When most pro basketball players retire, they don’t walk into a Subaru dealership and ask for a job as a mechanic’s apprentice. They also don’t have a widebody Porsche 997 and BMW E30 Touring in their garage. Leo Lyons is different, as you’ll see in this week’s episode of CARISMA on YouTube.
Getting paid to play basketball is a lifelong dream for many. For Leo, it was always a means to an end. That end being German cars with JDM widebody kits might seem surprising, but it all makes sense when you look at his path in life: a tall kid growing up in Kansas City who was into cars and fashion, went undrafted out of college, and made a career playing basketball in Japan, where the country’s love for outrageous widebody kits hit him hard.
He was always very public about his love for cars, hoping doing so would plant seeds for later when his playing days were over. Then a fan gave him the chance to visit RWB and hang out with Akira Nakai, an opportunity that changed his life as much as basketball.
“Seeing him work and being around him, and seeing how people revere him to this day has always motivated me to want to do exactly what he does. That’s opening up a shop where I can do everything I want to do. Meeting him showed me that there is a place for me in creating in a world like that.”
Over the years, Leo kept playing, making connections and earning enough to get himself a Porsche 997, an Audi R8, a clean second-gen Subaru WRX STI, and a home in upstate New York with room to build that shop. He bought the Porsche hoping to get an RWB kit installed, but when Covid slowed the process down, he went for a 935-style slantnose kit from Old and New in Japan and never looked back.
Next, with a daughter on the way, he bought the BMW E30 Touring after seeing it featured in a Larry Chen video. It was a custom build by Eric Penelow, co-founder of Live to Offend, a company selling badass widebody kits for the E30, E36, and Mazda FD RX-7. In it, Eric explains that he built it as a fun family car to cart around his two kids, keeping the M20 straight-six mostly stock save for upgraded studs and gaskets and a Precision 5858 turbo to keep the output around 340 hp. He also said very clearly it wasn’t for sale.
Leo was hooked, and with a baby daughter on the way, he’d found his dad car. He got in touch with Eric through Larry and asked to be first in line if he ever changed his mind. Again planting seeds. A few months later, the wagon was in his garage.
There’s a lot to be done to create this shop, build his new identity, and bring together people and influences from around the world over his vision. (Hence the Subaru dealership story—he wants to learn as much as possible. And he knows this second act is unexpected from someone in his position. He’s spent the majority of his 37 years on this planet thinking about basketball, and he can just walk away from all that and become Leo, the widebody tuner guy? In his words, pretty much.
“It makes people upset with how simple I am. Sometimes I just don’t want to do things that I don’t love. I played basketball for a very long time and once I didn’t love it, it’s like what next?” he says. “That’s kind of what led me to making the decisions I made with just throwing myself into cars completely.”
We’ll see where he takes it, and we’ll be rooting for him. Especially if he keeps doing the crazy widebody thing, which it sounds like he will.
“Every time I collected Hot Wheels [growing up], I knew I was going to get that car, like I’m collecting this ’cause I’m going to get it one day. That’s kind of where my theme came from with the cars that I do buy, which is kind of more widebody than I probably should have. It’s because I want my cars to actually look like a Hot Wheel. So that’s kind of my aim to try to create and make builds that make me feel like that kid again.”
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