The media industry’s rapid evolution is partly to blame for the popular car show with Gas Monkey Garage coming to an end.
We all know and love Richard Rawlings. Rawlings is the famous host of the Fast N’ Loud TV series and is one of the most charismatic automotive personalities out there. While he is perhaps most famous for the show, he is also the founder of the Gas Monkey Garage featured in it. He's also been in various television commercials for the Dodge motor company, promoting their vehicles. Even if you think he is brash and loud, the job he and his team do on classic and muscle car restorations is second to none.
Of course, all good things must come to an end. Back in 2020, Rawlings announced that the famous Fast N’ Loud show was ending, which naturally came as a bit of a shock to many of his fans and fans of the show. The Discovery Channel TV show had run for nearly a decade, starting on June 6th 2012 and the final episode had in fact aired on June 8th 2020. Almost eight years to the day that the first episode aired, and having produced some amazing builds over the years. Finally, Rawlings appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast and spilled the beans on why was Fast N'Loud canceled, and it's not what you think.
Did Fast N’ Loud Get Canceled?
Rawlings was a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience in December 2020, on episode 1578 to be precise. Rogan asked Rawlings straight up why has Fast N'Loud stopped. As Rawlings himself said, he went right for the big question.
Rawlings then came straight out and said that the show was no more. Rawlings had exited the Discovery Channel and that was that. He was a free agent but at the time he had plenty of cool things lined up for the future. And we saw that too with some great stuff out there from Gas Monkey Garage and Richard Rawlings, all documented on his new YouTube channel that has over a million subscribers.
But Rawlings went on to say it was a bit of a perfect storm, so to speak. Rawlings himself wanted to expand and grow a bit, and he had got to the top of that mountain at Discovery and used the tricky year we all had in 2020 to rethink the future and work out what he wanted to do. And with 300-ish episodes, we can’t argue that Fast N’ Loud hadn’t had a good run. It had done very well and made Rawlings a household name in the United States, and around the world.
The Future For Gas Monkey Garage
Back then, Rawlings spoke about what the future might hold for him. One area he wanted to work on was an automotive podcast for himself, as no one in his world was really doing one at the time. He has of course appeared on quite a few podcasts since then. Social media didn’t really fall into that, as it wasn’t as big of a thing in 2012 as it is now. Rogan spoke of a time a potential employer wanted to control his social media, which was a "hard no".
Basically, Rawlings would not have the chance to post his own things a lot of the time. He was exclusively signed up to Discovery. Amazingly, Rawlings revealed that as part of his contract, there is a clause that essentially says that he can’t talk bad things about Discovery during his contract. That would in fact see him incur up to a $25,000 fine per occurrence, had he done so. And naturally, no one is going to want to pay that much if things are not good between yourself and your employing studio.
As things turned out, Gas Monkey Garage lives on, and how. The YouTube channel is doing great, and Rawlings is even hiring new people to come work for him.
Richard Rawlings: Getting Stuck In A Rut
Rawlings did indeed feel he was stuck in a rut at the channel. And in fact, this $25,000 fine could still be fully applied upon him leaving the channel. So he can’t go and trash talk the show. For the most part, he does like the Discovery Channel, and he and his team did want to make some changes to boost the automotive programming. But that wasn’t easy to do, hence him feeling like he was stuck in a rut while he was at the company. But still, he was able to make a very successful show for Discovery.
A Big Change For Richard Rawlings
The move from Discovery to more focus on YouTube and various automotive ventures was a big switch for Rawlings. And something he seems to be relishing with the extra freedom. It did sound like it was frustrating with Discovery at times, as it took him five years for example to do a crossover with the legendary Chip Foose.
Photo by Forbes
Nowadays, Rawlings is still as busy as ever, with one of the most recent surprises being the fact that he began to sell off his Gas Monkey classic car collection. This was in order to collect "...better cars, different cars, things I’ve always wanted to have" which sure seems like a good reason.
Rawlings sold 28 vehicles from his collection, making a grand total of over $1,000,000. All of which means that Gas Monkey Garage and Richard Rawlings have a lot of bank to go looking for new cars to resurrect and build and document. The spirit of Fast N'Loud seems to be very much alive even though the show is over. For fans, we think that's all that matters.
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