Steve Myers is an American classic-car restorer, YouTube creator, and software developer based in Ames, Iowa. He is the founder of Skunk River Restorations, a classic-car restoration shop opened in 2011; the creator of the This Week With Cars YouTube channel; and the developer of LastDrive and a growing family of mobile apps built for vintage-car owners, collectors, and amateur racers.
He first came to wider public attention in October 2010, when the Des Moines Register’s Juice magazine profiled him in a cover story titled “My whole life is cars” — an Ames collector with a fleet of more than 40 classic automobiles, all of which he maintained himself and drove regularly.
Early Life and the First Sprite
Steve grew up in Ames, Iowa, around his father’s cars — most memorably a Sunbeam Tiger his father restored in the 1970s and raced at Northwoods Shelby Club track events at Road America beginning in 1977. Steve learned to drive a manual transmission in that Tiger, began autocrossing it in SCCA events at eighteen, and went on to an SCCA driving school and club track events at Hallett and Road America alongside his father.
In 2004, while studying mechanical engineering at Iowa State University, he bought his first classic car — a 1969 Austin-Healey Sprite — and restored it with his father’s help. A rescued MG Midget followed six months later, then a pair of Sunbeam Alpines, a Triumph TR6, the Sunbeam Tiger he had always dreamed of owning, and more. By December 2007 the collection stood at thirteen cars, and it has kept growing ever since — today spanning dozens of vehicles, from British roadsters to military trucks.
Skoolie.net and a Career on the Web
Steve’s first venture was online rather than automotive. In August 2002 he bought a 1972 International Harvester school bus and started Skoolie.net to document its conversion — a simple build blog with floor plans and progress photos, “very similar,” as he puts it, “to what I’m doing today on YouTube.” In December 2003 he relaunched the site as a full community, with one of the era’s early internet forums, shared photo hosting, member subdomains, and a directory of every bus-conversion page he could find. Skoolie.net grew into the largest school-bus-conversion community in the world, and Steve ran it for twelve years before selling it in 2014. The site is still going strong today — more than 46,000 members and nearly half a million posts, with the original posts from 2003 still intact. Steve tells the whole story, Yahoo-group rivalries included, in “The History of Skoolie.net.”
The cars had their own sites, too — starting even before the bus. fordmustang.us, registered in June 2002, was where Steve first shared photos from car shows, races, and his growing collection — an archive of more than 12,000 pictures that is still online today. Then came passthespanner.com, launched in November 2004 with a first post about that first Austin-Healey Sprite. Project diaries, a forum, dyno tests, printable vintage ads, and 300-plus posts documented what Steve was working on with his cars — the same week-by-week documentation This Week With Cars does today, in written form — until the shop’s opening in 2011 turned the hobby into the day job. In 2007 he created innocentispyder.com, a registry documenting the rare Innocenti Spyder — a car with only around thirteen examples in the United States — tracking histories, specifications, and surviving cars.
All of this ran through lonepilot.com, the web and graphic design business Steve operated — “a web and graphic designer by day and a car nut by night,” as the site puts it. Most of his work was automotive: he designed websites and graphics for a long list of car clubs, marque registries, and automotive events, including the Iowa British Car Club, the Mustang Club of Central Iowa, the Central Iowa MINI Club, and the shows he helped run.
Not everything was automotive. While a student at Iowa State University in the early 2000s, Steve ran isudhs.org, a free dynamic-DNS and web-redirection service he operated and funded himself, letting users point a custom subdomain at their own site. He has also produced technology-focused online content, including the Nostalgic Mac YouTube channel, devoted to vintage Apple computers, and the earlier MiddNation podcast, co-created in 2006 and distributed through Apple’s iTunes podcast directory — reflecting a long-standing interest in consumer technology and digital media. The audio and video production experience fed directly into PistonVision — and, eventually, This Week With Cars.
“My Whole Life Is Cars”
By 2010 the collection had passed 40 cars — among them ten Sunbeams and a Sunbeam motorcycle, three Sunbeam Tigers, four of the roughly thirteen Innocenti Spyders then in the United States, and an Arkley SS, one of only two known to exist worldwide. Steve was attending some 35 shows and events a year, racing a Panoz Esperante GTS in SCCA competition, and running 24 Hours of LeMons and ChumpCar endurance races around the country, while doing all of the maintenance and restoration work himself. He also served on the boards of the Salisbury Concours d’Elegance, the Iowa British Car Club, and Road Rally Charities — having built the websites for all three.
