1800 Miles in Dark Horse SC; ProjectS Updates; and Oopsies

Matt Farah is back from an 1800 mile road trip in the new Ford Mustang Dark Horse SC. He shares everything about 41 hours in the seat including 2 track days and countless turns on the East coast. Also, many of our cars are broken; a fresh wheel isn't so much anymore; Zack Klapman drove some Maseratis; and Patreon questions include: Strange ways car companies saved money Driving skills: Nature or Nurture? Our WORST story about mechanical sympathy Can Maserati survive? Will faceted crystals make a come back on watches? Watch options at the $5k price. A car that is good because it's bad? Help my mom buy a convertible Why hasn't the aftermarket fixed this? No lock-out for 2nd gear, why? Best/worst volume controls Life after Miata: what to buy? Recorded November 2, 2026 Avants https://avants.com/tst use code TST for 10% off your membership! Align Shoes Get 20% off your first pair with code “TIRE” at checkout at https://alignshoe.com. Promotion valid for 20% off one pair of full-priced footwear with code TIRE. Offer not valid for items on sale. DeleteMe Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to https://joindeleteme.com/tire and use promo code TIRE at checkout. Truewerk Go to https://TRUEWERK. COM/tireand use code tire to get 15% off your first order. TRUEWERK, Built Like It Matters. Brian James Trailers Visit Brian James Trailers at SEMA this week booth #24933 in the Central Hall or check out https://brianjamestrailers.com Want your question answered? Want to watch the live stream, get ad-free podcasts, or exclusive podcasts? Join our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thesmokingtirepodcast Instagram: https://www. Instagram.com/thesmokingtire https://www. Instagram.com/therealzackklapman

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Matt Farah?

  What's up folks, welcome to the Smoking Tire Podcast. This episode is brought to you by Avance. We love Avance here at the Smoking Tire because they are saving you money on things you're gonna buy anyway. Like tires. Avance can get you 10% off with Michelin and BF Goodrich plus, and then plus, an additional 10% off at Discount Tire. It's crazy. Avance also has a beautiful quarterly magazine and events around the country specifically for their members. Plus, plus, if you use code TST at checkout, you're gonna get another 10% off. This whole thing just pays for itself right away.

• 0:40Matt Farah?

  So go to Avance, that's A-V-A-N-T-S dot com slash TST. That's Avance dot com slash TST and use code TST for 10% off your Avance membership. On this episode of the podcast, I did 1,800 plus miles in the Mustang Dark Horse SC. A whole bunch of my cars are still broken and Zach forgets I gave him concert tickets. It's the Smoking Tire Podcast. Let's go.

• 1:08Matt Farah?

  Hi, everybody. It's been, it's been quite a minute since you actually heard from us in real time.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  10 days?

• 1:17Matt Farah?

  Well, it's 10 days since I was, yeah, I guess, did I, would we do a show the day before I left?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:22Matt Farah?

  Yeah, okay, so 11 days. Hi.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25Matt Farah?

  We jumped forward in time. Things happened. I flew to the East Coast and then drove almost 1,900 miles in the Mustang Dark Horse SC.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  You drove basically the whole East Coast.

• 1:41Matt Farah?

  I drove six states and two different racetracks in this vehicle. And it was, I love how it says Road and Track was invited to be a collaborator but hasn't accepted yet.

• 1:55Matt Farah?

  You know, when they said, when I see those things, they, you know, they expect me to.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:59Matt Farah?

  It's Monday over there. You know, what are we doing? Get on that. Um, yeah, so, so we can talk about that. Also, I have a, I have an update on all of my cars that are being, have been and are being worked on. So there's that. Construction has begun at the new shop, which is fucking crazy because it felt like after three years and eight months, construction would never actually start. It felt like I was doomed to just stare at that empty shitty building for the rest of my life.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34Matt Farah?

  You know what I mean? Like, it's crazy. It's just so, I've been so used to carrying.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  It had become like, like an uncle you let live in a back house. Well, you know, I just watched Girl with a Dragon Tattoo again and like the whole family.

• 2:48Matt Farah?

  Our friend is living in our other friend's back house.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. They're like, oh, we just keep that recluse over there. So that building does nothing. That's where like your weird uncle lives. And over here, you guys store cars.

• 2:58Matt Farah?

  Yeah. So we're finally get to store cars, which is much needed. Very nice. That's great.

• 3:06Matt Farah?

  How've you been?

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Pretty good.

• 3:09Matt Farah?

  Did you took, you took my Rise Against tickets? How were they?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  I did do that.

• 3:12Matt Farah?

  Yeah, were they good? You didn't go.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  I forgot it was this week.

• 3:16Matt Farah?

  You took my tickets and then you didn't go.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  I don't need the money.

• 3:19Matt Farah?

  No, you don't. It's okay.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Yesterday, yesterday I was in the car coming back from Christian's show and I was like, when is, I was like, Mac, when is that concert? Is that, is that because he's gone on this trip? Or is that because he's gone in three weeks? And I like looked, I was driving in.

• 3:38Matt Farah?

  And the day you looked was like the day after the show?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:41Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Cool. Nice job.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I'm gonna pay for it.

• 3:45Matt Farah?

  On Instagram, it looked good. Oh, boo. Boo. That's not a bit.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  It's not a bit.

• 3:53Matt Farah?

  That's not a bit.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Look at my face. My bit was, I was like, okay, if I miss it, I'll just, I'll lie to him. Like, no. I couldn't do it.

• 4:00Matt Farah?

  Yeah, I'm glad you didn't lie about it. That'd been lame. We'd have found out sooner or later. Sarah would have fucking, Sarah, you'd have forgot that you lied and Sarah would have.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  And she's not gonna.

• 4:14Matt Farah?

  No, she wouldn't know. Yeah. Like backing up her dumb lie.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  I heard they were great and, you know, the singer knows three notes and that's good. And then Christian, Christian walked out of it. I brought him.

• 4:25Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, all right, fine. Uh, well, fine. Before you get in the Dark Horse, you didn't, you obviously didn't do anything else. That's it. You just, you just didn't do.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  I drove around a Toyota Crown for the week. Oh, because my car broke again and then fixed itself.

• 4:39Matt Farah?

  It fixed itself?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Sort of. But I went downstairs. I hadn't driven in eight days because we had press cars. And I go turn on and it was just dead as a doornail. And so I used one of our handy jump boxes.

• 4:50Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Like not even doing the ad that we have to do this week. Had to put it on super boost. Like the only light that turned on the ga, on the gauges was the airbag light. The only, it's like this is active barely.

• 5:02Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  So if someone hits you, we don't even know if it'll work. And then I brought it here and threw it on a tender and it had like nine volts when I got here.

• 5:11Matt Farah?

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's probably, did you have to replace the battery?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Not yet. And then I trickled it overnight.

• 5:17Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  And now it's fine. And the battery is like a year and a half old.

• 5:20Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  So fun mystery.

• 5:23Matt Farah?

  I mean, in a car from the early 2000s, if you don't drive it for like a week at a time, it should probably be on a tender. Because all those cars have some low level fucking drain. They're never like, oh, it's not like a car from the 80s. It's like off. Like when you, or the Manks or like, you know, you turn the fucking Countach off, it's off. It's dead as a doornail. Like your car, something's still going on in there.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  But it's never.

• 5:52Matt Farah?

  It doesn't mean it's broken. It just means that like, if you, but you, you normally don't let it sit for that long.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  No, I do. There's been, there's been stretches where either you and I are on a trip or we have a press car or whatever. And one thing that I laugh about is like the battery, after I switched from lithium, has always been like, fine. If it's a newish battery, it hasn't drained. So maybe I left a door tightly, slightly cracked or a sensor went out, but it's been okay since then.

• 6:17Matt Farah?

  All right.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's.

• 6:20Matt Farah?

  But usually if it, if, if it gets to the point where you're doing that, it's the battery's on borrowed time.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:27Matt Farah?

  It happens. You may, if it's only a year and a half old, you might have a warranty.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  I'm, I need to look up when I bought it because I know it was, I know the last one died right at like the three year mark just after warranty day, basically. So.

• 6:38Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Here at WCCS, we are able to claim a shocking amount, and I mean secure, secure warranty claims on a lot of batteries.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Really?

• 6:49Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Because we have batteries that die, we have batteries that die when the car is on a tender for 99% of its life. You know what I mean? It's on a tender all the time. It goes out for six hours a month. It goes right back in a tender and then the battery dies. And it's a new car. Like, what the fuck? And it just happens. It sometimes just happens. Yeah. A tender is much, much better than nothing, but it's not actually as good as driving it. It's just, it isn't. But yeah, all right. So fix now-ish.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Fix now?

• 7:23Matt Farah?

  Temporarily fixed.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  We'll see. Okay. I'll let you know tomorrow.

• 7:26Matt Farah?

  All right. Well, so, so do you want, I'll give you one fixed and three not fixed.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 7:33Matt Farah?

  One fixed, my mom's Jaguar. Shout out to the homie Dan, Turn7 Auto Care in Connecticut. Stellar mobile guy. I shouted him out on Instagram last week because he did the Dark Horse in between trips. He came over to my parents' house and did the sticky button fix. That dude right there, the underneath the 911. Yeah, that guy. That guy and his boy. He came over and did the sticky buttons on my mom's Jag. Because like early 2000s Ferraris and a lot of these other, not a lot, but a few other companies used this, this rubberized coating that felt really nice when it was new.

• 8:20Matt Farah?

  And after like 15 years or 10, 11 years, it, it, it just gums up. Like this car lives indoors. It's got 8,000 miles. It's not like it was parked in the Florida sun. It's not like it was used every day for 100,000 miles. Like this is, this happened to a very, very low mile car. It happens to all, literally all. If you went to a Jaguar dealer, they'd tell you to kick rocks, by the way. The, the, the full, full like way to do it is like what they do with the Ferraris, where you disassemble the entire interior. It's like $10,000. Not worth it.

• 8:59Matt Farah?

  This dude, about 1,500 bucks. Not nothing. And it was a pain in the ass. He had to like make some weird alchemy mixture of like fucking kerosene and plutonium or something. And like made like a slather of this shit and let it sit on there for a bit. And then use a plastic razor blade and like a toothpick to like get it all off because it becomes like rubber cement.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:29Matt Farah?

  Shit probably turns into fucking napalm, to be honest with you. 16 year old me definitely would have tried to light that resulting goo on fire.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  But so is it, is the goo happening because the rubber is like breaking down?

• 9:43Matt Farah?

  It's coming off of the.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  So this takes off a layer of it that's problematic and then leaves a fresher layer?

• 9:49Matt Farah?

  I was getting to that.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry.

• 9:51Matt Farah?

  It takes all of it off.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 9:53Matt Farah?

  So all of the rubberized coating from the vent surrounds, the button surrounds, the steering wheel.

• 10:03Matt Farah?

  Um, not, not the column, but like the back of the steering wheel, like the front is like leather, the rim is leather, but like the back bit, that's not like the paddles, but around that. Normally it would either be just plastic, regular plastic, or in a very, very nice car, perhaps covered in leather, but.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  This is in between. It's, it feels fancier.

• 10:27Matt Farah?

  It feels fancier when it's new.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Pretty cheap to put on it.

• 10:30Matt Farah?

  Yeah. And so, so all, all of it comes off and it all becomes piano black. So it looks a little like different now. Like it doesn't like fuck up how it looks. Actually, it all became piano black, except the side window, um, button surrounds that it, for I don't know why, become gray. So those are the only things that, that you might look at and go, cause they used to be black and now they're gray and they're really the only gray things in the car. So you look at that and you go, oh, well, the gray, those, that is sort of, you know.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Stands out.

• 11:12Matt Farah?

  Yeah. There's kind of no going back. If you do it this way now.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:16Matt Farah?

  I don't know. Maybe if you do the $10,000 way and disassemble the entire interior and send it out, maybe it comes back with new rubberized coating.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  They probably re-dip it.

• 11:26Matt Farah?

  Yeah, or whatever. I'm not really sure, but this was the, this was the way that was worthwhile.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Kind of a pleasant surprise. I mean, I hate piano black for so many reasons, as we all do, but it's, I think it's better at least that when they remove this fancy coating, it doesn't, it wasn't all just gray. Like it could have, it could have looked so much cheaper underneath that.

• 11:45Matt Farah?

  It could have looked like primer.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  It could have looked like primer. It could have looked like, you know, dove gray Volkswagen Passat interior stuff. So at least it's like sort of nicer looking.

• 11:53Matt Farah?

  You'd have, yeah. You, you, if you, if you hadn't spent a lot of time in F-types, and I mean like a lot, you wouldn't immediately look at the car and think anything's different.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:05Matt Farah?

