‘Just Say Yes To Stuff’: How An Instagram DM Led One Woman On An Epic Adventure In A Stranger’s Vintage Land Rover

The fastest way to get back to Los Angeles from Monterey Car Week is to skip the scenic route and haul ass down Interstate 5, trading cool Pacific views for the hot and scraggly foothills of the Diablo Range. If you’ve got air-conditioning and a fast car, the trip is ideally quick and unmemorable. For Mikeala Worthington, who answered a random person’s request for help moving a car via Instagram DM, the journey was done in a slow, semi-functioning ’59 Land Rover with no climate control. Uncomfortable, but extremely cool.

When I first saw Worthington, it was almost like a mirage. Here was a Harlequin-inspired truck bouncing down the highway, with a be-scarved driver seemingly floating above the seats. Could this be real? I was in my third hour of driving the Murano back from Monterey to Los Angeles, and the rest of my travelmates were in various stages of slumber, with me not far behind. Perhaps this was a dream.

“Look!” I yelled as I quickly came up on the Land Rover. The delta between our speeds was so great that I had to pull over to the shoulder so I could let her pass and get another glimpse of the truck. It was clear immediately that this unique British machine and its driver were special. We posted a reel of the scene, and it was already going viral by the time I stopped for gas an hour later.

 

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“My goodness, what a badass! Who is this badass? Who is this?” you can hear David asking in the video. I had to find out.

It turns out the car, the driver, and the story of how it came together were even more impressive than I could have imagined.

‘Total Boss Energy’

That’s how James Howson, aka @jymboplays, describes Worthington to me.

The story I’d heard was that Howson and his partner in the car, the artist Sean Wotherspoon, met Worthington at the famous Baja Cantina 15 minutes before handing her the keys to their extremely special and likely very valuable Land Rover.

Last year, Wotherspoon and Howson brought a vintage Porsche 2.7 RS to Monterey, done up in a similar multi-color aesthetic. The 1959 Land Rover Series II has a similar look but a different story, according to this HypeBeast article:

Originally built in England and delivered new to an engineer in Canada in 1959, the left-hand-drive 2.25 petrol spent more than four decades with its first owner before returning to the UK in 2002. Remarkably, the Land Rover was never road-registered and is believed to be one of only six left-hand-drive Series 2 models in the UK and even more notably, one of three that still sit on their original chassis.

Howson acquired the vehicle earlier this year, rebuilding it in Essex between March and July before shipping it to the States for its Monterey Car Week debut. While it retains as many original panels as possible, the truck has been upgraded with a fresh engine and gearbox rebuild, Wolf alloys, CarPlay integration and a rear seating setup with built-in speakers.

Howson further explains the appeal of the Land Rover as something a little different from what he’d done in the past.

“I’ve always loved Sean’s design, from Nike, to Adidas, to the Porsche that went down so well,” he says. “All the cars I’ve done have been beautiful and curvaceous, so I thought: let’s colour block, a literal brick. Also, I’ve had a few Land Rovers in my time, why not have one in LA!”

Most of the vintage cars brought to Pebble are towed up, not driven up, due to the risks and effort. In that context, handing the keys for your car to a person you met 15 minutes ago seems incredible.

“You’re actually wrong,” Howson told me via DM. “[The] first time I met her was to advise her how to operate the funky clutch before she drove like nine hours south to LA! I trusted her because she’s a proper car girl. None of this fake shit to get views on Instagram, she doesn’t give a fuckkkkkk. Total boss energy, and she rocked up in a Mini GP1 (the supercharged one).”

The bit about the Mini GP made sense to me since I’d seen another woman in a Mini Cooper GP driving, slowly, about 15 car lengths ahead of the Land Rover.

I reached out to the driver and asked her if she’d sit down for an interview, so I could try to piece together a story as colorful as the car itself.

‘There’s A Gear Here Somewhere’

What I’d taken for serenity as we shot past Mikeala Worthington on the road might actually have been something closer to road madness. I’d been on the road for approximately three hours, whereas she’d been traveling for closer to six, outdoors, in temperatures well into the 90s.

“At one point on the drive between the delirium and everything else, I was like, I feel like Amelia Earhart,’ Worthington tells me. “Gina [in the Mini Cooper] was like ‘She didn’t come back!'”

As Howson alluded to, the modified and partially restored Land Rover wasn’t exactly in perfect operating spec.

