According to the Chamber of Commerce website, Spring Green, WI, boasts Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, a golf course, a cheese factory, eight churches, 11 bars, and the accurately named “House on the Rock.” Among the town’s 1,647 residents live two brothers named Mike and Jim. The only mention of them on the Chamber of Commerce website is under the category “Auto Repair.”

Of course, the reality of what the Ring Brothers do is far more complex than just mundane auto repair. From SEMA builds to high-end customer cars, the Ring Brothers are on the cutting edge of the custom car world, melding old and new to make high-tech high-performance rolling art. They’re a huge influence on car enthusiasts, both young and old, and they do it all from a small, nondescript shop in a tiny Midwest town.

I interviewed Mike and Jim Ring over the phone shortly after they purchased a 1974 Winnebago Brave at Barrett Jackson’s Scottsdale sale in January ’14 (see the profile, March-April 2014, p. 58). I’d been planning a trip to Spring Green ever since. Conveniently enough, the Ring Brothers “auto repair” shop is less than a two-hour drive from my in-laws’ home in Madison, WI. So during our summer visit, with my kids finally down for naps, I borrowed my in-laws’ drab-gray SUV and hit the road.

Believe it or not, the Ring brothers’ primary business is running the local Spring Green collision shop, which they’ve been doing for years. In fact, Mike credited their foothold in the collision industry for not only keeping them afloat when the economy stumbled and custom shops around the nation shuttered, but also with keeping them in touch with the latest and greatest OEM technology. “We’re always looking for a better latch,” said Mike. “A better electrical connector, a better hinge. And no one can do it like the OEMs.”

Tight but neat

Touring the back half of the shop, where all the custom work takes place, took all of about five minutes. Tight but neat, every inch is occupied with dream machines in progress and machinery to make it happen.

I asked Mike about the increasingly astronomical costs associated with building custom cars at the highest level. He groaned and admitted that the practice simply isn’t sustainable — particularly when it comes to the pursuit of the industry’s top prizes. “We have people ask all the time,” he said, without an ounce of ego or pretension, “‘What can I get for $150,000?’ and we’ll tell them, ‘Well, that’ll buy you a nice pile of parts — still in the boxes!’”

We went on to discuss the overwhelming sophistication engineered into the cars they build, and the daunting task of trying to replicate their work on a real-world budget. “The reality,” he said, “is that when Jim Ring gets on the phone with one of our vendors, someone gets on a plane to help him get it right.” The rest of us, I guess, are just out of luck.

On the drive back to Madison in that boring SUV, I kept rolling one of Mike’s statements over and over in my head, thinking about my young boys and what may lie ahead. Our conversation had inevitably turned to our kids, and I had asked him what his sons, who are in their early 20s, thought about his work.

“Well,” he said, with a lighthearted smile and a father’s full acceptance, “they couldn’t care less about this stuff.”

Would they feel differently if the Spring Green Chamber of Commerce classified their father’s work in the business directory under the more appropriate category — the one labeled “Artists and Galleries”? It probably wouldn’t hurt.