  Um, but it's fixed. I mean, it did not, it was not the kind of work I would want to do. You know what I mean? Like, uh, that's, that is a tough, tough gig to spend a day doing that. Uh, I have a lot of respect for Dan for being able to do that, or, you know, any real, any detailer. I was, I never liked detailing that much. If you liked detailing, maybe you'd like doing this, but it seemed like a pain in the fucking ass.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  It's cool they figured out how to solve it though.

• 12:33Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  And solvent it really.

• 12:34Matt Farah?

  Solvent it.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah.

• 12:36Matt Farah?

  But yeah, it doesn't just wipe off, you gotta use a plastic razor blade and just like, oh, it's just, it's nasty.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  It's like those videos of someone's cleaning out the sound deadening of their unibody and use dry ice to freeze all this soft stuff and glue and then they chip it out with a chisel. This is the small version of that.

• 12:55Matt Farah?

  I wonder if you could, I don't think you can just dry ice blast a dashboard.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Call it that is it.

• 12:59Matt Farah?

  I think, yeah, if we had a sacrificial.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  That would probably take, that would, surely that would scratch the piano black.

• 13:06Matt Farah?

  For sure.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:07Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Uh, although speaking of dashboards, okay, that's one fixed and four broken's. I said three, it's four. Taycan, which you were in today, um, although the body shop and everybody, you know, they fixed the car nice, I, I think because it sat outside during the heatwave, the leather is peeling back on the dashboard all of a sudden.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  It's lifting.

• 13:32Matt Farah?

  It's lifting.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Well, I guess that will peel it back to a degree where it's stretching it.

• 13:35Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  It looks like filo dough that's rising.

• 13:37Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  It's, there's just a bubble.

• 13:40Matt Farah?

  And it's only a four-year-old car. So this, this needs to be, I'm pretty sure they'll warranty this. I need to take it. They won't accept photos to approve a warranty. They make you go down there and I got a real busy week, but I'm gonna ask Hannah to take the car down there and have them look at it. Which by the way, this morning, while I was gone, she curbed one of the wheels already.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  She's curbed it this morning? No, you saw it.

• 14:08Matt Farah?

  No, no, while I was gone, I noticed that one of the wheels is curbed. I, I, they've been on the car like eight days. We, I, we can't, the only argument.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  California is a 50, 50% state. So you'll get two good wheels and she can have the two curved wheels.

• 14:26Matt Farah?

  I'll take the, I get the left ones and she gets the right ones. I, I, I think I'm, I think we're done getting her cars that have rims. I think that's, I think that's not a thing we're doing anymore. That's the argument legit against Cayenne. Because that Cayenne will have curvable wheels, whereas something like the Lexus GX, which can tow, or a fucking Durango or whatever that can tow, you could put some like meaty ass 1552s on there, you know, and Hannah could, Hannah, she's never curbed a Delica wheel. You know what I mean? Like those things are mint, like.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  You know, when we get truck, like press car trucks, I am kind of a little happy cause that's one less thing I need to think about when I park. I don't need to put the mirror down and all that stuff to get it perfect.

• 15:13Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  You go, sure. Rub the tire.

• 15:15Matt Farah?

  Okay. So that's, so that's one broken. Guys, taking a break today because support is coming in from Brian James Trailers. That's right. You've heard me talking about these guys. They are the leading automotive trailer manufacturer in Europe and they have been since 1979. I now own a Brian James trailer. That's right. They made me a custom race sport built to my specification, enclosed car hauler with a low bed. It's great for towing performance. It's got a kneeling, uh, uh, mechanism, like a hydraulic lever that allows the back of the trailer to kneel and have an ultra-low load height. It's fabulous.

• 15:57Matt Farah?

  It's got the huge twin side doors on the outside for easy access. So I can strap the car down while standing outside the trailer. I don't have to crawl in that tiny little crawl space and lean all over the car's paint. I can be comfortable outside the trailer, strap the car down. Uh, my Brian James Race Sport trailer, it had every feature I need, including this tilt bed for the low load angle. Uh, it comes with race ramps for the ideal approach. It comes with a backup camera, an electric winch with a remote control, uh, winch, uh, winch remote. So I can stand outside the car or be in the car steering it and winch the vehicle up into the trailer. It's so awesome. And if you're gonna be at SEMA, uh,

• 16:40Matt Farah?

  our friends at Brian James Trailers, they'll be at SEMA this week. You can visit them at booth 24933 in the central hall. Tell them Matt Farah sent you. And this is Brian James's debut at SEMA. They've got the Race Transporter 7, their flagship enclosed car transporter. It's the absolute best there is in Europe. One day I will have one for myself. The Brian James team is there all week to answer any questions. And if you can't make it to SEMA, check out all their trailers online at brianjamestrailers.com. That's B-R-I-A-N-J-A-M-E-S-trailers.com. Also brought to you today by Delete Me. We love Delete

• 17:21Matt Farah?

  Me because they keep your privacy private, right? You can get yourself to joindelete.me and then I will tell you why. Your digital footprint is gonna be way bigger than you think. Why? Because you're a human that exists on the internet, like pretty much all other humans that don't live on North Sentinel Island and list, exist on the internet, right? You use social media, you use apps, you email, you text, you buy things, you go to forums, you subscribe to things. It all makes your private info vulnerable for data brokers to buy or scrape. And Delete Me knows that your privacy is worth protecting. Sign up and provide Delete Me with the information you want deleted from people's search sites

• 18:05Matt Farah?

  and the experts take it from there. Delete Me sends you regular personalized privacy reports showing what they found, where they found it, and what they removed. Now, my privacy report started off big. My first Delete Me report had like 1,200 things on it, but they keep going every month and they find stuff, they take it down. Every once in a while, I have to do a couple of click clicks or a signature to confirm something. But now every month, it's like 80, 100. It's never gonna be zero, right? Because I continue to exist on the line, on the internet. I haven't moved into like a cave or something. I'm still here. So it won't go to zero, but Delete Me is control of, in control of my

• 18:47Matt Farah?

  data and keeping my private life private. And you can too. Sign up for Delete Me now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to www.joindelete.me.com/tire and use promo code tire at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to www.joindelete.me.com/tire and enter code tire at checkout. That's joindelete.me.com/tire code tire. The Aston Martin update from Keen's Auto Works, Bedford Hills, New York. So the Aston

• 19:23Matt Farah?

  Martin, the problem we have run into with the vanquish is that much, much needed componentry is at what you might call minimum priority for Aston Martin right now.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, no kidding.

• 19:45Matt Farah?

  That they are not really interested at all in.

• 19:54Matt Farah?

  Parts support for first gen Vanquish's. So get this, first gen Vanquish clutch assemblies don't exist anymore. Okay, they, they haven't, the, the, the thing they used was an old, you know, it was old from two, early 2000s, right?

• 20:17Matt Farah?

  And Aston Martin, you know, the, the, the Vanquish is a, is a, is a Tremec. It's a fucking T56, basically, right?

• 20:29Matt Farah?

  And, and

• 20:33Matt Farah?

  the following DB9 was a torque tube and a transaxle, not an inline gearbox. Like mine is like, like a, like not a transaxle. It's like engine, gearbox, driveshaft, diff. The DB9 was engine, prop shaft, transaxle, okay? So Aston Martin has discontinued the Vanquish clutch forever. I, I don't know when, but they don't, they don't exist now. They don't have them. They, they're discontinued. They've, and they, if you try to order one, they go, this part, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh, has been replaced by this part, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh.

• 21:14Matt Farah?

  Yeah, like, and it's, it's a DB, and the, the part that's been replaced, it's been replaced with is the DB9 clutch and flywheel assembly. Mike Keane

• 21:27Matt Farah?

  doesn't think, the, the DB9's clutch, like if you look at the, the, the Vanquish clutch is like, I don't know exactly what it is, but I believe it's like a 10 inch disc, okay? The DB9's is like a 6 inch disc.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 21:42Matt Farah?

  Yeah, okay, with a diff, and in the flywheel's different, it's different. So, so the clutch won't, doesn't replace, it won't made up to the Vanquish flywheel, because they're, they're different sizes, right? So they want you to use the DB9 flywheel also. Except this flywheel and clutch are designed to go into a torque tube, not into a gearbox. So that, he doesn't even think that that will fit, that, that will fit properly. So, and, and if so, like it, it basically, he, he, he has no confidence that that fix will work. So, there's, I think it's, uh, Saks that actually made the original Vanquish clutch.

• 22:23Matt Farah?

  So he has a message into Saks to see if they can provide replacement innards.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Is, if, is what you need just like the clutch pack? Like the friction disc essentially?

• 22:35Matt Farah?

  Essentially, like, we would like to get a completely new clutch assembly, but we could certainly make do with internals and we could take apart and clean the clutch. Like they can, they, it is possible. The, the, the option number one is can Saks provide a new clutch? He has a message to them. Option number two is, uh, there's a company called GTE Engineering, not GTO Engineering, but GTE, uh, that can rebuild this clutch. Like what, essentially what you're talking about.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  So they would get a, the friction disc from whoever?

• 23:09Matt Farah?

  Yeah, or, or ma, or make it, or whatever, yeah. And they, and I don't know, I don't know if there's a supplier or this company is capable of making their own, you know, plates, like I, I don't know how it works, but they rebuild the one that's here, so. Well, either way, like, just sucks.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Well, I was curious how, how many cars were produced and it looks like?

• 23:27Matt Farah?

  1600 something, right?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, 1086 V12 S's, uh, 1500 regular. So, and I bring it up because it's hard for, like, not all, not all OEMs provide, you know, uh, support for older cars. Like BMW's pretty good at it.

• 23:48Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  I think Audi's kind of known for being, they're bad at it.

• 23:51Matt Farah?

  They stop after 10 years.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Mercedes is like coming, starting to do it a little bit. But basically, these huge companies that have sold hundreds and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of a certain model of car.

• 24:01Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Even they're like, we're not going to make parts for that thing anymore. We're just not going to do it. So Aston, who sold 1500 of these, 2000, whatever, like, the number is so small.

• 24:10Matt Farah?

  They don't give a fuck.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  This is a sixth owner's problem.

• 24:14Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  And we don't care, fix it, figure it out.

• 24:16Matt Farah?

  Yeah, so.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  It's you and Tavari.

• 24:18Matt Farah?

  So that's where we're, where we're at.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 24:21Matt Farah?

  Yeah, but I'm paying like primo labor rates for this shit, so. So anyway, that's, uh, that's where we're at with Vanquish. Um, it's in good hands. I mean, I absolutely, you know, uh, when he sends me photos and videos from around the shop, I mean, that fucking place is spotless. So I'm, I'm, I'm very confident that the car's in, uh, is in good hands. But it's, it's been a pain in the ass to like, just get stuff, which is,

• 24:49Matt Farah?

  it's, uh, for a car that's not that, it doesn't feel like it's that old. Like it is, it is that old, but it doesn't feel like it's that old. It's like, oh, it's fucking stupid.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Well, I can, I can add to, you know, whenever we bring these 20 year old cars somewhere, the shops will tell you like, here's what's wrong now, here's what's going wrong.

• 25:07Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  So of course at office, I was like, fix the gauges, fix the thing. And they go, you know, your like, fan motor, like for the HVAC is like starting to wear out. It just sounds a little weird. I go, okay, how do you fix that? And they're like, you take the dash out. And I was like, well, I'm not doing that right now. And then I Googled it and all the posts are like, this is the worst thing I've ever done. I'm eight hours in, it is, it is, it's not, like I've removed parts of the dash, put the stereo in. The entire dashboard has to leave the vehicle.

• 25:36Matt Farah?

  That's crazy.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Down, you have the beam and a whole bunch of wires. And I was like, I'll just put a fan, I'll just hang a fan from the windshield if this thing goes out. I'm not doing it.

• 25:45Matt Farah?

  That's what I read about, uh, converting the Delica's AC to 134. They're like, because it's, you know, it's cab over, so they're like, get ready to disassemble the entire interior. And oh, by the way, you also need a lift. You know, like you need both, you need a lift and you need to like disassemble the interior.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Top and bottom.

• 26:05Matt Farah?

  Everything, fuck it, so. No air conditioning for the rest of that car's life, I guess. Unless you, for real, shout out to anybody in LA. If you get the R, got that R12 hookup? That's all I need. I don't, the thing is working, it just needs a charge. I just need.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  I know a guy at the ports.

• 26:22Matt Farah?

  I need a little R12 in LA, dude, you know, it's, it's hard to come by.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  In cash at night.

• 26:27Matt Farah?

  You can't, I need it. Then I just, I don't need it now, I just need it by, you know, June. Need it by summer.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, except the, the police will be watching you with your windows up in July. They'll go, he got the R12, pull him over.

