The auto restoration work for the creme de la creme of cars is big business in Los Angeles.

The region leads the nation in the luxury auto market with roughly 2,000 million-dollar cars owned here, which is more than anywhere else in the United States, according to Traverse City, Mich.-based classic car insurer Hagerty Group.

That number has tripled since 2010, according to Hagerty, which bases its figures on counties with large wealthy cities and an active car culture scene as a comparison to L.A. County. These include wealthy pockets in rival classic auto regions in Florida, such as Palm Beach and Miami; the Hudson Valley in Westchester County, N.Y., where some of Wall Street’s financially savvy live; and in the tech-rich Silicon Valley.

Other regions showing huge growth in million-dollar cars include Orange and San Diego counties, oil-rich Houston, suburban New York’s Long Island, and the affluent retirement community of Scottsdale, Ariz., according to Hagerty.

But none are as big as L.A.’s.

And with that scale comes a bevy of mechanics who form a network of service providers for owners who can afford these ultra-luxury automobiles.

“Everyone has a different specialty,” said Michael Bodell, the Petersen Automotive Museum’s deputy director. “Some specialize in Italian or British cars, or engines or wheels. People in L.A. are real craftsmen.

“It’s an underground economy. These guys are prominent craftsmen, people who work on exotic cars. You can’t just go and buy a part. You have to make them,” Bodell added. “With a vintage and exotic car, you don’t know how much it will cost to restore. It is an art that doesn’t exist. To put it in original form, you can’t know what is ahead or how tough it will be.”

Car care culture

The million-dollar car culture in Los Angeles has fueled demand for mechanics – many of whom clam up when it comes to discussing or taking photos of their employers’ cars.

“It’s pretty hard to write an article on this because people don’t want the IRS to know what they (vintage cars) are worth,” said John Willhoit, who owns Willhoit Auto Restoration in Long Beach and has worked on cars such as Jerry Seinfeld’s million dollar-plus Porsche 908.

Willhoit’s shop insures cars up to $150,000 in case of vandalism or theft though he regularly garages several millions of dollars’ worth in vehicles at one time. Owners typically have insurance riders that cover the cars at a higher price tag in case of loss, so Willhoit’s headaches are limited.

“I have maybe 10 cars in my shop at once, and they’re worth altogether $2-3 million,” he said.

Bruce Canepa, who is said by auto restoration experts to run one of the world’s largest auto restoration shops, Canepa, in Scotts Valley, estimates that the value of the industry and mechanics it employs in California may total in the “hundreds of millions of dollars.” Other auto experts interviewed agreed with Canepa’s back-of-the-envelope assessment.

Those figures are nearly impossible to assess for L.A. alone – or anywhere else – because of the highly fragmented, private nature of the work that caters to the ultra-wealthy’s passion for the hobby – and desire for secrecy.

In-house help

While most high-end car collectors rely on independent shops like Canepa’s and Willhoit’s, at the extreme end of the spectrum are enthusiasts – particularly those with larger collections – who have a single person or team of people in charge of maintaining the vehicles.

Aaron Weiss, who estimates he has up to roughly $15 million tied up in his collection of 32 classic cars buried in a warehouse in Pasadena, uses auto body shop Nicks Old Car Specialty out in Redlands for metal bending work but also employs an in-house mechanic. He counts among his crown jewels a 1933 Packard Series 1005 convertible, 1929 Rolls-Royce Phantom convertible coupe, and 1931 Duesenberg.

“This isn’t a hobby for the thin of skin. You have to have the resources to do it because it will eat you alive,” Weiss said.

Weiss, who keeps his fleet in Pasadena in a nondescript row of commercial buildings along San Gabriel Boulevard, employs a single mechanic who works Monday through Thursday, keeping the vintage classics polished and their engines humming.

Vicente Zaragoza, Weiss’ mechanic at the Flying A Garage, polishes and details the cars. “I change the oil and perform other minor work, said Zaragoza, whose favorite car is a 1925 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. “It’s my favorite.”

One dedicated mechanic isn’t enough for comedian and automobile preservationist Jay Leno, who has a crew of half a dozen mechanics overseeing more than 350 classics autos valued at more than $50 million at his Big Dog Garage in Burbank near the Hollywood Burbank Airport.

Bernard Juchli, who had a Jaguar service and repair shop in the Bay Area until Leno hired him to run his garage in 2001, has performed maintenance on everything from Leno’s few million-dollar 1994 McClaren F1, to $1 million worth of restoration work on “six or seven” Duesenbergs, originally manufactured nearly a century ago.

“This is a great job. It’s not like you’re doing the same thing all of the time, like working in a dealer,” said Juchli, who keeps Leno’s fleet of classics in shape. He does everything from welding supports on a convertible to machining new master cylinder brakes.

Mechanics like Juchli, Willhoit and Canepa can do anything from reverse engineering old car parts – like a master cylinder brake – to making a picture-perfect paint job, to upholstery.

Collectors’ heaven

A month ago, RM Sotheby’s auctioned off at the Petersen Automotive Museum to undisclosed buyers six autos worth more than a million dollars each, including a $22 million 1956 Ferrari 290 MM. The Ferrari sale entered the ranks of the top 10 most valuable motor cars sold at auction, according to the New York-based auction house.

Of the 2,000 million-dollar autos Hagerty estimates to be in L.A. County, Petersen has at least 25 of them, according to Bodell. The museum’s crown jewels are movie star and race car driver Steve McQueen’s 1956 Jaguar XKSS, of which only 18 were ever manufactured, and the 1925 Round-Door Rolls-Royce Phantom 1 – the museum’s signature car.

The museum itself has tapped a network of dozens of auto restoration shops in L.A., the region and elsewhere across the country. It has three autos in various stages of restoration now, according to Bodell.

So why are there so many of these million-dollar cars in Los Angeles?

“You can drive there all year,” Canepa notes. “In other parts, it’s either too hot, too cold or too wet. You’ve got pretty limited driving. In L.A., you’ve only got to drive 30 miles out and into the canyons.

“We have weather, the roads and all of these things. We’ve also got the money,” said Canepa of L.A. and California’s strong foothold in the high-end auto market.

And that’s bred a thriving scene for the class of blue-collar workers who service the million-dollar machines.

“I’d say it’s Ground Zero for a lot of different disciplines, not just restoration,” Canepa said. “Where I’m at in the Bay Area, there are three or four really good restoration shops. Among the top 10 in the U.S., we are one, there’s one in Seattle, one in New York, and one in Connecticut. I can name them all. In L.A., there is a much larger population, where there are two, three, four or five of them. It’s not necessarily Ground Zero, but there are a lot more.”