SIBLING RIVALRY

Sibling Rivalry

The brothers behind Austin’s Riso Motorworks share how they’ve stayed close for so many years.

“Not everyone gets a shared dream that survives adulthood, let alone one they get to live out with the person who was there for the whole thing. I try not to forget how rare that is.”

Now working together as cofounders of Riso Motorworks, brothers Soham and Rishin began with surprisingly different approaches to the car world considering where they both ended up, driving to the same office side by side in a pair of matching G series Porsches. Though they shared an upbringing, the age gap between them is five years, “a gap that matters more than people think” according to Soham.

“Five years means we didn’t grow up loving cars together” he says. “By the time I was old enough to pay attention, Rishin already had a head start and a mythology of his own. His earliest memory is of a friend’s parents who kept two 930s in the driveway. He talks about that the way people talk about a song that rewired them, as a kid standing in awe of these wide-body Porsches. Something locked into place that never came loose.

My journey started in a friend’s garage in high school. It had a pit dug into the floor and a lift, where somebody’s dad let a bunch of teenagers actually get under a car. That’s where I learned the machine wasn’t a mystery. You could open it, understand it, and put it back together. I sold stereo upgrades to friends, I built go-karts, rode dirt bikes, and drove anything with a motor and a seat. Two different doors into the same room.

Before we ever compared notes, we were running the same rituals apart. We both ordered the manuals, calling dealerships to ask about cars that weren’t even out yet, getting mailed glossy brochures with every spec. Rishin pulled Auto Traders out of the free magazine bins and read them cover to cover, studying cars he had no business buying. I was doing my own version of the same thing. We were on parallel tracks for years and didn’t fully know it.

My brother Rishin is the kind of person who decides he wants to learn something and then just… does it. He wanted to learn stick, but didn’t know how, so he bought an old Toyota and taught himself on the drive home.”

“Somewhere in the swapping of stories we realised we’d been chasing the same thing the whole time.”

“The business was downstream of the bond, not the other way around. The cars came first, always."

Though Soham and Rishin both nurtured their love of cars in very separate ways, it was only a matter of time before they began joining the dots. “Somewhere in the swapping of stories we realised we’d been chasing the same thing the whole time” says Soham. The brothers began building cars together, and the machines became a shared language.

“The business was downstream of the bond, not the other way around. The cars came first, always. Now we both live in Austin and life gets loud. Work, family, all the things that pull siblings in different directions. We got lucky that the thing we both wandered into as kids turned out strong enough to hold us. The cars are the thing that keep pulling us back into the same garage, and I don’t take that for granted.

We each drive a 911SC now. Mine is a 1979 in Cashmere Beige, Rishin’s is a 1981 in Chiffon White. I don’t think either of us planned it as a bookend, but it’s hard to miss. My brother began as a kid standing in someone else’s driveway staring at a pair of air-cooled 911s, and now we stare at the same silhouettes all these years later.”