• 26:40Matt Farah?

  Dude, I'm not a narc. I'll fuck, I'll get caught, I'll do time, I don't tell nobody.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:45Matt Farah?

  Um, but a little bit of R12 would really go a long way in my family's life, is all I'm saying. My wife, my wife can't keep driving this car on rims.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Give her the Delica though. Will she not drive it without AC?

• 27:00Matt Farah?

  No, she will.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:01Matt Farah?

  But she would prefer it in the summer to.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Have your solution. Cool suit, cool suit, Matt Farah.

• 27:09Matt Farah?

  Look, you and I both know that a cool suit is actually better than air conditioning

• 27:15Speaker 01

  So great.

• 27:15Matt Farah?

  for a car you're driving for five hours once a week up a mountain. Like 100%, that's a suitable replacement for that. Imagine Hannah driving, like, go to, go to Century City Mall, wearing like a cool suit.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  You have to have a cool cloak made, you know? So it's just like you get in, you buckle in, and then you wrap the shawl and it's got the tubes in it.

• 27:36Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Get Nino over here. Get Nino over here. So all we have to do, actually, that would be kind of, that would be kind of sick, because all we'd have to do is get Nino the tubing.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:48Matt Farah?

  Right?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:49Matt Farah?

  And we'd go, dude, you just, just make, make an awesome garment that has a matrix of this tubing in it. He would do that for us.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  For sure. Do it like a vest, a long cloak thing, now, you know, ready, ready for LARP or for on hot days.

• 28:04Matt Farah?

  That'd be pretty fucking sweet.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  It would be very fun.

• 28:07Matt Farah?

  I feel like, uh, I feel like that would be a really fun thing. What, what kind of, what kind of garment do you think would be the, would it be like?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  This is also, I mean, the video pitch is like.

• 28:17Matt Farah?

  In real, in reality, you'd want like, almost like a hoodie or something, right? Like something that would be comfortable for while you're in the car, right?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  I would go vest, because, like in the race cars, you're like, you cool off the center of your body, you'll cool your extremities. So I don't think I need like a full cool jacket. But if you just, if you just hop in there, easy to slide on over any outfit you're wearing.

• 28:37Matt Farah?

  Yeah, if it looked like a bulletproof vest, like a cool fashionable bulletproof vest.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Make it orange for Marty McFly, her little throwback. And then she just pops that on, hit the button.

• 28:49Matt Farah?

  Hey, where's your lifeboat?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  I mean, the jokey video pitch is like, in our warming climate, this is cheaper than R12.

• 28:56Matt Farah?

  It's kind of sweet though, I bet Nino would do it.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 28:58Matt Farah?

  Yeah, we should, we should, we should workshop that a little bit.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  The cool vest.

• 29:02Matt Farah?

  Yeah, a cool vest for cool kids.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Bingo. See, see, the headline is there. I can see the billboard outside right now.

• 29:07Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Cool vest for cool kids.

• 29:09Matt Farah?

  If you, I mean, and now they have, you know, they, you don't need.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Cool like a data center.

• 29:16Matt Farah?

  Look, there's a reason there's a reason they need these things to be so cool. You don't you want to be that cool too?

• 29:24Matt Farah?

  You'd basically, you'd be a person at the, uh, at the end of Digger. Um, the, uh, the new cool suits, the one we saw, um, Richard Childress was using at the Cletus race. They put one in his car. You know, the one, the old school one I use, like literally was like a fucking igloo cooler with a fish tank pump in it.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:48Matt Farah?

  And you'd have to fill it with ice water. The new one is a, is about the size of that box and it's an actual just, it's just a radiator.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Refrigeration unit.

• 29:58Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a like a mini, it's a, you know, like I have a mini split. It's a micro split.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:04Matt Farah?

  It's a micro split that just, there's no other end. Your body is the other.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  And you can probably actually adjust the temp.

• 30:11Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Because it's just, you know, but with, with our system, it's like you're, you're as cold as the ice is. And if it's too cold, sorry, turn it off.

• 30:19Matt Farah?

  There's, well, if you're using that motherfucker, there's no such thing as too cold.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Uh, 8:00 AM at Sebring, I didn't run it for the first hour. Cause it was like, the temp was perfect. And then 9:00 AM, I was like, I need that thing.

• 30:31Matt Farah?

  Yeah. The first time I ever used one wasn't in a race car. It was with Rob Ferretti doing Bull Run in that Cobra R shit pile across Texas. Worst car ever. Thing was horrible. I love, I love Mustangs. And that thing was such a piece of shit. It's amazing that anyone pays $5 for those cars. They're junk. Um, but, but we, dude, when you first, you've gotten morphine before, right?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:58Matt Farah?

  Like re, the real shit, right in the hospital? One more break, folks, because support is coming in from True Work, talking about that T2 work pant. This is the all-season soft shell pant that started everything for True Work. Between the hottest and coldest days is where this workhorse thrives. The T2's double woven soft shell fabric has a four-way stretch, water-resistant, stands up to abrasions and tears on the job site, plus articulated knees and an innovative nine-pocket layout gives you the comfort, durability, and utility you need. The T2 work pant was the product that launched True Work. It's inspired by the performance of modern soft shell fabrics, but challenged the long-held assumption that durable workwear had to be made from heavy canvas or denim.

• 31:44Matt Farah?

  It's continually evolved through customer feedback and product refinement. The core concept remains the same, but a series of intentional updates to the fit fabric and features have made it even better over time. The T2 is engineered to withstand abrasion, tearing, and daily abuse that comes with professional job site work. And it fits great. Great work pant has to move naturally through every position the job demands. This was refined through firsthand experience and extensive wear testing. Plus, the T2's durable, water-resistant finish sheds light rain, snow, and everyday moisture, helping professionals stay comfortable without sacrificing breathability or mobility. And it's versatile, able to handle a wide range of job site conditions and demands.

• 32:26Matt Farah?

  Plus, hiking, active, uh, recreational work off the job site as well. It's on the job site, but you can wear it for other stuff. I wear mine for hiking. Zach wears them for filming. You get it. Pockets everywhere, and you can get them now. 15% off your first order at truework.com, code tire. That's T-R-U-E-W-E-R-K.com, code tire. True Work, built like it matters because it does. And we're also supported today by Align Footwear. This is a men's brand that blends refined style, expert craftsmanship, and next-level comfort. There's premium leathers like Italian suede or American hides paired with the signature Align Dual Density Footbed

• 33:11Matt Farah?

  for lasting support and effortless comfort. It's built for wherever the day takes you, right? And that dual-density footbed, it's made of high-density foam that forms a deep heel cut and a prominent arch support for stability and optimal foot alignment, while open cell form absorbs impacts and provides all-day comfort, eliminating the need for aftermarket insoles. It's weatherproof and available online at alignshoe.com and select retailers like Dillard's and Nordstrom. I got the Wrangley, that's the waterproof Chelsea boot, their best-selling boot of 2025. It's got that slip-resistant rubber lug outsole for terrain-gipping, dripping traction. The heel pull tab and stretch goring for easy on and off.

• 33:55Matt Farah?

  And available in three colors, the Italian cow suede, American full-grain leather, or the oily, distressed, full-grain American leather, which is what I got. I brought these things on my trip to the, uh, Catskills Mountains, wore them out to some nice dinners with my blazer, and boy, did I look like a million bucks. And you can too. Get 20% off your first pair with code tire at checkout at alignshoe.com. That's A-L-I-G-N shoe.com, alignshoe.com. Promo, uh, promo valid for 20% off one pair of full-priced footwear with code tire. Offer not valid for items on sale.

• 34:37Matt Farah?

  But like, have you ever done an intravenous drug that you could feel going through your veins?

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Well, sure. When I just had surgery, they gave me the cocktail before the real cocktail.

• 34:44Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah. You can, you know, you feel that?

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:46Matt Farah?

  That's what it was like the first time I turned on the, when it goes breathing and you feel it getting cold around you. That's what that shit feels like. It's the best feeling in the world when it's hot out. You just feel your core temperatures go instant.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  It's really, they're amazing. Brilliant, brilliant invention, whoever did.

• 35:03Matt Farah?

  Yeah. And if you have a classic car that you drive like once a week for five hours in a hot climate for half the year, fuck air conditioning, just put this in.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  True. I mean, you have to wear the

• 35:14Matt Farah?

  You have to wear the vest.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Rapsguard suit.

• 35:15Matt Farah?

  Yeah, wear the vest.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:16Matt Farah?

  But like, I mean, it's really a t-shirt. My cool, my cool shirt is literally a t-shirt. Um, but like,

• 35:24Matt Farah?

  it's, when I had it in the Fox body, I swear to God, driving on a hot day with a cool shirt on and the windows down, if you're shaded, not necessarily convertible, but in the shade, that was better than air conditioning. Like, you, cause you, you, you enjoyed the warm day, but you didn't feel any of the effects of it.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Well, it's like when you're in someone's house that's too cold and you step out into the perfect temp and you're like, ooh.

• 35:49Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  It's nice.

• 35:50Matt Farah?

  God, that shit is, that shit is good.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're great.

• 35:53Matt Farah?

  Um, okay, so, uh, the Aston Martin is gonna be a while, but that's okay. We, uh, we don't, we're not in a rush. Um, let's see, the Mercedes, not broken, not held up, uh, just not running yet. He's, uh, Matt Quick, Quick Classics, uh, who's doing our powertrain conversion in the E500 convertible.

• 36:16Matt Farah?

  Is, uh, about halfway through the wiring, he said. He's like, wiring really sucks. Like, making everything work in this car is a challenge, so, um, you know, the, the original key has to work with the original gauges and, you know, all, all this stuff, so.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  You're getting a telegraph to work with an iPhone.

• 36:35Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  You got, cause you, don't you have two different computing eras, right? There, you have CAN bus and OBD1.

• 36:42Matt Farah?

  Correct.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  They're trying to marry.

• 36:44Matt Farah?

  OBD, it's a 95, which is OBD1. And then the powertrain is an O2.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Right. Which is OBD2, I think.

• 36:54Matt Farah?

  Yes.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:55Matt Farah?

  Not, I don't think it's CAN bus. No, CAN bus is like the next one, which is why you don't want the supercharged cars. It's part of, the main reason you don't want the supercharged powertrain is because getting the electronics to work is like a fucking nightmare. He's like, it's easier to skip, skip the supercharged one and go for the V, the 6.2 if that's what you wanted to do.

• 37:16Matt Farah?

  So anyway, wiring, that's what's happening. And, und wie weit? And, uh, Countach, uh, also wiring. The suspension is assembled.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 37:28Matt Farah?

  And, uh, the car can sit on its wheels, which is nice. So that's an update to all the shit that's happening in my own garage.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Very good.

• 37:40Matt Farah?

  Actually, I drove the Delica the other day, which got new tires on it for the first time since 2019 and just had service. God, was it smooth?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  It's so, that is a very comfortable vehicle. It has so much play in the tire and the suspension. I like that car a lot.

• 37:53Matt Farah?

  Delica's great. That thing fucking ass. We've done 13,000 kilometers in it since we've had it, which isn't a lot, but it's mostly used for just short errands anyway. I bet, I bet most trips in that thing aren't five miles. But like, it just asks like nothing. It's just cheap. We finally had the, uh, hatch struts replaced.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:16Matt Farah?

  The hatch struts went like, went out like two years ago.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  That's right. We had them replaced at the tire place.

• 38:22Matt Farah?

  And, and they gave us, they gave us bad parts.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 38:25Matt Farah?

  We ordered, we had them replaced, but they were bad. They didn't have gas in the strut. So I returned them and got other ones, and then I just like, didn't get around to replacing them. Finally just did. We were using a stick. I mean, it was so shanty. So it's really nice to have actual gas struts in your, in your thing. Yeah. All right.

• 38:46Matt Farah?

  On the way here, by the way, I, I wrote it down because I was so, and then, and then we'll talk about the dark horse.

• 38:55Matt Farah?

  The most Altima driver I can ever imagine, and I just saw, I saw their whole world in about thirty-five seconds. I was going west on El Segundo Boulevard, coming from our South Bay location here, looking to turn right onto Crenshaw Boulevard. I'm behind a gray Altima, and the light at Crenshaw is, is out, and it's blinking red. And so it's a stop sign, right, and it's, and, and this is two lanes each way, ninety-degree intersection, uh, excuse me, like, two lanes of travel each way. So it's a four-by-four intersection with a turn lane, okay, but it's a stop sign.

• 39:37Matt Farah?

