Hello, My Name Is: Steve Strope

Name: Steve Strope
Occupation: President and owner of Pure Vision Design
Current Hometown: Simi Valley, CA
Birthplace: Apalachian, Upstate NY

You own the street machine fabrication shop Pure Vision — how did the company get started?

It all started — unofficially — in ’97. I’d moved to California in ’95 and I was already building cars for myself, as a hobby. One of my cars got in a magazine and got me a bit of notoriety, nothing big: I was just some kid tinkering on a car that got in a couple magazines. I decided to build another one so I sold the first car. I knew of this cross-country cruise that Hot Rod magazine put together called The Power Tour, so I formulated a way to look professional — all the pro-builders had concept artwork done of their cars — so I had a drawing done of the car I was going to build and I told Hot Rod I was going to bring it out. I didn’t have a real shop, I was doing it in my underground parking garage, and I was building this car for under 10 grand. I told them this and that I was going to blow them away.

Long story short, they ran the drawing, and when I finished the car, they really liked it and that car went on to be featured in Hot Rod and later on it got chosen as one of the Top 10 Cars of the Year for Hot Rod magazine. It got another cover and a feature in a magazine in Japan. That was in ’98.

Then Hot Rod called me up and said, “hey, you’re the young new guy (i.e. the sap who will do anything for nothing), do you want to design a giveaway car for us?” I told them I didn’t have a shop to build it and they told me I could use Hot Rod‘s shop, so I built that for them. At the same time, I worked on a friend’s car around which I’d formulated another idea and we took that to the following year’s Power Tour and that car became one of the Top 10 Cars of the Year. So I didn’t even have an official shop and I’d already been in eight or nine magazines and gotten two Top 10 Cars of the Year awards, which are extremely coveted.

At that point I basically crossed my fingers and opened up a shop in Simi Valley and soon we had another Top 10 Car that was also a cover car and a pull-out poster car. But at the same time, I basically lived in my shop. Life’s very different when you live in an industrial complex. The building had no heat, no A/C, so it’s either extremely cold or scorching hot. I joined a gym so I had somewhere to shower!

That’s how Pure Vision came to be. I was really surprised. I never thought anybody would pay me to build a car for them. I’m very fortunate that I have a lot of people who like what I design.

How did you get started with cars?

Nobody in my family was into cars, but my dad was a really hands-on guy. Changing his oil, painting his own cars, maintained the house, so I was fortunate to have such an amazing father. He was raised in a large family — nine kids, I believe — on a farm, extremely blue collar, and his father passed away when he was quite young in a lumber mill accident, so the sons had to carry on the family. That’s how my dad got started. He eventually became a 3-D hologram expert for IBM with some 20-some patents. He is very analytical and smart and yet very hands-on, and these things were a big part of our lives growing up at home.

For me, like a lot of car guys, it started with little Hot Wheels cars. I modified every toy I had. Every toy. And that went into BMX bicycle-motocross and that went along with tweaking with those bikes and fiddling and modifying. That went to dirt bikes. I was already knee-deep in digging muscle cars before I could even drive. The first car I got was instantly modified and it went from there. I went to car shows, hanging out with the guys and cruising downtown as soon as I got my driver’s license. I never had a “normal” car. Everything was taken apart and modified.

What was your first car?

My first car was a 1973 Oldsmobile Cutlass. I immediately stuffed big tires into the back of, modified this thing and that thing to it. I was 15, going on 16. My dad bought it off one of my cousins, so I had the car right when I could start driving.

When did you realize there was a need to provide modification and custom services for the automotive industry?

I didn’t know there was a need. I didn’t think anybody would pay me to do anything. When I finished that second car that I took on the Power Tour, which was a ’66 Charger called “Skully, then Hot Rod magazine asked me to build that giveaway car, I thought, “wow, somebody trusts in my hands and my designs. Pretty crazy.” Right about there was the first time I knew someone was willing.

What is the craziest car you’ve worked on at Pure Vision?

It’s a tie. The one we just finished, which is the ’69 Anvil Mustang is the one that’s currently in the new issue of Hot Rod. Big honor; seven-page feature and a two-page pull-out poster. They haven’t done a poster in Hot Rod in over a decade! That was a big honor. That car is really intricate with a lot of amazing stuff on it. It’s completely hand-made from stern to stern, but it looks like a ’69 Mustang to the layman. We didn’t “ruin” it. We didn’t alter it, even though we completely altered it. There is a lot of restraint, even when I go crazy when we’re designing.

