While he may not share the family legacy of, say, Robby Gordon, Evan Evans or Todd LeDuc, Scott Gailey was probably equally destined to become an off-road racer, and his VW-powered GET Performance Class 10 Buggy was all but preordained to become a Masterpiece in Metal.

Beautiful from every angle, Gailey's car wears a striking mix of House of Kolor's yellow, green marble and competition orange on white, applied by Wally World Design of Oak Hills, California. The chassis and all the hard components were powdercoated by Xtreme Powdercoating of Palmdale, California.

"My first job out of high school was at a Volkswagen shop called German Auto, and they had a Class 2 car at the time," says Gailey, now 46. "I started working on that with them and going to the races, and I was hooked from day one."

The cockpit, like the rest of the car is Spartan by design. The lack of a GPS unit is the only visual hint that it was built from a budget. Beard Ultra Pro seats flank a Fortin shifter that stirs the car's Mendeola five-speed transaxle. Seatbelts are by Crow; gauges by Autometer. The steering wheel is a MOMO unit.

Gailey eventually began to log seat time in the desert, starting in Budget Baja–sort of a cross between Class 11 and Class 5/1600–and then moving on to Class 2, Class 5 and eventually Class 1. Always intimately involved with the preparation of the cars he rode in and drove, Gailey knew exactly what he wanted when the time came to finally realize the dream of building his own ultimate ride.

Partnering with friend and master fabricator Gene Towler, Gailey enlisted another friend, designer and engineer Zac Johnson of Engineering Innovations LLC, to draw up the plans for a new Class 10 machine. Starting with a clean sheet of paper, Gailey, Towler and Johnson laid out a plan to build a car that favored claw-hammer reliability over raw speed and utilized simple hardware rather than exotic components. On the surface, that might sound a little boring, and yet somehow this less-is-more approach has yielded a stunningly beautiful racecar: a true confluence of good old-fashioned know how, state-of-the-art craftsmanship and carefully selected parts.

Back to basics best describes the rear suspension layout. Measuring 22 inches, the rear end uses Fox Shox. Gailey and Towler actually favor an old school McKenzie's floating outboard hub/brake arrangement rather than midboard brakes. The gun-drilled rear axles are TCS units.