Steve Rees and his son build a sports car

Every night, it’s the same ritual for Steve Rees. “I look in the garage when I get home, and this car is a snapshot of our memories.” The car is an AC Bristol that Rees and his 18-year-old son, Ridge, restored during the eight months before Ridge left for his freshman year in college last August.

“It’s almost like a shrine,” Rees said. “It’s our shrine, and it’s great.”

Rees, of Kansas City, has been fanatical about cars since he was 15. He has owned and raced a number of cars since 1986, the high point being a drive at the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1996. He hasn’t raced in recent years. Ridge, during his senior year at Rockhurst High School, told Rees’ wife and his mom, Jo Beth, that he was unhappy that his dad had not shared his car experience. Hearing that, Rees, with the help of Roger Hurst, located this AC Bristol in a barn. Jo Beth said the hulk they hauled home on a trailer was so “broken and nasty” that she thought they were crazy. But the two could look past the mess and see the car within. It helped that Rees’s very first vintage racer had beenn AC Bristol.

What seems like a typical car restoration story is more than that for Rees and his son. “It was something we could do together,” said Ridge, “something he could pass on to me, something that we would have forever. In the end, we have this great car.” And something much more. “It was a way to relate,” Rees said.

Restoring a car in eight months is a monumental chore and took lots of planning. While the body was being refurbished by Brian Haupt at Carriage and Motor Works, Inc., Rees and Ridge worked on the mechanical pieces. Parts arrived in the mail nearly ever day.

Stripping paint, polishing parts and fabricating pieces for the AC was a way for a father and son to learn about each other, about life and to share a passion. They forged a new kind of relationship. Driven to complete the car before Ridge left for college, father and son tackled some part of the project every day. Sometimes on weekends, Ridge and his dad would start working on the car after Ridge came home from a date, and they would be in the garage until 4 or 5 a.m. They each said there were times when they fell asleep under the car.

“Almost every morning they had something to show as an accomplishment,” Jo Beth said.

Working on the car with his dad came at a “wonderful moment when Ridge was transitioning from a young boy to a man,”said Jo Beth. “We saw him grow up,” she said. He was more disciplined in school and learned to be patient when working on the car. “He was light-years ahead of where he had been before,” she said.

In some ways, the project became a metaphor for how fathers and sons change roles. Rees taught Ridge to fabricate aluminum panels, for example, but once he learned, “a lot of times he was better at it than I was. It was like I was going out to pasture and he was coming in,” Rees said.

Rees ordered a 345-horsepower V-8 from Ford and installed it in place of the original engine. The result is nearly identical to the original AC Cobra developed by Carroll Shelby.

Ridge and his dad took the car for a quick spin without a hood or windshield the night before he left for college, but it was only when Ridge came home for Thanksgiving that they drove it as a finished car. Their dream is now a reality they will keep forever. What they learned about each other will last a lifetime.