethic that these guys have we’d be able to make it. … They’re fighters, and that’s what makes it happen. Yeah, they’re family, and I’ve known them forever. I mean these guys go way back with me.”

Darnell’s favorite clients are those who give him some freedom in the customization process.

“If a guy comes in here with some money and says, ‘Steve, look, you build cool stuff. I just want you to build me something cool. Here’s the money. Call me when it’s done,’ those are the best clients because now I can just ask them a few question about their life, and find out who they are, and what they’ve done in their life, what’s important in their life, where they’re from and learn about them. And then I can creatively start putting the car together, but the guys that come in that can build the car themselves, but they don’t do it, they want me to do it, those are the hard ones because it’s like, you know, they want it built kind of their way. But they want me to build it, but that’s not really what I do. … I detach myself away from the build because now it’s not what I want; it’s what you want.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Vegas Rat Rods airs new episodes 10 p.m. Mondays on Discovery Channel. Click here for more information.