That October, Juice, the Des Moines Register’s weekly magazine, made him its cover story. The headline came from Steve’s own words: “I like to know what it was like to drive these cars in their original form. My whole life is cars.”
Skunk River Restorations
In November 2011, Steve left his career as a web designer to turn the hobby into a business. On December 12, 2011, he opened Skunk River Restorations at 709 Airport Road in Ames, Iowa — a shop specializing in frame-up, in-house restoration of European and American classic cars and trucks.
The shop’s work has been covered by the Des Moines Register (2012 and 2014), KCCI-TV (2014), the Classic Car Club of America Bulletin (2012), the Goodguys Goodtimes Gazette (2019), and The Muscle Car Place podcast (2019). A full list is on the In Media page.
This Week With Cars
Steve launched the This Week With Cars YouTube channel in June 2019 with a simple premise: film what he’s actually doing that week with cars. It’s a premise he had been living online since 2002 — first on fordmustang.us and the Skoolie.net build blog, then on his passthespanner.com car blog — and one he had even tried in video before: in February 2009 he launched PistonVision, an automotive video show distributed by RSS and iTunes that never made it past its first announcements — a first attempt, ten years early, at what This Week With Cars would become. The channel documents the real, unpolished work of keeping old vehicles alive — barn finds, hidden problems, repairs, rescues, road trips, and the setbacks in between — rather than edited-down restoration reveals.
The channel gives sustained attention to marques that rarely get it — Austin-Healey, Sunbeam, TVR, Morris, MG, Land Rover, Corvair, and vintage military vehicles among them — and as of 2026 has grown to more than 100,000 subscribers and over 35 million views. Alongside the weekly videos, Steve has digitized and shared rare archival material, including 1968 Can-Am racing footage and historic racing-school film that would otherwise be unseen.
Apps for the Old-Car Community
Drawing on his engineering background and years of managing a large collection, Steve develops mobile apps under the Skunk River Restorations name — tools built for problems that only old-car owners have:
- LastDrive — the flagship garage app for collectors: drive logging, maintenance, documents, seasonal checklists, and calibrated GPS gauges (iPhone, iPad, and Android).
- Fuel Pre-Pay Estimator — know exactly how much to pre-pay at the pump on a car with an unreliable fuel gauge.
- TachoSpeed — a GPS tachometer and speedometer for cars whose factory instruments can’t be trusted.
- RaceCarLogBook — an offline race-session logbook for amateur racers.
- GearRatio — measures rear-axle and final-drive ratios from GPS speed, tach RPM, and tire size.
- WireForge — a vintage wiring-diagram tool, currently in development.
All released apps are available on the App Store and Google Play — see the full lineup at skunkriverrestorations.com/apps.
Racing, Community, and Preservation
Steve remains an active amateur racer, campaigning an Austin-Healey Sprite race car, and documents race weekends and driving schools on the channel. His endurance-racing résumé runs from 24 Hours of LeMons and ChumpCar events across the country to the 25 Hours of Thunderhill, where he finished fifth in class (2014) — North America’s longest closed-course endurance race — the British C1 Racing series at Silverstone and the 24H 2CV at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium (2019), and the 6 Hours of Sebring in a Spec Racer Ford (2020). In NASA and SCCA competition he set fifteen certified track and course records at ten circuits between 2010 and 2018 — from Gateway International and Putnam Park to Iowa Speedway’s road course. He is also a Bonneville land-speed record holder: at the 2016 Bonneville Speed Week, driving Tom Donney’s two-stroke Saab Sonett II, he earned his rookie license and broke a class land-speed record, with GPS measures showing the little Saab hitting 124 MPH — a story told in Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car‘s February 2017 feature “Super Sonett Transport.” He is a major sponsor of the Austin-Healey Conclave — the largest annual gathering of Austin-Healey enthusiasts in North America — in both 2025 and 2026, and has ridden in the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride in support of men’s health causes. Skunk River Restorations opens its doors for car-club shop tours — and in 2014 and 2015 hosted the Midwest British Motor Show on its grounds, the Iowa British Car Club’s all-British gathering of some 130 vehicles.
Across the shop, the channel, and the apps, the through-line is the same: keep interesting old vehicles — and the knowledge it takes to run them — alive and on the road.
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