Legends of Hot Rodding – Steve Frisbe, the Northwest Metal Maestro and Hot Rod Visionary
Renowned hot rod builder Steve Frisbie of Steve’s Auto Restorations passed way in October 2025 following a long illness. We felt it was appropriate to add Frisbie to our roster of Goodguys Hot Rod Legends.
Steve Frisbie was an unassuming sort. Quiet, serious, studious. With eyeglasses and a full beard, he projected the air of an academic, which, in a way, he was. But rather than mastering French Linguistics, he majored in car crafting.
Over the past four decades Frisbie and his talented team at Steve’s Auto Restorations produced some of hot rodding’s most memorable rides, including the 2017 Ridler Award winner at the Detroit Autorama, a mind-blowing 1933 Ford he dubbed the “Renaissance Roadster.” It would go on to win the America’s Most Beautiful Street Rod from Goodguys later that year.
Frisbie was a bit of Renaissance man himself. Born in South Dakota, he grew up in Portland, Oregon. His father, Chuck, ran a service station, where Steve spent many hours under the spell of its automotive ambience. While he admitted that the gas station vibe helped fuel his interest in cars, what he remembered most was joyfully riding up and down on the car lift.
As a young adult, Frisbie worked at Portland’s Boeing facility, where he learned to paint, assemble, machine, and weld, skills required to build an airplane – and coincidently the same skills required to build a hot rod.
In the 1970s, Frisbie left Boeing and started Steve’s Auto Restorations, focusing not on hot rods, but classic car restoration — you know, the Pebble Beach scene. Meticulously restored Model Ts, Model As, Gullwing Mercedes, pre-war Ferraris, and more, Frisbie painstakingly restored them all. And he was good at it. Very good. Frisbie became a fixture at the Pebble Beach Concours, dazzling the high-brow attendees with his faultless handiwork.
In the late 1980s, the world economy blew a gasket, blowing up the classic car market. Prices had been skyrocketing. Auction houses had been flourishing. Then it all collapsed like a nail-impaled radial tire. That million-dollar Ferrari Testarossa? Suddenly worth a fraction of its inflated value.
“The restoration business took a real hit,” Frisbie once explained. “Shops closed everywhere. The boom was over. The restoration market views automobiles simply as investments. When that investment potential died, so did interest in building those type of cars.”
Luckily for Frisbie, he had slowly been eyeing the growing interest in street rods and customs. And while the build-cars-for-profit resto market had flatlined, the build-cars-for-fun hot rod market had come back to life. And few were better positioned to take advantage than Steve’s Auto Restorations.
Frisbie possessed talents few traditional hot rod shops could offer. If you’re restoring a 1930 Delahaye, for instance, there is no 1-800 number to call for parts. The restorer must fabricate missing components from scratch, such as Landau bars or intricate grille pieces. And Frisbie was a master at creating something out of nothing. As anyone who has ever built a street rod knows, fabrication is fundamental to the process.
One of Frisbie’s most dazzling examples of this skill was SAR’s most famous ride, the NewMad ’55 Chevrolet Nomad — the 2001 winner of Goodguys Custom Rod of the Year, among many other accolades. Designed by Chris Ito, the NewMad went beyond mere customization and completely reimagined the iconic Chevy wagon with custom sheet metal, a one-off chassis with Corvette suspension, and an Arias big block Chevy engine. Both bumpers, for instance, were hand formed, then smoothed, then copper plated, followed by more polishing and more copper. The process was repeated five times before they were perfect enough to be nickeled and chromed.
If there was a secret to SAR’s success, it was that sort of dedication to excellence. “My guiding philosophy,” Frisbie once explained, “is to attain perfection. The Ridler Award proved we were capable of building an award-winning vehicle from design rendering to finished car. This diversity is healthy and much more interesting.”
As if building hot rods wasn’t enough, Frisbie also ran another on-site business, Real Steel, which produced spot-on steel body panels of 1933-34 Ford roasters, including complete bodies and fenders. They’ve sold hundreds over the years.
Calling Steve Frisbie a hot rodder is like calling Ernest Hemingway some rando with a typewriter. Like his contemporaries, Frisbie created automotive art from a blank page, opening our eyes to the limitless possibilities of what a hot rod can be.
Over his career, Frisbie showcased those possibilities. In addition to the aforementioned Ridler-winning ’33 Ford roadster and NewMad Nomad, other standouts include: Dave Hall’s Hemi-powered ’46 Ford convertible; a Chip Foose/Frisbie Chevy RealMad wagon; Dave Ralph’s ’63 Corvette split-window coupe, and Kyle Leanza’s ’56 Corvette. And, oh so many more.
Fortunately for the hot rod world, Frisbie’s passing does not mean the end of Steve’s Auto Restorations. Frisbie thoughtfully provided a way for the shop to remain open. Guided by longtime employee Chris Clark, the SAR team continues to serve the hot rod and restoration community and is starting a new chapter for the shop.
Every day when Frisbie left the shop he walked under a ‘32 Ford coupe body that was perched atop the entrance way. It looked like a bright yellow gargoyle, glowing against Oregon’s rain-streaked sky.
“You know, we make our living with steel,” he laughed. “But this is the Northwest and that ’32 up there? Well, it’s a ’glass Wescott body. That thing’ll never rust.”
And neither will Steve Frisbie’s influence on the history of hot rodding.
