(electronic music)
- Grew up in small town, Wisconsin.
There wasn't much to do.
Park Falls Wisconsin has a population of about 2000 people.
As you'd imagine, there weren't a ton
of car enthusiasts up there when I was younger.
When I was young, I focus most of my time
and attention to radio-controlled things.
They included airplanes, cars, helicopters, boats.
I mean, you name it, anything RC, pretty much.
It was a hobby that I shared with my parents.
And I definitely say that it's what definitely like got me
into figuring out how things worked
and like tearing things apart and understanding
like the mechanics of it.
And really got me started working with my hands.
Things like small engines, electrical systems, all that.
As you can imagine, Fast and Furious, Need for Speed,
all that sort of stuff were pretty big influence
for my interest in cars to begin with.
I remember pouring like a ton of hours
in a Need for Speed, Underground Two Most Wanted,
those are probably the ones I played the most of.
I also remembering that having an influence on some of the
people in the town as well in the 2000s when I was younger.
There were a handful of Eclipses, Civics,
Cobalts, I think there was a Jetta
that would roll around all the time and they would show up
at the one car show that our town had
and I absolutely love seeing those cars.
They were just so different from everything else.
And like, I always looked at them as like,
those are real life versions of what I've played
in the video games, what I'd seen in the movies.
And I knew that one day,
like I had to have something like that, however,
as the years went on and those people graduated
from high school and moved on with their lives,
so did the cars.
By the time I was old enough to drive,
there really weren't any of those kinds of cars
or those people that were into
those kinds of cars around anymore.
It kind of like faded away.
It wasn't like the trend anymore, I guess.
My name is Alex G Lena and I drive a 2013 Scion FRS.
(hip hop music)
My first car was a 2005 Dodge Neon SXT.
It was actually my parents' old car.
I pretty much just ended up taking it.
And I did so many stupid things.
That poor car, I had underglow like a random eBay exhaust
intake, you know, all of that.
And after I got that all out of my system,
I knew that I had to get something different
and I was dead set on getting this
second gen Mitsubishi Eclipse.
I ended up finding one pretty local.
It had a blown engine, the guy just kind of had it
sitting in a garage and he was just kind of ready
to get rid of it.
Me, still really new to everything.
Thought it was a fantastic idea to just dive in head first.
I mean, I was looking for a second gen Eclipse
and here was one for pretty much free.
He just wanted to get rid of it.
So now I was 16, 17,
didn't know a whole lot about cars, honestly,
let alone working on them and rebuilding a whole engine.
I ended up taking the car and I remember being like,
just so excited, like this was my car.
I got to work on this car.
I'm gonna like build this car.
And I finally had one of those cars that I always wanted.
Being from a small town did have its perks, however.
I was fortunate enough to be able to take shop classes
in high school, starting with small engines
and then autos and we had, you know,
metals classes and stuff in there
to learn how to weld a little bit.
I was able to learn how to work on cars by working on my own
Eclipse during the school,
which I thought was like the coolest thing.
The car did need quite a bit,
Needed the new engine, body parts,
re spray, miscellaneous things here and there
that were missing.
It was a learning experience that it
absolutely kicked my ass, but I enjoyed every second of it.
The Eclipse introduced me to the Wisconsin car scene.
I found a little Facebook group back in 2014
called the Wisconsin Car Enthusiast Club.
The group really started growing fast, like insanely fast,
and eventually events started being held around Wisconsin,
different parts of the state.
My now fiance and I would try to hit up
as many of those events during the summer as possible,
which typically meant driving anywhere
between like two to three hours
one way to make it to wherever the event was being held.
So usually meant like kind of heading out
on like a Friday night, going, staying at a hotel, you know,
attending the event and then driving back the same day.
As much as I loved the Eclipse and the memories
that were made with that car,
it was definitely time for something new.
I wanted something that was new.
It was a blank canvas, something clean with no rust.
That was a huge one and something that I can just enjoy
as much as I enjoyed the Eclipse when I first got it.
Two months into my job as a packaging designer,
I went and bought a 2013 Hot Lava FRS on my lunch break.
And as stupid as that sounds, it really came down to,
I was driving by it like every day,
it had been there for awhile and it was long enough
for me to become intrigued enough to just like stop in
and just ask like, yo, what is going on with this car?
Like what kind of information you got on it?
And it turns out it was a one owner manual car
with less than 16,000 miles on it,
took it for a test drive and I was instantly sold.
It was completely stocked,
checked off everything on my list.
The only mistake that I made when I bought the car is that
I bought it in October, and if you know Wisconsin,
we like to store cars around the winter.
And it was like three weeks later that I had to put the car
that I just bought away for like six months.
It was the following spring,
I realized that I wasn't enjoying my job.
And as any younger car guy with access to a camera
and the internet would do in that situation,
I went and started my own YouTube channel.
I gathered some parts over the winter,
which included the header, exhaust, like a tuning tablet,
some other things here and there,
and then started doing install videos and some random vlogs
of events of cruises and stuff that we would go to
and all that kind of stuff.
I wanted to make that like my full time thing.
That was my goal. If I could do that for a living,
I knew that's what I wanted to do.
And I did that throughout the summer of 2018
and I had a ton of fun doing it.
If I had a bad day at work, I'd just come home,
work on the car and do a video.
And it just made me enjoy the car so much more
than I already did.
(light electronic music)
(hip hop music)
It was by the end of August
and I was scrolling through on Facebook
and I saw a job posting shared by the founder
of the Wisconsin Car Enthusiast Club
that had been hanging out with for so long.
And that just so happens to be Alex Martinez.
The job posting was for a videographer position
for Fitment Industries.
Obviously I kind of lost my shit a little bit.
I had been following Fitment Industries for quite awhile.
I'd watch videos daily.
Usually during my lunch break, when I just wanted to
kind of like disconnect from everything a little bit.
And I knew that like I had to at least take my shot
at doing it. Like I wasn't super experienced,
but fast forward almost two years now,
I am now the operations lead for Fitment Industries
and I love what I do every single day.
It's what my goal was, and I've actually achieved it,
and the car has helped me get there.
I love being in videos.
I love working with the team that we built.
Everyone here is just so passionate about what they do
every single day and it shows in their work,
it shows when they show up to work.
It doesn't feel like a job.
If it wasn't for cars,
I don't think I'd be where I am now.
I think about that a lot. Like I really do.
If I didn't have that outlet of creativity
and the ability to express myself,
I don't really know what I'd be doing right now.
It's honestly crazy to think about.
I think we all kind of realized the same thing
recently here as a team, when we're looking back
at some older photos.
When I was going to events around Wisconsin,
when I was even in high school,
it was Alex and his team that were hosting those events.
If you look back in the pictures from those shows
or the meets, I'm standing off to one side
in this big group photo
and not too far away is Steve Miller,
the guy behind the camera right now filming this,
and then, you know, it's kinda crazy to think about,
but then you look a little closer
and then there's like right in the middle of the crowd,
there's Dakota who actually had set up the camera
to take the group picture, like to begin with.
And somehow we have all ended up under the same roof,
doing what we do and doing what we love every single day.
And that's because of cars.
(hip hop music)