“I’m driving a car. I don’t know how to land this plane,” she says, only half-joking. “[It’s] pretty accurate because the clutch just doesn’t keep pressure. So, you have to pump it a bunch until it builds pressure and hope that you can slam it into the next gear before it loses it again. And it’s not like you can just go directly into a gear. You have to find it and then get into it. Whereas the Mini Cooper I have, it’s an excellent shifter. It’s very crisp. It’s very short and precise. And the Land Rover was like, ‘Ah, there’s a gear here somewhere.'”

In addition to the lack of A/C and the bad clutch, even a perfect old Land Rover feels like a farm truck. It is not designed for long stretches of American interstate, and Worthington says it required about 20 degrees of constant steering input just to keep straight. You can see her in the reel trying to keep the car straight long enough to give us a quick wave.

Even with all the mechanical obstacles, fatigue was clearly the biggest hurdle. Worthington says she stopped roughly every hour to fill up on water and cool herself down, in addition to checking fluids and filling up the truck’s tank. Her callsign for the trip was, fittingly, “Sunday Roast.”

“It’s a British car. The Brits love a Sunday roast. It was Sunday [and] I was roasting.”

One of the things that surprised me was how well-prepared for the journey she seemed to be given that she had no idea she was going to do it.

“I just love radios. It’s just such a fun way to communicate, I think. So, I had brought the [walkie-talkies]. So, [Gina] had one, I had one, and obviously a supply of hats and sunglasses, and sunscreen because Car Week is always about the sneaky sunburn,” Worthington says, reminding me of my own cracked lips. “Luckily, the hat did stay on once I tied it down.”

I was curious how this all came together, and Worthington explains that she’s in a group of 50-or-so car friends she’s met on social media who go to Car Week every year. Someone in the Instagram chat knew someone, who knew someone, who found out that Howson had brought up the Land Rover with no plan to bring it back, other than, it seems, asking a stranger.

“I’m not sure when it was, but one of the guys dropped in the group chat, ‘Hey, uh, this guy Jimmy is looking for help moving a car back to LA.’ For better or for worse, I will …help out when I can say yes to things — do more stuff, right? So, Gina and I had driven up together, so we were two up in my car on the way to Car Week and I was like, ‘well, there’s two of us. We could technically take two cars home.'”

As the weekend progressed, the details started coming in from Howson via Instagram DM.

“I got messages whenever I had reception, like: “Hey, it’s probably gonna die, do you have breakdown insurance? Do you have other coverage? Can you drive a semi-functional clutch?” and it was seeming like a worse and worse idea the whole time, but I was like, ‘Yeah, I guess uh we’ll go for it. Why not give it a shot?'”

At this point, I’m wondering if it was more insane to hand a car over to a stranger or to accept a car from one.

“I trust everyone until they fuck something up,” Howson explains to me. “I didn’t need to convince her. The car community is about experience.”

Also, Howson entirely lucked out, given that Worthington’s day job and experience make her kind of the perfect person for the job.

She’s Also A Rivian Engineer And ASE-Certified Mechanic

Worthington grew up in rural Connecticut, a place that was mostly just “shitboxes and farm trucks.” She went to a technical high school to learn how to fix cars, picking up a couple of ASE certifications along the way. This was a practical choice, not a passionate one.

“No one in my family was ever into cars. I didn’t really know that automotive enthusiasm was a thing,” she says. Even after high school, she didn’t consider cars as a hobby until she got deep into her mechanical engineering degree in college and joined Formula Student.

“I was like, “Ah, I kind of like cars as a recreational thing, not just as a necessity in life.” And from there, it has only gotten worse or better. Who’s to say?”

After graduating from college and interning at various firms, she landed a job as a Technical Program Manager for Development Engineering at Rivian.

“I manage a lot of the vehicle fleet health type stuff for the engineering cars, the prototypes, making sure that they’re fit for purpose, ready for test, able to function, and able to do the things that they’re that the domains need them to do in order to get us a sellable point.”

To that end, she handed over a list of things that could probably be fixed or addressed at the end of the journey.

Her current fleet is an extremely reliable 2008 Toyota Corolla S, the Mini GP, and 2.5 motorcycles. She’s currently thinking about swapping the extremely reliable Corolla for something with a V12. Specifically, a Mercedes CL65 AMG.

“I think they’re gorgeous. I love a pilarless coupe.”

Is she worried that the car is a complex German automobile with expensive parts? Not really.

“There’s something wrong with everything, but if it makes you happy, who cares?”

That’s seemingly her view on everything.

“I think the moral of the story is just say yes to stuff, do more things. And while it was absolutely type II fun [miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect], it was worth doing,” she concludes. “And you never know, you never know what life will toss you if you’re open to and prepared for opportunities. So, it was cool… Wouldn’t do it again.”

Photos courtesy of Mikeala Worthington