So You Bought a Fancy Vintage Car. Now Who's Going to Restore It?

Summary

Mike Regalia knows exactly where he was when he heard Elvis Presley had died: deep into restoring a Shelby 289 Cobra for Bruce Meyer, the Beverly Hills real estate scion and prominent collector who today owns swaths of Rodeo Drive.“I had stripped it to bare metal, welded up a bunch of cracks and was in the booth painting it,” says Regalia, who spent months in 1977 getting the roadster from an unfortunate salmon-y hue to an arresting red, among other refurbishments. He heard the announcement about The King of Rock and Roll over the radio in his garage: “I’ll never forget it.”