And the other is the car before, a ’69 Charger, called the 515 GTB. I developed that car with right-hand drive and a lot of ’60s Ferrari and European sports cars influence. There are a lot of intricate modifications in that car, too. Those two would be the craziest things that we’ve worked on. We won several awards, the car is very decorated. We’re very proud of it.

In 2006, one of your cars was used as Vin Diesel’s car on The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift, how did that come about? What kind of work had you done on that car?

A gentleman by the name of Dennis McCarthy, who handles all the cars for Fast and Furious, was looking for a “bad, ominous muscle car” for Vin Diesel’s character, who was described as a “mopar-looking guy” — the nickname for the guys that built muscle cars from the Chrysler Corporation’s products, Dodge and Plymouth.

One of the guys at Hot Rod magazine told him, “I know the baddest mopar in SoCal, it’s a car called Hammer that Pure Vision built.” The Hammer has a rear wheel-hubs highly modified to fit extremely large tires. The chassis is modified, very modern suspension under it in the front. It has a very large, all-aluminum, 528 cubic-inch digital fuel-injected HEMI in it. It’s a hand-made interior — I handmade the dash. Friends of mine at Redline Gauge Works custom-made the gauges, which we designed together. That car has a lot of hand-made parts and pieces, but it still looks immediately recognizable as a 1970 Roadrunner GTX Satellite.

So they asked us to come down. It was the final night of shooting, an added-in scene to bring back Vin Diesel’s character to the franchise. They had a bunch of muscle cars down there that they were choosing from and I purposely pulled in fashionably late. The Hammer is a nasty-sounding car and it looks really ominous. I pulled in and parked it over the side in a corner and the director and producer came over right away: “This one.”

We filmed that night — all night, up until four or five in the morning — and had a great time and Hammer went down in history that night as Vin Diesel’s comeback car. They used it again in Fast & Furious, and Vin Diesel’s girlfriend dies in the car. Well, that one is a stunt car, obviously, not the original.

How did the deal with Mattel’s Hot Wheels come about?

Around ’98, going on ’99, I was working for a gentleman down in the Valley and we did samples and prototypes for the dye cast companies like Mattel and Action Diecast. The designers would make a drawing of this cool toy and we’d make the body and create it so that it could sit on the table and execs at Mattel could go, “that’s cool, let’s make it.”

Also we’d do paint and color changes and different samples and prototyping. I worked on prototypes for the scale motorcycles, the Harleys when that was just getting hot and Hot Wheels was just getting into doing a display version of the Harley. When Hot Wheels got the contract to do Ferrari, I handled a lot of the first samples of the 1:18 scale cars.

So I had a relationship with Mattel as a guy who did prototype work for them. Time marches on, I open up my shop, and I am fortunate to be in a lot of magazines and some TV shows and blah blah blah, and every time I’d run into those Hot Wheels guys, I’d joke, “hey, guys, how many features do I have to get before I can get my own line?” It was a total joke. There are people in this industry who are heads and shoulders above me as being a living legend and none of those guys have a toy line, so what in the world possessed me to think I’m gonna get a toy line?

You know what? I joked with them about it one more time and they said, “you know what? We should put a meeting together to talk about that.” They said “we have this 1:50 scale line called G-Machines and we’ll give you a bunch of bodies that were already going to go into production and you just create the paint schemes and pick from the rims and tires.”

Doing prototype work for them, I understood cost of having different paint jobs done. When you do a line, you can have one that is complicated and expensive, but another car has to be cheap to balance it. I’m still floored that the series happened. For my series to go across the world with my logo on the rear window of each of the cars and on the package with a paragraph about Pure Vision. You can’t buy that. You can’t buy the coolness of being a Hot Wheels.

Which is your favorite of the toy line?

They were all smartly designed, but my favorite is a ’71 El Camino. The flames on the side of the car are my hand-drawings. I drew these flames to scale. That was one of the expensive toys because of the multi-colors in the flames. I guess it’s my favorite because it’s very personal. It’s not just a design in my head, it’s a piece straight from my hand.

Hot: my family; the automotive industry, hot rods, cars, drag racing; music – probably more than cars; vintage BMX bicycles; socializing, meeting people.

Not: stress, how fast time slips away from you because you can only do so much; rude inconsiderate people, blatant cruelty; being bored, stagnant sitting; complacency, people who are willing to lie down and die, who no drive.