  So, there's a semi truck in front of an Altima in front of me. And I'm, you know, kinda zoned out and just inching forward, we're there for, you know, a minute. I mean, literally, probably one minute. And I just see a fucking bag of Doritos, empty bag of Doritos fly out the window of the Altima and just into the street. I'm just like, oh, God, you know, and then the window goes back up, and I'm just like, ugh, fucking, God, gross people, like, come on. Like, and then, right as the semi gets to the stop sign, so it's one car in, or the stoplight, one car in front of the Altima, the Altima decides it will not abide this,

• 40:20Matt Farah?

  and goes to cut through the little strip mall on the corner to cut the light to make a right. Okay, can't wait for just the one vehicle in front of it to clear, it's gotta do it. But it does it too aggressively and with bad math, and the front end clears the driveway. The rear hits, hits the curb with such aggression, the rear tire blows out, okay?

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:53Matt Farah?

  And

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Oh, God, that's great.

• 40:54Matt Farah?

  And there is no reduction in the vehicle's inertia. They keep on the pedal through the fucking thing, and then go up the street, turn right. Well, coincidentally, I am also turning right, so I fuck, I'm now right behind it, having waited for the truck and everything.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  And their rear tires, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 41:13Matt Farah?

  And they, and they go to pull over, I'm like, oh, they finally realize their tire. No, just into the fucking drive-through line at Chick-fil-A, just right in there, and they're, and, so, they've done all this aggression, blown out their tire, fucking sped through a shopping center, just to get into the fucking drive-through lineage, like, and, and like littered their potato chips on the fucking street on the way. And I'm like, this is the most Altima driver, and as they, as they also blow the tire, they really bottomed out the car, it was a kachunka fact.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  So they probably think, oh, it was just loud, and then when they leave drive-through, the car's gonna be, that tire's flat.

• 41:55Matt Farah?

  Fucking asshole, just to, to, to save zero second, I mean, to save like, tenths of a second on the way to sit in a big-ass curled fucking Chick-fil-A line.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  People, they don't do math, like, they just don't think ahead on that kinda stuff at all.

• 42:12Matt Farah?

  That's how you end up, he's probably got sixty-month payments on that fucking Altima.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  I have a quick Model 3 story, this guy was such an asshole, he was going to a Christian show last night.

• 42:20Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Going through, we're in Koreatown, so it's just stop, it's stop signs, we're going through like neighborhoods, so stop sign, stop sign. Get to, I'm in front, and I see Model 3 headlights, and I could see them aiming for the right of me, I'm like, oh, he wants to turn right. I'll move up a little bit, that way he can go next to me and go. So I move up a little bit, he gets next to me, we both stop together, and then he floors it and goes straight. And just like, cuts me off to save four seconds.

• 42:46Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  So it just further reinforces that the new M3 driver is the Model 3 driver, we've talked about a lot.

• 42:52Matt Farah?

  Yeah, but there's so many more of them.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  I know.

• 42:55Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, jerks, we can't have nice things.

• 43:00Matt Farah?

  Yes, dark horse?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Uh, darker horse.

• 43:03Matt Farah?

  Dark horse, dark horse?

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Dark horse.

• 43:08Matt Farah?

  So, you know,

• 43:11Matt Farah?

  after Performance Car of the Year,

• 43:16Matt Farah?

  I knew this thing was gonna be pretty cool, but I didn't know if it would be something I would really enjoy for eighteen hundred, you can go look at the last slide on this and see, see my, my driving stats on my, oh, second to last slide, excuse me. Uh, eighteen hundred and fifty-five miles.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 43:36Matt Farah?

  I drove the car for forty-one hours, thirty minutes, and thirty-eight seconds, averaging forty-four miles an hour and thirteen and a half miles a gallon. So that's a fucking road trip, dude, that's a lot. And might I, might I remind you, the entire purpose of both, it was a double-leg road trip. I made a Bavarian pretzel in the Northeast, effectively, that's literally what my shape, the shape of my trip.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  With this car, we call it a phone cake, excuse you.

• 44:05Matt Farah?

  And, uh, the whole point is to avoid highways, to take back roads. So this was not eighteen hundred miles of seventy-five to ninety miles an hour on the highway across the deserts or whatever. This is taking back roads in New England in the fall, so a lot of these miles are like thirty-five miles an hour, you know, windy, and there's some beautiful blasts and some scenic back roads. There was, of course, a little bit of highway, of those forty-one hours driving, I'd say like, five, five to seven were probably what you'd call highway. And because it's the Northeast, a lot of those highways were parkways.

• 44:47Matt Farah?

  I drove the entire length of the Merritt Parkway four times on this trip, which is a lovely thing to get to do, actually.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Did you get a Merritt badge?

• 44:57Matt Farah?

  Oh, it's so lame.

• 45:01Matt Farah?

  Lamer than forgetting to go to a concert your friend gave you tickets to.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  I know, I'm definitely thanking for this.

• 45:07Matt Farah?

  Um, so, so the SC, you know, it, it, it replaces the Shelby GT500, it just has a way less cool name. I wish it was still called Shelby. Jim, just pay the license, whatever they want, just fucking give them money so you can call this thing a Shelby, and it sounds cool. But speaking of sounding cool, you have to pay attention to the direction this vehicle is parked in, because when you start it, they're waking up, and them is anybody and everybody. This is possibly the loudest cold start of any car I've ever heard. It's fucking, uh, it's really obnoxious, and I mean that in both a good and bad way.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Cause the previous champion, I think, was an Escalade V, right?

• 45:49Matt Farah?

  It's, it's effectively that, it's like that, but, but it's even more bark than that. And so you gotta, you know, my parents' house is made of stone, and where I park it was on the opposite end of the house where they live, and it woke them up, you know, like, it, it wakes up everybody. So you have to park it in the back of the hotel lot with exhaust facing away from stuff.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you don't wanna back, you back into a spot facing a wall.

• 46:18Matt Farah?

  Oh, my God, if you stay at a fucking Hampton Inn and you back this motherfucker up against those ground, you're waking the entire east wing of that motherfucker, for sure. And I know, cause it Performance Car of the Year, they did to me multiple times, cause they would take the cars out at sunrise for photography. It's insanely loud. It settles down, you know, once it's, uh, uh, once it's past its cold start cycle, but, so, it's fucking eight hundred horsepower, um, it's six hundred and sixty pounds of torque, it has a Tremec dual-clutch gearbox like the C8 Corvette. It, it's, uh, it's a Mustang, but it is, I have to say, I was so impressed.

• 47:03Matt Farah?

  I mean, um, this one had the comfort seats, which if you scroll, they're the, the same seats as the fucking rental car, just with some like sway or Alcantara centers. They, for this car was a hundred and seventeen thousand dollars, very lightly optioned car. The only options this car had on it were blue seat belts, um, the, uh, the set, and the stripe on the, on the, on the center. That was it, no other options, a hundred and seventeen thousand dollar car. Uh, the one that we drove for Performance Car of the Year had the carbon pack and the track pack, that was a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. So, on the one hand, you look at these seats and you go, Jesus Christ, guys, for this kinda money,

• 47:46Matt Farah?

  that is, that is the loser-est seat, right? On the other hand, forty-one hours in this seat, no back pain. My body was in a completely neutral position with the exact right amount of lumbar support. I had no back pain at all this entire trip, I did not need my Tempur-Pedic pillow.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 48:09Matt Farah?

  None, so if you're doing like, and, and on, and although the, the side bolstering is puny and shitty, um, on back roads, if you're not like pushing, if you're just like hustling on a back road, it's fine. On a track, that's a no-go. Not only do the side lateral, uh, bolsters just completely collapse under the weight of any person, but also this car, I got it with fifteen hundred miles on it, the bottom like wiggled a little bit on the rails.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Whoa, oh, the bolts were loose.

• 48:41Matt Farah?

  Under, under lateral, so if you are going anywhere near a racetrack, just get the fucking Recaros. I can't promise how they are on a long trip, but if you're not really doing track work, is, if this is a street car and you wanna do a lot of miles, road trip miles, or daily this car, which you absolutely could, eight hundred horsepower car, either, be easy, as easy to daily as if it was a fucking EcoBoost, there's no trade-off aside from, you know, the cold start and, and fuel prices, that would make you say, no, I wouldn't daily this car, you easily, easily could. Um, it was extremely comfortable for a long trip, the ride was really good, the body control was really good.

• 49:27Matt Farah?

  The brakes for a road car, fabulous, I might, uh, do a little track pads for, you know, we, it was, it was fine on the track, the brakes held up. Uh, they got a little warm, the pedal got a little soft after twenty laps, twenty-five laps around Lime Rock. Um, two very heavy braking zones and not much distance at Lime Rock, three heavy braking zones, really.

• 49:51Matt Farah?

  But it held up and it came back. The power is amazing. It's, you know, it's 800 horsepower. It's got a huge wide torque band.

• 50:04Matt Farah?

  But like a lot of cars, particularly three liter Carrera Porsches, the default drive mode, which is, you know, normal. It's not like so in Europe, everything, you know, it starts in EV mode because it's a hybrid. And then you gotta do, put it in the right mode, right? Blah, blah, blah. This starts

• 50:22Matt Farah?

  and it's grumble. It's always on grumble, grumble, grumble, grumble. But the normal, there's like normal sport, track, drag, and snow, I think are the modes or wet or something like that. Normal, it's not like it pulls power. It dumbs the throttle a little bit and it just makes this thing shift like the second it can shift, it'll shift. So, so it's in, you know, sixth gear at 37 miles an hour or something, right? Which, yeah, it's got a shitload of torque. It's fine, but there's a big asterisk on this one. The only thing about this dual clutch gearbox that I don't like

• 51:03Matt Farah?

  is if you happen, if you're accelerating, let's call it a steady state 10% throttle, which 10%, 15% throttle, which in this car, under what you would just call normal driving around, like that's what you're using, right? If you go from that, you would, if you get, you're following the car in front of you, you accelerate at 35 miles an hour, it gets up to like sixth gear. And like right as it shifts into sixth, you lift off the throttle because now you're either coasting or decelerating. If you lift off the throttle at about the same time it goes up a gear, there's a

• 51:40Matt Farah?

  it's not like broken and I even DM'd with a Ford engineer on Instagram that happened to work on this gearbox and they were like, oh yeah, that's like a thing that happens. If you happen to lift off the throttle as it upshifts, it's a

• 51:55Matt Farah?

  almost like that, the clonking of a R35 Nissan GTR's gearbox a little bit. If you're using manual mode and you time your shifts and you time, you know, you don't, you make it not do that, it never does the clonk. And if you put it in sport mode, it revs the car a little higher and so it's less likely to do the clonk because there's a little more like drivetrain lash at like very low RPM than there is it. Like that sort of slop, you know, like if you're spinning 6,000 RPM and you're like modulating the throttle, like it'll respond pretty like, eat pretty perfectly. But like at that low end, it's like kind of sloppy below 2,000 RPM, the response isn't quite there.

• 52:41Matt Farah?

  So you get that clonk, which I didn't love. If you put in sport mode, it revs it higher, it's less, it doesn't shift as many times. Maybe you're now only in fourth gear at 35 miles an hour instead of sixth. So you have fewer opportunities to do the clonk, but if it's in auto, it could still happen. Because you don't know exactly when it's going to shift. The only way around that is to drive in manual. When you're in manual, it's, it's perfect. No notes. It, it works. It does exactly the right things at exactly the right times when you tell it to, you know? And a good driver knows, knows what the gearbox needs when it needs it better than the computer anyway. So the gearbox is excellent, but for that one thing. What else did I write here?

• 53:29Matt Farah?

  The heater, it was really cold right there, that photo, top of Mount Washington. Not at the moment I took that photo, but when I woke up the next morning, it was 21 degrees outside. And the, the heater and defroster get hot really fast. They, this, this engine puts out a lot of heat. And it doesn't overheat on the track. It was totally fine. It has totally, totally appropriate thermal management. No problem there. It didn't for me anyway. I mean, it wasn't, it was like 55 degrees in our track day, which is pretty ideal. So I don't know what it's like at 105 degrees. I couldn't tell you, but it was fine. But it does get warm in the cabin very quickly, which is nice.

• 54:11Matt Farah?

  CarPlay was perfect. I had no issues at all.

• 54:17Matt Farah?

  You've got that My Mustang mode, which allows you to program and your own modes, right? So I, I had one where for like canyon driving where the powertrain was in like kill, stability control is limited and, and the, the, the powertrain is essentially in track mode with manual gears. And then the suspension was in soft. Like I pretty much had the suspension in soft all the time, except for when I was literally on the racetrack.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Could you change the steering weight?

• 54:48Matt Farah?

  Yep.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  In those, did you do that at all or leave it?

• 54:49Matt Farah?

