Hello, Kansas City, and welcome back to the Bespoke Automotive Refinement podcast, the premier Kansas City car detailing podcast. We are so glad that you joined us and that you yourself are also an enthusiast of cars. Today we have with us the founder of Bespoke Automotive Refinement, Thomas Thill, and he is the number one Kansas City car detailing expert.
Thomas, thank you so much for joining us on this show. Thank you so much for having me, and Happy New Year to all of my Kansas City car detailing enthusiasts, listeners, and clients. I love coming on here and just talking about Kansas City car detailing and car culture and cars in general, which is actually what I want to talk about today.
I want to talk about car culture and the direction that car culture is going. Before you start, kind of give us a little bit like how long have you enjoyed cars? Like about a year or two? I think more like a year or two of age. Photos of me as a child, I always have a car in my hand.
I’ve always been a car enthusiast. I’ve always enjoyed just the way cars bring people together. You know, I was never a big sports guy, but I loved how when we went to that Chiefs game a couple weeks ago, how sports bring people together, cars also bring people together.
So I’ve always enjoyed that aspect of it. What is it about cars that you like specifically? When you look at a car, are you looking at the stats of how fast it goes? Are you thinking about what it would be like to be driving yourself? Are you looking at the color? What exactly is it about cars that just makes your heart flutter? Everything. I love what they represent.
So I love the idea that you can buy a Toyota Corolla and you can drive it around town. And if you want to hop in that car and drive it to the Rocky Mountains, to Pikes Peak, you can do that. This is the first time really in history that you can just get in a vehicle and drive it anywhere.
So I love that aspect of it. And then I love how different they are. I love how right now I’m on a C8 Corvette kick.
That’s what I want to buy next. And I love how different every one of them are. You can get an orange C51 or you can get a light blue 1LT.
And they’re specced totally different and the color combination is a little bit different. Every car for a car enthusiast, they make it their own. And I love that aspect of it.
I love that to a car enthusiast, they make it their own. And they’re never the same. So now that we’ve established that you are generally okay with cars, you have a general look of appreciation for them. What have you seen change over the last 20 plus years in the car industry and car culture amongst street racers, amongst maybe the higher end luxury cars? What have you experienced? I remember TX2K20, which was a huge street race.
It was like the Super Bowl of street racing. And I went down there and it was right around the time that COVID was really becoming mainstream. And they actually canceled it.
And I was there when they canceled it. Send everyone home. At that point, people didn’t know how bad it was or how bad it wasn’t.
And they pulled the plug on it and sent everyone home. And that was really like the last big street racing event that I ever went to. That was the last organized automotive festival that I ever went to.
During COVID, a lot of the urban car enthusiasts started doing what are called takeovers. And it’s basically where they shut down a street intersection in the middle of the city. And they do donuts and they shoot guns.
It kind of became more gang related. And the city’s ordinances and police departments, they began referring to that as street racing. So they cracked down on anyone doing any sort of car meets or car events.
And they grouped it in with these takeovers. And now you have people trying to put on car meets, car festivals, and they keep getting either shut down because of these street takeovers or these street takeover groups who show up to these street races, these organized events that are actually relatively safe. And they’ll get the cops called on it and they’ll get it shut down.
I know of people that have ended up with prison sentences because they put on a car event and it got grouped in with a takeover event, which turned into a riot. And it got grouped in with organized rioting. So unfortunately, I feel like car culture has really died.
The car culture that I grew up with, you know, it’s gone. And so I have a vision. I used to play the Forza Horizon games.
And I have a vision of someday having an automotive festival. So like a music festival, but instead it’s cars and it’s street racing and it’s organized. And I think that will bring it back.
But I think for the time being, what was the car culture of 2015 to 2020, which to any car guy will tell you that was the most enjoyable time frame, it’s gone. It’s really sad. That is sad.
Do you think it’s something that could be revived? Like maybe not some of the more dangerous street racing aspects of it, but drag racing? I do. I have a good friend, Kyle Loftus, up in Omaha. He puts on an event every year called Ice Cream Cruise.
And they basically rent out a track and they create it like a Forza Horizon type car festival, but it’s in real life and it’s 100% legal. It’s on a track. It’s incredible.
I have a vision of putting those all over the United States. And I think that would really bring it back. It’s just between organized street racing becoming so criminalized and all of these drag strips all over the country are being closed because they’re building developments, housing developments right next to them.
It’s a lot harder now to be a racing enthusiast than it was five, six years ago. Something that you have started doing here in the Kansas City area is you’ve tapped into some other versions of car culture. Not the street racing, but the Ferrari rallies and other more higher end type cars.
What does that look like? And if somebody is wanting to experience a Kansas City car detailing package on maybe even a higher end car like a Ferrari or Lamborghini, how would they go about doing that? Well, first of all, exotic car rallies are a form of street racing. They’re organized heavily. You have to pay a massive amount of money to get into one of these rallies.
The one I went on, it was like $10,000 a person to do this. If we had more events like that that were a little bit more affordable so you could cut out the degenerate group of people, I think that it would come back over time. If you’re looking to book a Kansas City car detailing package or a Kansas City car detailing service, we offer everything from paint correction, ceramic coating, your basic mobile wash, mobile detail.
You can give me a call at 620-282-0402 or you can go onto our website bespokerefinement.com. You can check out all the different Kansas City car detailing services that we offer there and you can book directly online.