Photo by Sean F. White – Copyright 2022 Omnifilm Entertainment
Summerland, British Columbia — The owner of a Summerland, B.C. restoration shop is receiving his minute in the spotlight with the premiere of “Bush Wreck Rescue” on Wednesday, featuring Bill Desrosier of Wreckless Restorations and Car Craft Automotive.
Desrosier has been in the auto industry for just about as long as one can say they have been, telling Okanagan-area news outlet Castanet.net “Since I was four years old, I loved hanging out in the garage with my dad.
“I started doing cars when I was 15. Working with him, built my own project car at that time, and put it on the road when I was 16. This is pretty much all I’ve done,” he said.
This new documentary series for the Discovery Channel will see Desrosier and his team seeking out wrecks and abandoned vehicles in B.C.’s vast forests to be hauled back to his shop and restored as unique custom builds.
“We haul crap that people don’t want and build them into something cool,” as Desrosier puts it.
The opportunity to join the show came as he was in the middle of a break from work, but thanks to some convincing from a close friend, Desrosier says he was ultimately excited by the challenge he was being presented with and elected to get back into the game.
“It was a learning curve. I mean, it was a ton of fun doing it, and it was frustrating at times. A lot of the timelines, the build schedules, we were building stuff that should have taken over a year. We were doing it in months, so it was a lot of overtime for my guys and for myself, but pretty proud of my guys,” he said.
“I think you’re gonna find a difference in the way we did this and the way it was filmed. I was pretty adamant that I didn’t want to do a reality TV show. Pretty much what they filmed is what goes on.”
Interacting with the owners of some of these vehicles came with a mix of reactions, Desrosier said.
“Sometimes people are happy to get them out of their yard. Other times people have great ideas that they’re going to fix them up one day. And then it’s pretty much the logistics of where you’re getting it from and getting into the shop and tearing it apart to see what kind of headache you’ve adopted yourself.”
A bulk of Desrosier’s excitement for the project he says is derived from the ability to give a platform to the often underrepresented Canadian custom repair community.
“Everybody thinks that the big companies down in the States are doing it…Summerland here is a pretty small little community, and hopefully it brings some notoriety to it right.”
The first two episodes of “Bush Wreck Rescue” premiered on the Discovery Channel at 8 p.m. EST on Wednesday.