  I never, I never put it to full. Like track mode was just whatever track mode was, but my mode was on sport. And then I drove in, I mainly drove in normal in sport most of the time. What else did I write here?

• 55:10Matt Farah?

  Sorry. It doesn't have radar cruise, which for a car that already has this much space and like blacked out shit in the front end. And I, for, I, this car is like a nine out of 10 as a GT car. It really is, except for that.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Is it not available?

• 55:30Matt Farah?

  It's not available.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  What?

• 55:31Matt Farah?

  It's not available on either Dark Horse or Dark Horse SC, and I confirmed with Ford. Also, the way you, the way you shuffle through Sirius stations sucks. And I think that's not a, that's an all Mustang thing. When you make a tight right or left turn 90 degrees, like out of a stop sign on a back road, the diff goes, it's a very tight, tight diff. I kind of get it.

• 55:58Matt Farah?

  You know, and look, a hundred and, $117,000 is a lot. I think, I think if this thing had a seat that was even more like the seats that were in the Focus RS, where it's a Recaro, but not a full bucket and in between. I, I think for this price point, a better seat than the base seat would make me feel a little better about it. You know, you could, you could, you know, at least, I think, I think so, but

• 56:24Matt Farah?

  it's very rare that I could do that kind of miles in that, in those kind of days, driving canyons and my body doesn't hurt.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:32Matt Farah?

  I mean, that's a pretty impressive thing.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  And they, they, you know, I'm sure Ford knows that a lot of their market does not live near a twisty mountain like we do. I mean, so much of the United States is real flat. So they go, here's a comfortable seat that doesn't hold you in because it doesn't need to. But it needs to be supportive when people are, you know, effectively always sitting straight up and down.

• 56:53Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Because if you're in a corner, you're doing more, more leaning. And they go, look, it, it holds the body well and it does this job of GT stuff really well. It does look cheap. And this car, the exterior of this car looks very exciting and it looks expensive and it looks cool. And then you open the door and the seat does not look cool.

• 57:11Matt Farah?

  And you look, yes, I know you can get better seats. But A, the better seats don't have lumbar support. I thought I was, I thought the car that I was going to be given was going to have Recaros in them. So I brought my Tempur-Pedic pillow. I ended up not using it, but I knew those Recaros do not have lumbar support. So if your back is sensitive, those Recaros are maybe not great either. And, and look, when, when it gets to be this expensive, this is a lot, this is a lot of money. And I think from a performance perspective, from a powertrain perspective, I mean, if you think about the powertrain that you're getting, this four cam, supercharged V8, incredibly high tech.

• 57:54Matt Farah?

  It sounds smoother and more tonal, like if, if an LS or LT bass to the GM small block is like a guttural, kind of a baritone or a bass. This is a, is not, it's not necessarily a soprano, it's a tenor, where it has a smoother, more tonal

• 58:18Matt Farah?

  a song to it. It's not just like it's like, it's got a more, a better tone and more even tone.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  It's not different from like a GT? Because I think for me, the Mustang GT, the standard Coyote engine is very deep. Like the cylinders sound like they're exploding very far away from each other, especially, you know, at below 3,000 RPM.

• 58:39Matt Farah?

  No, this is, this is more like the Ford GT. Where you get more supercharger wine.

• 58:49Matt Farah?

  And the sound is more even.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 58:52Matt Farah?

  Um, with this motor. Uh, it's, I, oh, speaking of sound, I, I, I blew sound at Lime Rock. Lime Rock now has a noise meter.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  That makes sense.

• 59:02Matt Farah?

  So I was running a few laps and they were like, listen, you're at a hundred and eight decibels at the meter and the limit's like 90. And I was like, all right, well, and they're like, you can't run anymore. And they're cool, man. Them guys are all right. I was like, look, let me, let me make an attempt. It was just us. We rented the whole track. You know, it wasn't like it was a track day, you know? So I was like, let me, let me make an attempt to.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  To lift.

• 59:30Matt Farah?

  Well, I, I go, let me see if I can put the car in track mode and then knock the exhaust back to quiet manually, which you can.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 59:40Matt Farah?

  Uh, now over 5,000 RPM, it opens anyway.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 59:44Matt Farah?

  So it forces it open, right? But I go, all right, well, this thing is very powerful and Lime Rock is not that big of a track. I go, I, I bet I could have a good time and give, you know, I'm giving people rides. So I, I was like, what if I, uh, I'll go track mode, quiet, and I'll short shift at 4,500 RPM. I'm probably making about 550 horsepower at that, at that RPM, you know? And peak torque is, I think, in like the, the threes or fours. So it's like, eh, it's all right. Um, so, you know, it's, I'm only hitting like 128 instead of 145 down the front straight.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Miles per hour, not decibels.

• 1:00:25Matt Farah?

  Deci, yeah, yeah, decibels. No, but I didn't, I didn't, but after that I kept it under, I kept it at 90.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:00:31Matt Farah?

  Um, so I was able to finish the day. So, but if you're, you know, if you're, if you are planning on going to track days and do I have a shot of the rear of the car? I don't even, I, I think I didn't do a good job. The exhaust is kind of funny shaped. I may not have had a, I may not, oh, have I? Oh, what a silly, oh, there, it's, it's a little too dark. It's a little too dark, but the exhausts are, they're, they're square and they're vertical. And so I don't really know what you could do to like put an additional silencer or something for, I like, you know, you, you may have an issue going to track days that are metered.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  You gotta have that crazy curved pipe, you know, it slips over.

• 1:01:10Matt Farah?

  This, this, this, when you're on it, this is a fucking loud car.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Matt Farah?

  Um, it sounds, I think it sounds great, but it's just, there's a lot of noise there.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Anything that's 800 horsepower, that's not electric is loud.

• 1:01:21Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  At, at speed. Turbocharged Porsche, whatever, like they all just to flow that much air.

• 1:01:26Matt Farah?

  But, um, you know, and, and the steering, like a, like a, like a, you know, a regular Dark Horse, um, because this one didn't have the track pack and I asked them to do a more road focused alignment, um, it really tracked nice. It, but, um, a couple of roads in Connecticut and a couple of roads in New Hampshire had, were really run it out.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Matt Farah?

  And boy, did it, it, it darted all over the place. I mean, it does have 305s. Yeah, 305s front, 315s rear, so.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56Matt Farah?

  Um, you know, there's a limited amount you can do, but I, but the last Dark Horse I drove had a track alignment on it and was so darty. This is like, at least showed me that it's possible. And I'm telling you, like, the ride, the space, you know, the, the practicality with the tray, the cup holders, the, the, where the ports worked, like, just like the way stuff worked. And like for real, like now that everything is just this big double screen, everything's the big double screen. The M2 is the big double screen, the Mercedes. Hyundai's, everything's a big double screen. And so, you know, if you're comfortable in the seat, like I drove during a leg at night,

• 1:02:38Matt Farah?

  coming back from somewhere at night, and you know, you dim everything down and what's the difference between this and a fucking M8? You know, if it handles well and it's comfortable and you're just looking at screens like.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  That's true. And by the way, the M8 from the back, from the B pillar, basically to the back looks.

• 1:02:58Matt Farah?

  Looks awful.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Very much like Mustang.

• 1:03:00Matt Farah?

  You know, and, and that's like 70, $80,000 more than this, but I drove both in, I drove an M8 competition at Lime Rock two and a half years ago, and this, this is more fun around the track. This is more lively. It, it, it responds better to, to inputs and that's not to shit on an M8 directly, but, but like, um, cause that's all wheel drive and that they, you know, they do some other things that this doesn't do.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  I think the Mustang, I think, has been hitting a home run since 05.

• 1:03:28Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  06, like they've been, they're good, they're good track cars. They're fun. They're pretty reliable. The engines have a huge aftermarket, but I've, I've said for a long time, they're great GT do everything cars.

• 1:03:40Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  I see, I see way more Mustangs around this town than I do Camaros. And I think Camaro is a great chassis, blah, blah, blah. We've been down this road, but like it's such a good do everything vehicle and you can make all the power in the world with a blower on it.

• 1:03:52Matt Farah?

  Yeah. And like the last Mustang I drove before this admittedly was a GTD. And so that thing is so huge that to go back to a Mustang that's effectively a normal size, you go, oh, thank God. Even though a Mustang is still, it's still a big car. It, it's still a big car and on some New England roads, it does feel like a really big car. I drove up Mount Washington. You, you can't fu, you cannot believe they race on that road. To watch like Travis Pastrana's Air Slayer video from 2021 after driving up that road, I could not believe it.

• 1:04:35Matt Farah?

  That road is so shitty. I mean, the view is beautiful, you know, it's, it's like a mini Pike's Peak.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:43Matt Farah?

  But the quality of the tarmac, the, it's, it's graded so badly. It's a piece of shit, this road. Uh, you must be correcting a thousand times a second just to stay on this goddamn thing. Pike's Peak, I, I don't, I don't want to call Pike's Peak easy, but by comparison, these two roads are like, it's like a joke.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  The Pike's Peak Road in terms of it's, uh, like how level most of the tarmac is.

• 1:05:11Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  With the exception of the, the upper section.

• 1:05:13Matt Farah?

  Upper bit.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Frost heaves.

• 1:05:14Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  It's really good.

• 1:05:16Matt Farah?

  This is.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Tarmac quality, the banking, everything, it's very good.

• 1:05:18Matt Farah?

  This is all bad.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:05:20Matt Farah?

  I mean, we're going to go up it on this event, you know, the reason I was doing this, I was scouting our new event, the New England 600. It's going to be in May. The roads are really cool, but you know what's different, going to be different about this event? Um, they're still going to be great roads, there's still going to be a great track, but everything's a little closer together because New England. It's not like Arizona or Colorado where you got, you have to have a big transit because there's just nothing there. Everything's a little closer, so there's a little more time to like explore the towns. So you have like, you'll have a half day to like explore Kenny Bunkport and Woodstock, Vermont, both of which are really, really cool places. And the drive is only like two hours instead of being four, but it's really beautiful. Um, Mount Washington was, was really beautiful, even though the road was, you just, I have

• 1:06:04Matt Farah?

  an entirely new respect for people who race up Mount Washington because that's, I drove it at, you know, most cars go up it at like 15 miles an hour. I mean, literally 15 miles an hour. I got stuck behind a couple of cars going up it and then I would, you know, make myself a gap and try to go like a little quicker. And by that I mean 40. You know, four, in that Mustang, 40 or 45 is flying up Mount Washington. Um, it's a private road. It's a, yeah, Mount Washington Auto Road, that's it. And just, it's just like, it's just not a well, like made road. Like it's, you know what I mean?

• 1:06:49Matt Farah?

  It's just not flat. Like, yes, this, in this particular photo, it looks all right, but it's just not, it's not really even. It's not, it's got weird cracks in it and weird, uh, like whoops and like, like you can kind of see on the left there, right as the road bends in, that it goes like up then down a little bit on the left.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:10Matt Farah?

  Like, it's just not, it's, it's a private road. So I don't think it was necessarily built to like the standards of Pike's Peak or something. So.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:07:21Matt Farah?

  It's a great thing to do in a car. I mean, to go up it, it's a beautiful view. You can definitely hike around up top and spend a half hour up there. Like it's, it's a cool thing to do. And that hotel, um, which is, uh, the Omni Mount Washington is like got a real fucking shining vibe to it. I really like it. Um, the views are amazing and I mean, you can just see.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, racing.

• 1:07:43Matt Farah?

  The consequences are extremely high if you fuck up here, but, um, to wa, you go, you drive it and you watch Travis, you go, what the fuck dude? Like so nuts. You can't believe it. So that's awesome. And then, uh, and then we did the Hudson Quattro Cento. The Catskills in the fall, just the best.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Matt Farah?

  Um, I really, the roads we were driving were so good. Um, we had such a nice time, went to Willzig Manor, you know, the famous.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  You guys get to drive on the track?

• 1:08:14Matt Farah?

  Oh, yeah. Oh.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  What is that place like? It doesn't, I mean, it's, it's what all of us dream about if we won the lottery.

• 1:08:20Matt Farah?

  It's the best house I've ever been to anywhere on the planet. You know, Alan Willzig is a, is a crazy person. I'm, I mean that in a good way. And he built a, um, I didn't, I didn't take any photos of it on the track there, but you can just Google Willzig Racing Manor and there's, uh, uh, plenty of photos and there's the aerial view. Um, you know, this guy, he built a fucking racetrack in, in his backyard. Um, you know, his quote backyard is like a hundred acres um in upstate New York, but um he actually lives there. Here's the photo. His house is up on the on the top right. Uh, that's the bar. That's the car barn. Yeah, that's his house. And then he's got the little lake house just at the four o'clock. Yeah, there. That's little the little lake house.

