My name is Roxy Calder. I’m writing this down because Drag City has a habit of turning facts into legend overnight, and The Outlaw Garage has become one of those places people talk about more than they actually understand. A reputation like theirs attracts every kind of projection—envy, superstition, hero worship, and the occasional outright lie. So I did what I always do when the pit lane gets loud: I went looking for receipts.
“Outlaw” is the kind of word that makes people lean in—half excited, half suspicious—like they’re hoping for a scandal. That’s not what this is. The Outlaw Garage isn’t a criminal enterprise hiding behind a cool name; it’s a small, stubborn shop that built its reputation the hardest way possible: by getting results in public, over and over, where the stopwatch can’t be bribed and excuses don’t survive the heat.
And here’s the part the modern world keeps forgetting: old cars aren’t computers. They don’t behave because a program told them to. They have moods—good days, bad days, and days where they run like magic for reasons you can’t quite explain. Most people try to tame that with shortcuts, charts, and bravado. The Outlaw Garage does it the old way—by understanding what a machine is trying to say, and having the patience to listen until it finally tells the truth.
From the street, the shop doesn’t look like much: three bays, brick painted white over blue, green awnings that throw just enough shade to make the interior look darker than it is. A corrugated roof that hums when the wind picks up off the flats. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you could drive past it on Bear Valley Road without ever slowing down.
But people do slow down. Not because of the building, but because of what keeps happening inside it.
On a race weekend, the driveway never really empties. Cars arrive with problems they’ve already paid someone else to fix. Engines come in quiet and leave sounding sharper, tighter, like they’ve remembered what they were built for. A driver might show up frustrated and leave an hour later saying nothing at all, which at Drag City usually means everything worked.
None of it looks dramatic while it’s happening. The legend only starts later, when the lap times show up.
A Shop That Grew With the Track
When Drag City began changing shape—first by expanding beyond the original strip, and later by redesigning, relocating pits, and rethinking how people and cars moved through the facility—the Outlaw Garage changed with it.
In its earliest life it was defined by proximity to the work: an extension of the old Chevron bays that became the first practical pit nerve center when the road course era took hold, before the official pits were moved in 1967 and the dual bays rebranded as a dedicated tuning shop.
But Drag City didn’t freeze in 1967. As the track matured through later rebuilds and reconfigurations—especially in the modern Mk IV layout—the “front door” of the facility shifted, and with it the gravitational pull of the entrance gates, staging areas, and public flow.
The result is that today the Outlaw Garage occupies a different role than it once did. Instead of serving as the improvised pit complex of the early road-course era, the shop now sits just outside the modern entrance ecosystem—where spectators arrive, entrants queue, and the business end of the track meets its public face.
Which means that sooner or later, everyone notices it.
The Small Shop Problem
There is one detail about the Outlaw Garage that comes up again and again: it doesn’t look big enough.
Three bays, a modest office, and just enough room out front to shuffle cars around; for a place that quietly services everything from vintage racers to exotic road machines, it feels improbably small.
The practical explanation is simple enough. The crew maintains an off-site annex elsewhere in town, where spare engines, bodywork, and long-term projects are stored between races. It’s the kind of logistical solution any working race shop eventually adopts.
When I asked about it, Brad Metzger confirmed as much with a shrug. “You can’t run a place like this without somewhere to stack things.”
But if you listen to the rumors long enough, you’ll hear a different version. Some people say the real work happens “out there.” The mechanics just laugh at that. According to everyone who actually knows the shop, whatever makes the Outlaw Garage special happens right here—in three cramped bays under a roof that rattles when the desert wind comes through Wardglenn.
The Man Who Runs the Floor
If the Outlaw Garage has a center of gravity, it’s the man who runs the floor: Brad Metzger.
Metzger isn’t the kind of mechanic who fills a room. He doesn’t need to. He listens more than he talks, and when he does speak it’s usually because he’s already decided what the problem is. There’s no performance to it, no attempt to impress. Just a quiet certainty that tends to make arguments stop before they start.
One driver told me Metzger once diagnosed an ignition issue without opening the hood. Another said he called a failure before it happened, then fixed it before the next heat. Metzger, when I asked him about either story, just shook his head. “It’s not magic,” he said. “It’s just paying attention.”
The Outlaw Crew
Metzger doesn’t run the place alone. Seven other mechanics make up the core floor crew at Outlaw Garage—each one with a specialty, and all of them working from the same set of fundamentals.
Cal “Torque” Dobbins handles Chevrolets and all things GM, the kind of expert who can hear something wrong before you can describe it. Rico Santoro is the Mopar man, known for building big-block engines that feel like they’re carrying a grudge. Miles Hargrove takes care of the Porsches, methodical and precise, the one people trust when reliability matters more than anything else. Enzo “Z” Marchelli works on the Italian cars—Ferraris especially—treating carburetors and ignition systems with a level of attention that borders on ritual.
Daphne Lusk handles the British machines, Jaguars included, with a reputation for solving problems other shops write off as “just how those cars are.” Hank “Stitch” Merriman fabricates whatever doesn’t exist yet, quietly turning raw metal into parts that look like they were always meant to be there. And Leonard Pike—Lenny to everyone in the shop—is the machinist, the one who measures everything twice and then checks the tools he used to measure it.
Individually, they’re specialists. Together, they’re something else.
Why It Works
Ask ten different people why the Outlaw Garage gets the results it does, and you’ll get ten different answers. Secret techniques. Special parts. A trick nobody else has figured out. The truth is less exciting—and harder to copy. They understand the fundamentals: Fuel. Air. Spark. Heat. Friction. Timing.
And maybe more importantly, they understand that not every engine behaves the same way, even when it’s built the same way. Cars of the eras that race at Drag City have personalities; anyone who’s spent enough time around them knows that. Some respond to adjustment immediately. Others resist. Some need to be coaxed or pushed. Others need to be left alone. Most modern shops don’t have the time—or the patience—for that kind of nuance.
Outlaw does.
They listen. They adjust. They test. They repeat. And when they’re done, the car doesn’t just run; it runs the way it was meant to.
There’s a reason people talk about the Outlaw Garage the way they do. Not because it’s mysterious, but because it isn’t. Everything they do happens out in the open, in full view of anyone willing to pay attention. The problem is that most people don’t know what they’re looking at.
Another beautifully written read that really expresses what it truly how these machines should be treated and listened to so they can be what they want to be. Some of the same things are true for an old house. I love all the details, the people’s stories, and the history. It really does bring things alive!