sludgo Rides Shotgun with Quartermaster007 You Should Know

It was a few months ago that I first connected with @Quartermaster007, builder of pitch-perfect Bond DB5 replicas, about being the fourth subject of the “Riding Shotgun” series. He said he was flattered and willing, but was leaving for Asia imminently and would get back to me in the spring. So imagine my delight when I recently heard from him letting me know he currently had some availability. We did the Zoom thing, and to my surprise, he looked younger than I’d expected (these days everyone is looking younger than I’d expected). Very well-spoken and a terrific storyteller, the Q-man was as engaging of an interviewee as I could have hoped for and was full of surprises, like his love for first-gen Celicas and his successes in motorcycle racing and film production—all worthy of telling in far more detail than I’m able to provide here. Suffice it to say: I hope the highlights I’m about to present reflect a fascinating life that’s been led by a fascinating individual. So buckle up all you wannabe double-‘0’s. It’s time to ride shotgun with Quartermaster007.

-sludgo

My first question is always the same…when did you get bitten by the bug?

It began with motorcycles. When I was younger we had a cabin up by Whistler, the ski resort in British Columbia, in a place that wasn’t developed yet. There was a big opening out in back and I had nothing to do really, because I’d moved away from all my friends, and one day my dad bought me a brand-new Honda 50—a Cub. So every day after school and on the weekends I was out there riding that thing. Could just go right out from the garage and across the street and had tons of room to ride. Did that for a bit then got into bigger bikes and bigger bikes and did motocross for a while, but then got into street-riding—things like GSXR-750s and R6s. Then I wanted to do a few track days, which I did with a couple of friends, and ended up meeting a guy who was racing in the Canadian National Series and he invited me to come to the last regional round to see how I’d like it. So I got my R6 ready and went up there with him. Had to start from the back, like twenty-eighth or something, but I got up into the top ten and liked it and had a lot of fun.

Dead last to the top ten in your first race? Impressive!

Yeah, I mean I was just in the amateur class and it was a track that I liked and knew well—all the areas that had sinkholes and cracks and divots that if you hit at a certain time you’re either going off the track or crashing. The biggest thing was always the gophers running across the track!

After that race I started doing all my own bodywork and my own paint jobs to keep costs down, and the following year did the whole regional series and did pretty good and when the national series came to that same track I ended up winning it. The Canadian Superbike series is hard for us West-Coast guys to do because it starts on the East coast and then comes westward and then goes back eastward, so that ends up being a lot of traveling. Because of that, there weren’t many teams from BC doing it, but there was this one guy who had his own team and he’d seen me won that one race, and we both kind of knew the same people from growing up in the same area. One day he told me that if I’d pay for all my stuff I could throw my bike into the back of his trailer and ride along. Said that since I’d won a round I had points and might as well try and do the rest of the series.

Well, I’d never been at any of those tracks before and I was in my early thirties by then. Of course, the next track was Mosport—a big and fast and crazy track. That was kind of an eye-opener for me. I crashed in the rain!

Speaking of crashes: any that were particularly memorable? Or any you’d like to forget?

My worst crash was in Shannonville a few years later when I was racing for Buell. It sucked because our team had three riders and we’d qualified first, second, and third, and one teammate was way ahead but my other teammate crashed down at the end of the straightaway and no more than the next lap later I did the same thing. I was cartwheeling and the bike was cartwheeling and it hit me in the head. It was all just a blur. Didn’t even know who I was. Ended up being my first big concussion.

Now, if you want to talk closest call, that was probably a few years later at Mosport again. We had a pretty big team—the biggest team in Canada with four riders riding in pretty much every class—and whenever you get into bigger teams then you need more people and more mechanics and all these towns we were going to were pretty big party towns. Montreal and Halifax—those kinds of places. Well, it’s a four-day program, so you practice on Thursday and then there’s qualifying on Friday and then the race on Saturday and another on Sunday, so the first couple nights we’d all went out and my mechanic ended up getting pretty hammered. The next day I was on my bike on the track, and there’s a section where you’re going one-fifty or one-sixty and you come down into this dip where the whole bike drops like a roller-coaster then shoots back up into this tight right hander and onto the back straight. I’d just dropped into the dip when the right handlebar comes down the fork because it’s loose. I was lucky enough to be able to still push and turn with my left and slow down quickly. That’s the only good thing about those V-twins—with all that torque, as soon as you let off the gas they slow down pretty good.

Yikes! Well, on a lighter note, what about your best race?