• 1:09:04Matt Farah?

  And then you can't really see from the photos um the the the car barn, which is the bottom right, and the lake house are below the track. The track is up on the top of this hill.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Oh, I see.

• 1:09:18Matt Farah?

  And and the road from the car barn to go up to the track. Yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  That's like, it's like thirty feet.

• 1:09:25Matt Farah?

  It's a big hill. The track has eighty-five feet of elevation.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Pretty good.

• 1:09:29Matt Farah?

  It's a lot. It's a lot. Uh, so it's I think it's one point two miles. Um, and it's it's really, you know, it's it's set up for that's the car barn. It's uh, it's set up for really lower, you know, your perfect car on this track is gonna be like a Lotus Xee.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:46Matt Farah?

  Or uh, Ariel Adam or something like that. Um, although on the in the Mustang, I hit a I hit a hundred and twenty-five or so on the front straight. We were running uh, we were running uh, counter clockwise.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  So you're coming out here?

• 1:09:59Matt Farah?

  Yeah, that's so that's a downhill.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:10:01Matt Farah?

  So that that that turn that leads on the front straight is almost, you take it almost like turns uh, two and three at Laguna. Or turn two and two at Laguna at the end of the front straight, bend around on the left, but it opens on to the front straight.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Geez.

• 1:10:15Matt Farah?

  That and then you have this double apex and it's hard to see, but that from from that white bit of paint, where the end of the pit pit out is to the top of the hill on the left is about a more for more left, more uh, the uh, up back, back, back there, where that other, no, no, on the track, there, that for that bit is about an eighty-foot rise. And then you come down the back straight and the end of that back straight is a fully uh, fourteen-degree banked corner.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  You can see it gets really.

• 1:10:50Matt Farah?

  That you really shoot out of. And then you go back up a hill to to bend around to the right. I mean, it's a really cool spot. And so there's a cut through, so you could run a figure eight or run, you could run in either direction and it's really insane. And so we actually got to drive it. People don't really get to go do that.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  That's really.

• 1:11:10Matt Farah?

  I I ran a lot of laps on it. I had a really good time. Um, that top, in the middle, the right-hand corner with the mouse is right there. That's the drift corner.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  I was gonna ask if that's even allowed here, because it's.

• 1:11:21Matt Farah?

  Yes, that's the drift corner. It ended up on Alan. Alan was standing there with one of those like a like a twenty-foot selfie stick and an Insta three sixty, and he got a good one of me doing a slide around that. Yeah.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Geez, what a trip.

• 1:11:34Matt Farah?

  Yeah, it's fucking crazy. And then he's got jet skis and shit on that lake. And he's got UTVs to go fuck around and it's the coolest. Just best, best life ever, right? So we got to do that. We get to run Lime Rock and it's always nice to go drive at Lime Rock.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, look at these colors, man.

• 1:11:51Matt Farah?

  Yeah, it was so red and yellow and uh, I got super sick the first day, so I was really fucking fighting, fighting disease the entire time. It was not, it was actually physically like a tough drive because I was really going through tissues like crazy and just coughing like crazy the whole time. The coast in Maine was great. That's Woodstock, Vermont.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  That's a good picture.

• 1:12:16Matt Farah?

  Yeah, but uh, I mean, just the colors and it was it was amazing. So I had a beautiful drive and and this car treated me really, really well. I I I do not have really any criticisms of it at all that would keep me from buying one as a consumer. I mean, really, I really wouldn't.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  I mean, uh, this will sound like a shameless plug, but I was on Doug's podcast about the second one I was on, Cars and Friends. And we were, it was basically just like, let's shop for Zach's E forty-six M three replacement. And where I landed, which would probably be top of the list, was a used uh, GT three fifty, or sorry, three fifty, like R or regular, because to your point, the reason I bring it up is basically this, you know, same shell and everything, like they just do everything so well. And they also do fun really well.

• 1:13:03Matt Farah?

  They do.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  Mustang, I think, for the money, probably had does fun and GT and daily stuff as well as pretty much anything on the market.

• 1:13:13Matt Farah?

  This was a really fun car. I I enjoyed it on the highway. I enjoyed it when I was puttering around. I mean, it it it really asked, you know, other than getting thirteen miles a gallon on this trip, it it asked very, very little of me um, in return. Um, so it it it was very, very well behaved the entire time I had it. So I I I expected it to be pretty good, but it was actually significantly better than I expected it to be, which is which is pretty cool. So you start to go, you know, maybe, and then you go, well, what else can I buy? I mean, you, yes, you can buy a Corvette Grand Sport. But I think, I think this is a better uh, road tripper than the Corvette. The Corvette,

• 1:13:57Matt Farah?

  uh, particularly the Grand Sport, you know, it's lovely, but this has a little more legroom. Um, this has more opportunity to like lean back a little bit. Um, it's got an easier um, you know, trunk to deal with. Um, if I was really gonna do a lot of miles, I'd rather be in this than a Corvette. Just straight up same money. Um, although the Corvette is gonna be, you know, faster on track and, you know, the mid-engine car is gonna turn in quicker, but it'll also be a little more nervous at the front, whereas if you're doing a lot of miles, this is more relaxed GT.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:14:30Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Great car, like great car. Really, really good. You don't, you notice, I noticed a little bit that I didn't have the carbon wheels. Um, the steering isn't quite, it doesn't fucking, it doesn't fucking go, you know, from when you're braking and turning into that. Really, it doesn't go quite as aggressively. The front tire has to work a little harder to achieve the same goal.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Compared to the one you had at P Cody.

• 1:14:54Matt Farah?

  Compared to the one we had at P Cody with the carbon wheels, but I'm glad I didn't have the carbon wheels, because there's a couple, you know, random potholes that could have potentially derailed my trip, you know, and and as that car was totally fine without it. Oh, there, you can see the weird square exhaust tips. Um,

• 1:15:13Matt Farah?

  they're uh, they're all.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  They're uh, taller than they are wide.

• 1:15:16Matt Farah?

  Yeah, they're almost like those shits that they put on fucking Harleys, like the old school style. What do you call them things like Fintail?

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, they basically look a lot like the taillights. If you take two of the taillights from the Mustang.

• 1:15:27Matt Farah?

  Pretty much.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  And then you drop them down where the exhaust is, that's what you get.

• 1:15:30Matt Farah?

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  A fusion of shape.

• 1:15:33Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Um, but uh, you know, I I I really have very few criticisms of it. It was a very, very, very nice car.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 1:15:41Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Uh, anything else you wanna throw out there, Zach, or should we go to the people?

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're at one oh eight, so let's go to the people and we can talk. Uh, I do, I got, I went on a Maserati launch I forgot about. We'll talk about that next show.

• 1:15:53Matt Farah?

  Let's save that for next show. We have, we have to, we're going, we're going away, so we're gonna have to do this thing where we do a lot of shows, so. Let's not, let's not blow eight loads on this one show, but let's instead go to the people. Patreon dot com slash the smoke and tire podcast. We love you guys over there. If you wanna watch the live stream of the show, ask us questions for it, get the show the day it is uh, release or the day it's recorded instead of waiting. Um, all these other good things, get extra show every month, get access to exclusive collabs and other things we did. Speaking of collabs, I brought my blazer uh, that we did with the Grotto on the Road and Track event.

• 1:16:32Matt Farah?

  The number of compliments I received from women wearing this blazer, dude, and and women that were on the event, uh, bartenders and uh, waitresses and people like, you know, catering staff, hotel staff. The number of compliments I got on this blazer is more than perhaps any other garment I've worn in a very long time.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  I remind Willow, and I had probably six or seven people like, this is really nice.

• 1:17:00Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  What is this? And I was like, it's the thing that you could have bought a month ago.

• 1:17:03Matt Farah?

  Well, we should do, we should do another one. I suspect that there will be another season for which a blazer is uh,

• 1:17:12Matt Farah?

  and I I brought it, I I wanted my dad to see it in person and have him uh, him evaluate, and he liked it very much.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:17:20Matt Farah?

  Yeah, he thought it was very, very cool. Yeah. Uh, all right, what do these folks have to say? Green Day Wu is in the house. Uh, question, what are some of the ways you've seen automakers save money by taking a feature away for the base model? Uh, I was working on a twenty twenty-one F one fifty Supercab. It would normally have four power windows. This was such a base model that had crank front windows and fixed rear windows.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:17:47Matt Farah?

  It didn't have a switch or even a crank handle. When I pulled the door panel off, it had a metal plate that held the glass in place. Uh, the track was still there, so if you took the plate off, the glass would slide down the track.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  I mean, window related, when Volkswagen went to using two buttons to roll down all four windows. Volvo now does it in the EX thirty. Hate it. They save whatever sense. It sucks.

• 1:18:12Matt Farah?

  That's not, that's terrible. Um, I mean, just the base model, hmm.

• 1:18:22Matt Farah?

  I mean, the worst is just, and I don't have a specific example handy, but when when they they build the hardware for the fucking better one and then they deactivate the thing just using software. So that sucks, but at the same time, if you know that, you can get someone to, who can play around with those things and has one of those, you know, dongle reader fuck with her things, you can, you can give yourself that feature back potentially. Um.

• 1:18:52Matt Farah?

  That's crazy, though, about fixed rear windows. I've not, I don't think I've seen that in a long time.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  People in the back don't get air.

• 1:18:59Matt Farah?

  Yeah, I don't drive a lot of like those like vinyl seated, you know, fleet trucks. But I bet that's where you find all the cheapness. Cop cars and shit.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  The thing like the spread of the cheapest F-150, the most expensive is some of the most remarkable of any model available.

• 1:19:15Matt Farah?

  Certainly like the Silverado, if you count the Escalade as the top end.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I'm saying you can go from fleet fixed window for $32,000 all the way to like King Ranch $100,000.

• 1:19:27Matt Farah?

  Hoofhearted, what's your worst story about being mechanically unsympathetic to a car? And how wrong did it go? Uh, we launched the like Aventador Roadster press car like 20 times in a row. Until the front diff blew in like 2013. Yeah.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  I forgot about that.

• 1:19:47Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Not in a row, but over the course of a day.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Over by LAX. Oh, man, I totally forgot about that. I'm gonna make that a phone call.

• 1:19:54Matt Farah?

  Yeah, it wasn't pretty.

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  It wasn't, but also.

• 1:19:57Matt Farah?

  But also.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Like launching the supercar shouldn't be able to do this.

• 1:19:59Matt Farah?

  Correct.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Matt Farah?

  That's the, I mean, that's probably the most. There's, I don't have a lot of like my own cars where I'm that unsympathetic to them. You know, I usually treat my own shit a little better than that.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  And we usually treat press cars, well.

• 1:20:16Matt Farah?

  No, like, look, we, however many launches we did with that car. All of them minus like the last two were for the video.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:25Matt Farah?

  Like, it wasn't like, it wasn't, even that was like not above and beyond by any means. I mean, I mean, there was like the famous alleged rental car race in which, you know, the car didn't make it out alive allegedly.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was trying to think like we don't clutch kick manual car, like we just don't, I don't know, we don't drive the cars in a manner we don't drive normally.

• 1:20:48Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  We drive our cars and press cars pretty much the same. So, uh, unsympathetic. I don't know. All my cars that I have driven the shit out of have somehow kept working until I sold them to other people, which is very surprising.

• 1:21:01Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Uh, we'll answer this question now, even though Zach will talk about it next time. Ali Danishvar, can the new era of Maserati keep the engineering and dynamic flair of the Ferrari era? Tease your full line drive.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  Of the Ferrari era, um.

• 1:21:22Matt Farah?

  I mean, the Ferrari era is what, 10 years ago? Is that what we're talking about? Quattroporte through, uh, you know, Grecale?

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  I think they, a month ago, I think on this show, I said there are some brands that should probably just fade away. And I was talking about Maserati. This is where we're discussing that their dealerships are not moving cars.

• 1:21:41Matt Farah?

  Sure.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  I will say that after the drive, I think they do deserve to still be here. But their price point might need adjustment.

• 1:21:50Matt Farah?

  Sure.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  But I, that would be the tease, I would say.

• 1:21:53Matt Farah?

  When we drove the Gran Turismo like two years ago, we were like, this is the best $125,000 car that it would cost you $245,000 to buy.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:02Matt Farah?

  I'm about to drive the new Gran Turismo. Did you get your hotel? Are you gonna, are you gonna do a couple of that?

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:07Matt Farah?

  You are?

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  We didn't book the hotels yet, but yes.

• 1:22:09Matt Farah?

  What are you gonna drive?

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  I asked them if they had a Grecale because I'm like.

• 1:22:13Matt Farah?

  We might as well just take Maserati's on this trip?

