"Behind the Wheel" is a series of interviews that will be an ongoing theme with TCF, interviewing not the CEO's and chief designers of the automotive industry, but rather those who report on them. Previously, I held an interview with SaabKyle04, detailing how he started his career and where it has led him. View part 1 & 2 of my interview with Wes Siler of Indefinitely Wild and previous /DRIVE Ride Apart. That's the theme of these current and future interviews.


In any profession that provides fame, particularly the media world, everyone wants to put their name to spotlight when their work becomes successful. There's no surprise there. YouTubers plead with viewers to "like & subscribe" and follow them on whatever Weibo, Twitter or Meerkat account they have so they can continue to force feed their content down their throats.

The surprise comes when someone doesn't want to be recognized by their work or be associated with the success of whatever content they release. That's strange. But then it all makes sense when you realize someone may not want to be associated with "a channel that talks about shoving cans of Barbasol up your ass, because your anus is so dilated, a D-cell Mag Lite just doesn't cut it anymore."


The man in question is, of course, Mr. Regular, of Regular Car Reviews. I had the pleasure of interviewing him over a two-hour period via Skype this week to truly understand who the hell he is. Frankly, I feel as though I know more and less about him at the same time. I had assumed he was "phoning-in" his grunting voice and peculiar adages just to make his content that much more odd.


I was mistaken; he truly is an oddball at heart. It's important I preface this interview by letting you know that I had no final goal nor intention of what to ask him. I just wanted to know what made him tick and let the conversations progress with fluidity rather than a rigid 20-question list I was shoving down his throat. So, if you feel like you're getting a little lost reading it, I was lost throughout the entire 2-hours, so enjoy the ride with me.


Living and growing up in a sleepy (unnamed) town in rural Pennsylvania, Regular had a somewhat normal upbringing. Mom was "God Squad" and his father a businessman; they were very much so into the getting an education and working a white-collar job. During the late 2000's, as he described it, he took a trip to South Africa for a month after graduating from high school. He met up with a group of friends he had met on forums and was hosted by a family, the Milan's.

I had this overwhelming feeling of infantile dependency on the Milan family, who, without them, I'm fucked. You know, I don't speak the language. I'm clearly an outs – they were white, but they said: 'Just by the way you're walking, we know you're not from around here.' Shit. And so, it was a grand feeling of being exposed.

We went off-roading – oh, they had an 80's Land Rover. I don't know what kind. I'm not good with Land Rovers, but it was very 80s. And I was the only one wearing shoes. And we were driving down this sorta – they would call it a highway, we would just call it a two-lane road, like a state road. And they said: 'Well we're gonna go off-roading.' I'm like, Okay, where are we going? Christian looks around and says: 'Right here is good.' And so he just … he just leaves the road. And this is like, people going by, there's no sidewalk or curb on this road. But he just leaves the road, starts bouncing through the sand. The sand and the underbrush. And he starts driving it around this construction site. I mean, no one was there, it was a Sunday. But, seriously? There's construction equipment here, we're like half having the wheels down into this ditch, this thing was leaning really far.


Even though Regular's oldest video has neared three years, he doesn't credit the true starting of his channel until about a year and a half ago, when he started taking the videos seriously and focused more time on producing them. Up until that mark, he had been filming friends' cars during winter breaks from graduate school.


Then things took a more personal turn that I was not expecting. After graduating and getting an undisclosed job in Alaska for a couple of months, he returned to PA. This is where he realized what RCR could become and how he could benefit from it.

I came back to PA after grad school with no job, and I was trying to get something in my field, and … feeling down. You know, you go look for a job for a few months, you get one or two interviews. That's it. I was riding through town with my buddy Tom. And I was given a little bit of the 'woe, is me' talk. You know: 'I don't know what I'm gonna do.' My buddy Tom is a doctor now, so … so there was a feeling like his life was just a rocket ship to fulfillment. He was married, baby on the way at the time, and I was just working some Joe job. No, wait, this was before the Joe job. He said: 'Well, if you could do anything you want, what would it be?' And I said: 'You know those weird videos I made?' 'I'd just do those forever.' He said: 'Well, just do that, then.' And of course I just wanted to say to him: 'Tom, that's bullshit. You don't just 'do' that.'' So, I half-take his advice, I do a few more, and Jalopnik does a story about us. Patrick George wrote the first article. I'm like "Oh. That's interesting. Someone wrote this thing." I show it to my buddy Neil, who's real into cars, Neil says: "Yeah, you're gonna get a lot of e-mails." Because the joke is: what's Jalopnik? And he said the classic internet line: "they're kind of a big deal."

And ever since the auto world started to post more of his content on Reddit, Oppo and Jalopnik started picking up his videos, it's been a climb ever since. I won't name names, but he started receiving offers to buy his content or work with him from prominent and "kind of a big deal" people in the auto-journo world. His immediate reaction? "The feeling I had was cautious. Because: 'Are these people trying to steal this from me?' Immediately I went to that thought."


This is part one of a two part series.