That’s a hard question. I ended up winning back-to-back in Calgary in the National Superbike Series, which is pretty cool because it was the National Series, and those races were both good battles because they were in the rain. The second race I ended up winning was funny because it was against another local guy who didn’t know the track well and only came up to do the national race. He was doing pretty good, but for whatever reason I gave him one of my secrets anyway. Told him to do this one thing there at a certain point on the the track and he took my advice and passed me in that spot! But the next lap he tried to do the same thing with someone else and ended up totaling his bike!

What do you like most about racing?

The great thing about racing, any kind of racing, is that everyone is dedicated to their sport and you just become family. Even though it’s all competitive and guys are running around fixing things and changing tires and working on bikes, other teams will lend you parts and help you out whenever you need it. And because you’re all traveling around to the same places with each other, you get to know one another, so I guess the best part of it is really the relationships that I’ve developed. Don’t know if you want to mention it, but I recently started racing competitively again.

Before we get to the Bond stuff; when I reviewed your history in preparation for the ride-along, I noticed a bid you’d made on a tidy little first-gen Toyota Celica and that intrigued me. What’s the story?

Ha! It used to be my car and I was trying to buy it back! I had gone through a streak where I was buying Celicas. Thought they were cool looking cars, and back in the day they weren’t worth that much. They were always like Volkswagen Beetles to me where you’d drive them and when they’d rust out you’d crush them and they’d just disappear! So when I found that one on Craigslist way back when I had to have it. It was really clean and a rare color—robin’s egg blue. Bought it for something like $3500 US and got it shipped up here from Boise, but when I tried to start it the engine was seized. I didn’t know enough about Celicas then to know that I should’ve kept that car because it was a ’71—the first year—and the original seats were the ones that looked like Mexican blankets. But I put it up for sale and this guy bought it and got the motor running and the interior restored then got a divorce from his wife and sold it on Bring a Trailer. So when I saw it was listed there I put in a few bids. I don’t know who has the car now but I do know that it was in a Super Bowl commercial.

What?

Not long after it was listed on Bring a Trailer it was used in a Super Bowl commercial!

I found out about it when one of my friends sent the clip to me. It was the same robin’s-egg blue Celica and the commercial was done in Canada, so I’m positive it’s the same car. I’m not sure how that even happened but I’m on a lot of Celica Facebook groups and the photos all came up there at once so that was pretty funny.

Okay, now let’s talk how the DB5 modeling came about.

Well, when I was a kid I thought pretty much everyone built plastic models like I did. I put together lots of Revell kits and remember sticking my fingers together many times! And where we used to live there was an original Bond film car sitting in Frank Baker’s restaurant for like thirteen years. My parents would take us there and the car was kept in a little case, like a life-size model, with the gadgets and all that stuff and it was just super cool. And then at a certain point I started doing these 1:8 scale detailed DB models made by Eaglemoss.

They were only available in some parts of Europe, and what they did was pretty cool. For seven pounds a week you got a part of the car and a magazine maybe ten pages thick that had an instruction on the part itself and then a bit about a stunt they did in a Bond movie, then a thing on a Bond girl, and a Bond villain, and after eighty-six weeks of that you’d have all the parts to build the car. You even got a mini car cover. The models were all super detailed. You could turn the key in the ignition and they had a little sound chip where you could push the gas and it would rev up and the lights would come on and the guns would come out. And I’d been buying these kits from the UK in totes and having them shipped back here then selling them on eBay as assembled cars, but the parts started to run dry so I thought, ‘I wonder if we could just build a full-scale version of one of these.’

So I took a model and assembled the body without all the parts on it and took it to a guy and he scanned it. Then I went and talked to a few local guys I know in the film industry who did big props and backgrounds, then found a local shop nearby to do the work. Talked to the guy and he said they’d never done anything like that before but they’d do it. Told me they’d make it out of foam. Took some big blocks of it and glued them together and put it on the CNC and after two weeks, there it was, basically a big foam plug that we epoxy-coated then did all the bodywork.

But it’s very delicate. Like an eggshell that cracks very easily, so you have to be really careful with it. And that’s how all that came about. I was always curious how it would float, so…

Now for the hard questions: most fun Bond experience?

I did a mini-Bond film during COVID. We’d just finished that first car and had all these plans to do things with it, but couldn’t do any of them because there were no car shows going on at the time. We all wanted to do something, and there was this house in West Van—the rich area that I knew from riding around there years ago. It was in this little bay where you come down into a gated community and there’s maybe four houses there and this one house is all concrete and a very modern cool-looking place and I was always like, ‘man, that looks like it would be the perfect Bond lair.’ At the time it was for sale for something like $25 million. I asked my friend Rob, the photographer, to reach out to realtor. I have some friends in real estate too, so I asked them if they thought the owner might be willing to do a photo shoot there. We put out the word and the guy said he would because he thought it would be a good way to promote the house, so we got started. Since it was during COVID, a lot of people weren’t working and were looking for stuff to do and one of the guys I knew was from a long time ago is a video maker who goes by DownieLive. He’s a YouTuber who was just starting out then, and he had done a video about my Bond car, so I contacted him to see if he wanted to do some more content, like a mini-Bond movie or something, and he said he was in. Then I found out he’d really grown his audience from when I first knew of him. He was at like a million followers!