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  Basically, because it was recency bias. I was like, it was two days after the trip.

• 1:22:19Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  And I drove each one for like an hour on the, on the launch.

• 1:22:21Matt Farah?

  The Grecale, uh, Grecale Trofeo is fucking sweet.

• 1:22:25Speaker 01

  It's real, and it's also very comfortable and real quick.

• 1:22:28Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  So we could just have, it would be easy from a content perspective and maybe a booking perspective.

• 1:22:34Matt Farah?

  Sure.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  But if they don't have that, I'll have to see what else is around.

• 1:22:36Matt Farah?

  Grecale Trofeo might be the best driving car that absolutely nobody ever talks about or thinks about.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:22:44Matt Farah?

  But it is awesome.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a really fun, slightly bigger than a Macan.

• 1:22:50Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Which is good if you are, if you're, you know, have a family and have, uh, baby seats you need to put in the back and it kind of rips.

• 1:22:56Matt Farah?

  But like they're fucking fast.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  It doesn't, their cars do a lot more things well than I remembered.

• 1:23:01Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  Um, so that would be the tease I'll give you right now.

• 1:23:04Matt Farah?

  All right. Um, Dodge Durango Unchained, uh, with every watch brand jumping on the retro integrated bracelet trend. Uh, could faceted crystals make a comeback? Uh, clean examples of the crystal, Seiko's, self for a thou, self for thousands. Um.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  What's a faceted crystal?

• 1:23:25Matt Farah?

  It, when a, when a crystal, um, has facets, um, a geodesic dome has facets, a diamond ring, uh, has facets. Hannah has, Hannah has one of these. I got one for Hannah. The one on the, um, pretty much the, that one in the center. Uh, it's actually a video, the top one up, one to the right, that one, that's called a Seiko Lordmatic. I got one for Hannah for her birthday a couple of years ago. With, I think, I think faceted crystals are actually very cool.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:57Matt Farah?

  Um, and I think I would like to see a high-end watch brand do a faceted crystal.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:24:05Matt Farah?

  It's funky.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:07Matt Farah?

  Yeah. It creates a really interesting effect. Um, I think the Tolledano and Chan watch has a faceted crystal.

• 1:24:17Matt Farah?

  But I haven't seen a good like one that I want to buy for myself in a while. But Hannah does, does like, that's the one, uh, top left and wrist enthusiast, that. So you, there you, the, the back one, that one there, that's the Tolledano and Chan, uh, which is a magnet. That's the Magnus rocks that because of course he does.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  I think it works better here than it did on the round face watches.

• 1:24:42Matt Farah?

  Yes.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  It like, it almost zooms in on a certain part of the watch, which is cool, as long as you're not missing out on the rest of the watch.

• 1:24:50Matt Farah?

  Sure. Yeah, there's the Vario Futurist kind of looks like the Seiko a little bit.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  And the light refraction's red.

• 1:24:56Matt Farah?

  Mm-hmm. And then you have, uh, that, whatever this ren is, that's kind of tough to see with the. Uh, this is the Tolledano and Chan, which is a sort of a brutalist design. Really interesting. I can't wear it because it's, it's, um, it's, it's, it's like tilted. Like, it's designed to be worn on your left wrist, the way that it works. It, it's like, if you wear your, your watch like this, it angles the, the face back to you. I, it would go away from me on this one. But, uh, it is very cool looking. Um, I have, I happen to think that one is very cool looking. But I'm pro faceted crystal.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:33Matt Farah?

  And I think they should keep it up. Uh, deactivate cylinder firing in the West Bank is coming to our Miami show. What up? Time to Drive Festival Miami. Uh, you can get your tickets. Uh, if you are a TST patron, you can get a free ticket to our podcast within the festival. Uh, there's a code, uh, on our Patreon page that's good for 100% off. I, um, but yeah, I'm stoked. We got, we got a, I got a panel chat at the Concourse Club Friday. Live Smoking Tire Podcast. Fucking Scott Dixon.

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:10Matt Farah?

  Six-time fucking IndyCar champion. The guy's got trophy, this trophy wall is insane, this guy. Scott is very, very cool. I've met him before, but his, uh, his accomplishments are just crazy. He's gonna be on the Smoking Tire Podcast with us in Miami. And then, uh, I'm doing a panel chat with, uh, Felipe Nasser, endurance racing driver on Sunday. And then Zach and I are going, uh, Iguana hunting.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  We're gonna go help the Iguana problem.

• 1:26:39Matt Farah?

  We gotta control the pet population.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  They are an invasive species.

• 1:26:42Matt Farah?

  Yeah, uh, with Iguana Safari Tours.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:26:45Matt Farah?

  Going out, gotta do it. Delray Beach Iguana hunting. That's what's up.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  It's gonna be cool. It's the first thing I've hunted ever.

• 1:26:52Matt Farah?

  It's gonna fucking great. I cannot wait. So, uh, I look forward to meeting you too as well. Um, you're considering your first nice watch, thinking about an Omega Speedmaster Cappuccino for $5,000 to $6,000. I don't know about the cappuccino, but an Omega Speed, I'm wearing my Speedmaster today. I love my Omega Speedmaster and I think it is an excellent watch. Things to consider with a Speedmaster, not typically water resistant. So if you plan on, if you want a watch that you can do water, water sports in, I would consider one of the other Omegas. Like the Aqua Terra or the Planet Ocean or a Seamaster Professional, if you wanted to do that.

• 1:27:35Matt Farah?

  5600, uh, Speedma, uh, well, it could get you a Tudor, uh, Black Bay Chronograph as well. That's a lovely watch at that price point. Could also get you, uh, a Breitling Premier. Uh, or a Breitling, um, Super Ocean, which are both very cool. 5600 gets you a lot of watch. If you want to go used, the sky is your limit. All the Tudors, all the Paneris, all the IWCs. IWC Pilot Chronograph is also very cool and has some better, uh, possible better water resistance as well. But I do love a Speedmaster. I'm wearing mine today and not just because I knew you were asking.

• 1:28:20Matt Farah?

  Okay, um.

• 1:28:22Matt Farah?

  Granny shifting, not double clutching like you should. You've mentioned several times that Harris Jethro, Jack from Savage Geese are probably the most talented, quickest automobile journalist drivers. I think, to be fair, I think there's other that are up there. I think those guys are about the quickest, like, video folks. Like, Rob Holland is an automotive journalist. And I think Rob Holland would beat all three of those guys, or could beat any of them on any given day in a race.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I agree.

• 1:28:52Matt Farah?

  That's what I mean, not would beat, but certainly could beat.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  Tom, I'm sorry, um, Rob is primarily a racing driver, who has also written for people and made content. I think it's the inverse of, of everyone else.

• 1:29:02Matt Farah?

  Most of these other guys are journalists first and racing for fun. There's certainly a few people that are racing first and, you know, like, for instance, J.R. Hildebrand has written for us at Road and Track before. Um, Hinch has written for us at Road and Track before. I just met, um, just met Ryan Briscoe, uh, who was immensely talented. Um, Indy, NASCAR, endurance racing, race, the races, the, um, 4G TLM, uh, raced with Scott Dixon, as a matter of fact, in that 4G TLM. He was just our, our featured driver at this event, giving ride-alongs. It was a good time. He's a good sport. I liked him

• 1:29:42Matt Farah?

  a lot. Um, so, oh, the question. Can, do you think driving skills can be developed and honed, or is it more like athletic ability, where either you have it and you don't? A hundred percent training and development.

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Otherwise, driver coaches wouldn't exist, and you wouldn't see, any skill can be taught.

• 1:30:05Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  And then honed and perfected. Now, if you have, if two people have the, the same amount of instruction, I think there will be differences on how good each of them can get. There are plenty of people who've gone, I just didn't have it, whatever it is. But you can improve a huge amount from where you begin.

• 1:30:24Matt Farah?

  If you have the passion, if you have the, the, the, the, the work ethic, because it does take actual practice, if you have the money, because it, it, it really will take a lot of money to get good at driving from somewhere, um, you know, good hand-eye coordination, reasonably good athleticism, you can be trained to be a very high-level driver. Like, you could go race at the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona from effectively nothing and very little athletic skill, um, and not be the worst guy out there. Um, if you want to be great, if you want to be in a position where someone's paying you to race their car, you're gonna have to put in the extra effort, you're gonna have to have the extra

• 1:31:06Matt Farah?

  talent, you know, you're gonna have to have the extra something. Um, but if you ask Harris, Jethro, and Jack from Savage Geese, or, I don't know, someone like me, someone like Zach, someone else who's maybe like, half a, half a step, and by the way, I think on any given day, I could probably take Jack from Savage Geese, but I like him. I like him a lot. Um, but, um, uh, and he's younger than me, and he is very quick. Um, but, um, you can be, you, it's, it's practice. It's giving a shit and then practicing. And I think the fact that folks like us get to have that practice in so many different kinds

• 1:31:49Matt Farah?

  of cars, that's really where you can, where you can really get beyond someone else who can only practice in the car they own. If you did a thousand laps of a racetrack in one car versus a thousand laps of a racetrack in 50 different cars, you're probably gonna be a better driver at the end of the 50 cars. Just, that's just a guess.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  That's something we talked about, uh, with Marino Francidi. He's like, he likes to drive a bunch of stuff, and as he said, his, his palate for feeling cars is very good.

• 1:32:21Matt Farah?

  Mm-hmm. Reference 63010.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:26Matt Farah?

  Thank you. That's a Seiko.

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:32:27Matt Farah?

  I think. Uh, what's the absolute worst car in all the right ways? Meaning, a car that is objectively bad at whatever is its most redeeming feature? I mean, I believe that a Morgan three-wheeler, traditional one, not a Super 3, is, is, the things that make it bad are also the things that make it good.

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  I agree. Like, Isotta pops to mind.

• 1:32:51Matt Farah?

  Right.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Anything where the designers knew other cars existed. They went, yeah, I know cars have trunks and roofs, but I'm making the Morgan three-wheeler because it, it says something, it makes you feel something, it's weird, and that's the point.

• 1:33:05Matt Farah?

  So, the DeLorean, right? In order to have the gullwing doors, it has this flimsy-ass chassis, because it can't have a good chassis. If it did, the doors wouldn't work. That's why the difference between a DeLorean and a Mercedes 300SL is very, very obvious when you look at the cars. DeLorean doors go all the way down. 300SL doors stop here. Why? Because there's chassis there. So, you know, you, you can't have everything. And so, that's, that's a real, a pretty good example as well.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:50Matt Farah?

  Cybertruck. A Cybertruck is bad at all the things that it's supposed to be good at.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:33:59Matt Farah?

  There is a, so I, you know, I saw Digger. Um, I really think, it supposedly bombed at the, uh, box office. I don't think that's deserving. I think it's actually quite a brilliant film. I really, I really enjoyed it. It unravels in a very fun way, and it's in Aratu, so it's like nuts. Did you see Birdman?

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:19Matt Farah?

  It's like, it's like insane, like that. Like, it, it, it, it makes absolutely no sense until it kind of does, you know? Um, but there is an unbelievable Tesla Cybertruck cameo in this thing that is fucking, just, just, this is fucking nice. It's a very, very good. If, if, I really recommend seeing Digger. I don't think, some people say you have to see in the theaters. I don't necessarily think that's true. Um, I saw it. I mean, maybe, I don't know. But I, I, I didn't, I don't think you do, but it's a very, very good movie. Home theater would be fine. If you got a quality home theater, I think you should get some good effects.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Need some sound.

• 1:35:02Matt Farah?

  You need some sound, a little horsepower. I wouldn't do it through air buds on an airplane. I'd probably try to at least get a home theater going if you could. But it's fucking, but there's an amazing, amazing, beautiful Cybertruck cameo in it. And, uh, fucking, you should look out for it. Suzuki Luki, my mom needs a new convertible. Turning 70 years old soon. She's been in a 2018 Audi A5 2-liter since new, and she had a SLK Mercedes before that. The only thing that comes to mind is a Lexus LC, but the prices are crazy, yeah. Uh, needs no sporting context, mostly local trips around SoCal. You could find

• 1:35:46Matt Farah?

  a lightly-used F-Type. I mean, I know we just talked about the sticky buttons, but you can get a, get a, you can get a new one.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  I said Z4.

• 1:35:53Matt Farah?

  Z4.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Z4, we drove a couple of years ago, and it was one of BMW's best cars of that year or that, you know, the last couple of years. That was a really nice thing to put around in.

• 1:36:03Matt Farah?

  Find a Z4 left on the lot.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:05Matt Farah?

  That's, that's a great call. That's a great call. Um, there's not, I mean, I do think the new, I, I drove the C53 Cabriolet.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:19Matt Farah?

  And I thought it was fantastic.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  That's a really nice convertible.

• 1:36:22Matt Farah?

  I thought it was such a nice car. Now, it was $101,000, so if your mom doesn't need anything sporting, maybe not the 53.

• 1:36:30Speaker 01

  Don't get the 43.

• 1:36:31Matt Farah?

  The 43 is no good. You need, you need six cylinders, not four.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  In a line.

• 1:36:36Matt Farah?

  But I don't, do they make something that's between those two? Can you get a, is there a 300? Or a 350, or something that has six cylinders in a C-Class Cabriolet? The, if you can swing it, the 53, that car is the titties. That shit was so nice.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  Well, if you can get a used one. I mean, she's probably shopping used.

• 1:36:59Matt Farah?

  I don't know. She's been in a 2018 Audi since new. I think she's buying new.

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  Let me see.

• 1:37:06Matt Farah?

  Z4 is a good choice. Also, I would look at the C-Class Cabriolet. CLE, maybe CLE53, is that it? CLE, CL, yeah, I think that's it. That's what I'd be looking at.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  Mercedes website, I hate, uh, oh, my God.

• 1:37:21Matt Farah?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  Too many things.

• 1:37:23Matt Farah?

  Anyway, that's the one I think.

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  Look at those.

• 1:37:25Matt Farah?

  Right?

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I think the C-Class, if she doesn't mind giant iPads, I think the C-Class, I think I'd rather drive that around than the Z4.

• 1:37:35Matt Farah?

  How about a Mustang GT? I mean, look.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  She might.

• 1:37:39Matt Farah?

  Might be into it. She might be into a Mustang GT. How about a Corvette? 70-year-old mom in a Corvette? Could be all right. Matt's cats are my Roman Empire. Um, I've really, I got a new cat toy that my cats have gone completely batshit over. It's like a wand toy, but it's a, it's a feather, you know, normal feather toy, like they've had forever, but it's got a little ball on the front of it that's like a rainbow. It looks like a mini tennis ball, but it's a rainbow. You just kick that out, and for some reason, the cats go absolutely batshit for this thing. It's called Go Cat, is the name of the, of the, the brand that makes it. But it's, yeah, the feather with the little rainbow ball

• 1:38:24Matt Farah?

  on top of it. Fucking crazy. Uh, what are some of your, how has the aftermarket not addressed this mods, uh, such as the BRZ and knee pads?

• 1:38:37Matt Farah?

  Oh.

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:38:39Matt Farah?

  Corvette dash pad covers, that so you don't have reflections on the windshield.

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, for the Mercedes SL, the early one, they need some sort of shade over the iPad, so you don't burn your hand trying to put the top down.

• 1:38:53Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  Or put the top up, I guess, it'd be hotter when the top is already down.

• 1:39:00Matt Farah?

  I mean, I like using, just in general, this isn't the answer to the question, but I like using a putter head cover for a metal shift knob, very much.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  I got one that, a tiny scrubber or water blaster for backup cameras. Like, you know, your backup camera gets clouded up and you gotta go back there.

• 1:39:18Matt Farah?

  What I just drove that had that.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:39:19Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  That'd be something expensive.

• 1:39:23Matt Farah?

  I just drove something that where-

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  Bentley super speeders?

• 1:39:25Matt Farah?

  No, that had no, it hadn't, was it something that had no rear window at all? And so the rear, yes, it was the Corvette ZR1X coupe that has no rear window. And it, when you go to wash, to wash the rear thing, it sprays the camera. I'm pretty sure it has, that's what it is, yeah.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, the aftermarket could supply that to older cars, or less expensive cars.

• 1:39:50Matt Farah?

  Oh, my Mercedes has windshield wipers on the headlights.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  Those are fun.

• 1:39:54Matt Farah?

  God, I love that. That's a fucking good one. Um, what else is the aftermarket not addressed? Remember when the aftermarket made the glue-on knob for the Ford must, for the Mach-E?

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:10Matt Farah?

  And then the Ford was like, oh yeah, just made that.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  That was clever. Whoever figured that out. It's like, there's a finger inside the little wheel that just touches the touchpad.

• 1:40:19Matt Farah?

  That was great.

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:40:20Matt Farah?

  The BRZ knee pads, man, damn, that's crazy. It's crazy that they came out with a new generation of that car, and that problem came back. Isn't that nuts?

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:30Matt Farah?

  Like, they fixed it, and they're like, you know what?

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Cost saving.

• 1:40:34Matt Farah?

  Fuck that. It's crazy. LL Cartier. Uh, I have, wait, wait, go back up, what happened? You scrolled down. I have a hundred series Lexus 470, the paint is crap, but it's mechanically very sound, with freshened, uh, mechanicals. Okay. Uh, I wanted to put some, uh, the seats of, the front seats have been cheaply reupholstered, but if I was to put some money into the interior to make it a cooler place to be, what are some ideas? The outside color is river rock green mica, and the interior is light gray.

• 1:41:12Matt Farah?

  Well,

• 1:41:14Matt Farah?

  Lexus, you could do the VIP Korean with the, with the curtains and the T-trays. You could go JDM with doilies on the seats, you know, like they would do, uh, that. You could go like 911 Safari, where you get like a school bus fabric, or a crazy outdoor upholstery fabric, and have the, have the interior done like that.

• 1:41:42Matt Farah?

  You could,

• 1:41:47Matt Farah?

  I mean, look, you could just restore it to stock also. You could put money into it, just bring it back to stock. CarPlay head unit. Certainly, if you don't have that, upgrade your, upgrade your tunes.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  You could do, uh, like Starliner head, uh, or, you know, Star Sky headliner, just for, because now they're so cheap.

• 1:42:07Matt Farah?

  Dude.

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  And it'd be so funny if your, if your off-road vehicle looks like garbage, and you're like, yeah, but sleeping under the stars and the stars.

• 1:42:14Matt Farah?

  Hannah and I took an Uber to the airport, and it was a Kia EV9 that had an aftermarket Star headliner, and, bro, it, it looks okay, but if you touch it, like, clearly they've never rounded rolls. Like, if you touch it, you just feel all the lights. Like, in a Rolls Royce, it's sunken, it's behind the top layer. You can, you don't feel any of that shit when you touch it. This is like, oh, it's so janky. But yes, you could do a Starfield headliner, aftermarket.

• 1:42:47Matt Farah?

  You could also paint your car. Eighteen ways to leave your lumbar, that is superb. I mean, that's really, really good. Uh, on a manual transmission, why is there only a lockout to prevent going into first at high speed? Is there? I don't, I don't know.

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  I don't know if there's a lockout, or you can just tell that the transmission doesn't really want you to do it.

• 1:43:08Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  I say that having done it once.

• 1:43:10Matt Farah?

  Um, he said, shouldn't there be a lockout for second gear as well? Because a two through, a five to two shift is probably more likely to cause the damage.

• 1:43:21Matt Farah?

  There, I could, I could see a possible, because look, they have lockouts for like the seven speeds now? For, not now, but they stopped making them, I think, but, but the seven-speed Porsche, you can only get into from fifth or sixth. So you wouldn't accidentally end up there in the four-five shift.

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  Which is very smart, because, because, and I think that actually highlights the, the point that, um, this person's making, or rather, the answer is, when you're throwing to the right, because you're in an American left-hand drive car, you're heading towards that seventh pocket. So they locked it out because you could get lost on your way to the third and fourth channel, the fifth and sixth channel, so they lock it out. I think the, the reason there's no lockout for first is because when you're going from four to three in 99.9% of cars that aren't like dog legs, you're just going straight up. And if you've driven the car for more than two minutes, you know that you just go upward. You're not going across from like, you know, six to, to third. Like, I think that's the thing, is no one's ever shifting like that.

• 1:44:23Matt Farah?

  Yeah. I think there isn't any, like, engineering reason that you couldn't have a lockout. I mean, in theory, you could have a lockout in any gear for which a mechanical over-rev would be a problem, right? In theory, but it adds complexity, that's a mechanical servo, it's something that could break. You know, it's, it's, it's just another thing to add cost and complexity to the car. And if you're driving properly, you're not, you, you, you, five to two shouldn't really be an issue.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  Or, yeah, or where people are trying to go, you know, five to four, do the overshoot to two, not that often. It's probably just one of those things where engineers, car companies will only solve the problem if it's frequent.

• 1:45:09Matt Farah?

  Like pervasive.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  If it's pervasive, so if it's not really happening that often.

• 1:45:13Matt Farah?

  Or if they're forced by law.

• 1:45:14Speaker 01

  That's also true. Um, so it's just not happening enough to warrant it.

• 1:45:21Matt Farah?

  Man in the shit box, god, do I love that, that's very good. Can you scroll down, please?

• 1:45:29Matt Farah?

  Recently rented a Mercedes GLE with a capacitive slider on the steering wheel as the volume control. Truly awful. Uh, what are some of the best or worst volume controls you've experienced?

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  Golf R has that same thing.

• 1:45:43Matt Farah?

  Yeah, there's a, the, the capacitive across the board is the worst, for sure. Um, you know, a knob is the best, a scrolly wheel is probably the second best.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54Matt Farah?

  Thumb scrolly wheel on the steering wheel, pretty good.

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  That's my, I prefer that over a button on the wheel all day.

• 1:46:00Matt Farah?

  Scrolly wheel on the-

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  Because I can move it more quickly. I hate having to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

• 1:46:03Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  And then if you have the capacitive, if you ever have to like swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe with your left thumb, it takes an hour, you know? You get pulled over, and the cop's like, turn your music down, like, I'm trying, I'm trying.

• 1:46:12Matt Farah?

  That shit is trash. That's not good at all. Yeah, that's no good at all. Um, you know, anything with a regular knob is good. Um, last one, and then we will, uh, call this a show and save the rest for the rest of this week. Doug Dimadome. I hope that's a real word, your real name. Um, located in, where do you think that is? NWI?

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  Northwest Indiana?

• 1:46:37Matt Farah?

  North Wisconsin.

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:46:40Matt Farah?

  NWI.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Maybe North Wisconsin, I'll Google.

• 1:46:43Matt Farah?

  I daily a Subaru Outback Wilderness and have a, uh, NC Miata for the weekends in the summer. Six-two, stocky, I'm starting to feel a little over the Miata. I have 25 grand, what makes the next step? Is the 86 the logical upgrade, or would that be too similar? Uh, I've also been looking at the 370Z and the EcoBoost Mustang.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  Northwest Indiana, most commonly. So, that informs our choices for you, um, although it's cold there and northern Wisconsin.

• 1:47:13Matt Farah?

  Yeah. I mean, look, the, the 86 dynamically, and from a space standpoint, does feel like a little bit of an upgrade from the Miata.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It is a much more usable car.

• 1:47:27Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  I think it's so good, it's so many things, other than being fast in a straight line, but it's equal with the Miata in that regard. I think it's just, it's a very livable car. You can put the seats down, the rear seats down, and put big shit in the back.

• 1:47:39Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  You can't put anything in the back of a Miata. I had one. It's like, one carry-on, I think, maybe, at best.

• 1:47:47Matt Farah?

  So that, I mean, that is what I would do. I mean, a 370Z, uh, to me, in 2026, doesn't feel like much of an upgrade from a, a better-conditioned 86, to me. Uh, if you can stretch to like a new Z, maybe so, but not, not so much with the NA engine.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:07Matt Farah?

  EcoBoost Mustang is like, will feel much different from your, um, Miata. It'll be a much bigger car, it'll be a much softer car.

• 1:48:17Matt Farah?

  I don't think you'd find it dynamically that exciting for too long.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you like, if you enjoyed the Miata, other than it's the, the size of the interior, I don't think you'll like the, the driving attributes of an EcoBoost Mustang are so different from a Miata.

• 1:48:34Matt Farah?

  I mean, look, 25K is Corvette money. Gets you a nice C6 LS3 car, you know, it'll have some miles on it, but you'll have plenty of room, it'll have plenty of speed, big trunk, and it'll be-

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  Parts are made next door.

• 1:48:48Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah, and it'll be much cooler than, than your other real choices. I mean, the, the 86s are really nice little scalpel cars. Um, Corvette's a little more of a hammer, but same, same kind of vibe, you know, front, mid-engine.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  Corvette feels like a big Miata. Like, truly, steering ratio, performance, all that stuff.

• 1:49:08Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  Just with a big engine in it.

• 1:49:09Matt Farah?

  So, that's probably the next bump for me.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:12Matt Farah?

  Uh, that's our show. Thank you patrons for asking such excellent questions today. Thank you to everybody else for listening. We're recording live shows all week, so stick around, and, uh, we'll see you on the next one. Bye.