Anyway, we were trying to plan this thing out and they were giving us this date that we could shoot at the house and I started wondering if we could get two black Range Rovers to use as our villain cars, so we contacted the local dealership and asked if they’d lend us a couple. Not only did they do that, but they sent us a brand-new red Aston Martin Superleggera! It was one of those things that just kind of blew up. Another connection I’d made at the time (through Nigel from Hagerty, an Aston Martin owner and 007 DB5 fan who I’d met at a car show) was also in the film industry and had worked on four or five Bond films. He was local and told me I really had to meet this other guy who’d worked on Bond films too. Said that he’d seen the DB5 and was a huge Bond fan and even had the original Q-jet-boat that does the flip in The World Is Not Enough, the Pierce Brosnan Bond that was shot in Turkey. Turned out the guy had worked on a bunch of those films like the one where they cut the BMW in half, so it was super cool to be in touch with someone like that locally, especially when we asked if he wanted to do get involved and he was like, “Yeah, I’ve got nothing else going on,” since during COVID any filming was on hold.

As it happened, he was restoring the Q-boat at the time, so it had all new paint and decals on it, and he brought it out and we did a photoshoot and the next day had the YouTube guy come out as well as the guy who’d worked on all the films. I had another friend who had connections with equipment rental, which came in handy because we needed to get a crane down into that little bay area. There was no other way to get one in there, and we had to launch the boat from the crane because the actual boat launch was too far to get to in choppy water in a little stunt boat that was loud and sketchy-fast. But eventually we got everything all set up and did this little mini-movie and it turned out great. I got two of my friends to come in as villains and drive the black Range Rovers, and on top of it all, a friend of DownieLive’s father loaned us a BMW Z8. So we had the Superleggera and the DB5 and the Z8 in the garage, and the Q-boat sitting out on the dock. We even got a new Triumph Scrambler 1200 Bond edition from the local dealer for some shots. It was pretty cool having all those Bond vehicles in one place all at once.

The behind-the-scenes video is fascinating. Any pushback from the Bond people?

Naw, we just did it for fun—just a little mini-thing that we did. Most of it was just to do some pretty cool shots. The way the house was situated, it had lots of glass on the front. I know we could’ve done a bunch of the stuff and photoshopped it, but we didn’t want to do that. My buddy Rob set up his camera in the driveway and we had the DB5 sitting there, and when you looked through the house you could see the Q-boat sitting in the background. It was so cool. We also had some cool drone shots coming into the house where, as we wrote it, the bad guys found out James Bond had been living since he’d retired. That was our little screen play, taking off from where Spectre ended—they drove the DB5 off into the sunset with Dr.Swann.

We also played around a bit with some other shots, like getting the Z8 with the boat behind it on a trailer so it looked like Bond was taking his boat out for a ride, even backing up the DB5 making it look like it was hooked to it too. I think some of those photos are on the Bring a Trailer listing for the Bond car replica.

iIt’s kind of cool how something like that comes together…

There were just so many weird coincidences. What were the chances that COVID gave me the opportunity to meet a guy who worked in the film industry and was able to help get the Q-boat there? Even the realtor who was selling the house told us a big reason he let us do it was because he was from Turkey where they shot the movie with the boat and that he’d been head of security there at the time. What are the chances that this guy was actually in Istanbul while they were filming that scene, and now the boat was there, locally? So he was really happy that he got to see the boat again and do a lot of his real-estate promotional stuff with it.

Controversy time: The Best Bond Car?

Obviously the DB5 because it’s been in eight movies, but the Lotus that went underwater in The Spy Who Loved Me was pretty cool too, although it was only in one film. Same with the Toyota 2000GT that they had to cut the top off of so Connery could fit in it in You Only Live Twice.

Best 007?

Oh…that’s a tough one. For me, obviously I liked Sean Connery but I also liked Daniel Craig. He was a great Bond. Played the role really well. But it’s just a different era these days too. Nowadays when you see some of those older movies, what you see is a reflection of that era, and for that era, Sean Connery was the best.

And lastly, Best Bond Movie?

Skyfall. No question. Easy. Has great shots of the DB5 in it.

Thanks for reading the latest edition of Riding Shotgun with sludgo. If there are members of the BaT community that you’d like to hear from through this interview series, please drop us a line at community.content@bringatrailer.com.