“On the Road” With Matt Farah

“On the Road” is a podcast produced by JC Whitney. We bring you interviews with a cavalcade of figures from across the world all united by one thing: their undying love of all things automotive. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Angel Sala-Belen catches up with Matt Farah at Westside Collector Car Storage (WCCS) to talk about all things car collecting in LA. Matt dives into how he launched WCCS to tackle the space crunch for car enthusiasts on the West Side, offering a secure haven that not only protects but also inspires collectors to grow their collections. Beyond WCCS, Matt runs the popular YouTube channel “The Smoking Tire,” where he dives into reviews of everything from high-end exotics to your everyday rides. He also shares his laid-back philosophy on car collecting: it’s all about driving and enjoying these machines, not just keeping them in pristine, untouchable condition.

Angel Sala-Belen: Hello and welcome! I am your host, Angel Sala-Belen, and today we are joined by Matt Farah. So, we are in your shop.

Matt Farah: Yes, Westside Collector Car Storage (wccs.com). High-end storage, care, and concierge for collector car owners. Yep, and I built this shop because I have a problem.

Angel Sala-Belen: Can we talk about your problem?

Matt Farah: I have too many cars and, living on the West Side, there’s not a lot of space. You know, even if you’re super rich, which I’m not, you can’t buy space on the West Side. So, I started this business for people who wanted to live in Playa Vista, Playa Del Rey, Venice, Manhattan Beach, or one of those areas and collect cars but didn’t have anywhere to keep them.

Angel Sala-Belen: So you identified the void in the market.

Matt Farah: I was the void in the market. And now I’m an enabler. Some of those people then buy more cars once they find that it’s safe and trustworthy to keep them here. And then they get more and more cars.

Angel Sala-Belen: Matt already started off a little bit talking about what he’s doing now in the automotive world. He does have a YouTube channel, The Smoking Tire, and on that YouTube channel, he gets his hands and his feet on some of the world’s most sought-after vehicles.

Matt Farah: Yeah, and also some terrible ones. Some of the least sought-after vehicles.

Angel Sala-Belen: Let’s talk about the terrible ones.

Matt Farah: Most of them aren’t that bad. Most of them are pretty decent, but there’s some not-so-great stuff.

Angel Sala-Belen: What’s not great on your scale?

Matt Farah: Well, there are cars that are just not that interesting. I mean, you go out and you drive a Corolla or something; it’s not that interesting. Or a minivan. Not that there’s anything wrong with those cars; it’s just not like The Smoking Tire is an enthusiast thing, so enthusiasts aren’t going to care. Pickup trucks, stuff like that. And then there’s great stuff—super exotic stuff—but then there’s also affordable performance cars. Our meat and potatoes are cars that are reasonably affordable. Your GR Corollas, your Mustang GTs, your Corvettes. Stuff where it’s like, “I might want to buy that. Let’s see if it’s good.” That kind of thing.

Angel Sala-Belen: Like a real attainable thing for most Americans, I would say.

Matt Farah: Sure. And we do exotic sports cars as well. You saw the McLaren that I’m driving this week is downstairs. I mean, that’s awesome, and I’m not going to be like, “No, I don’t want to drive a McLaren this week.” I do, but what the audience wants is stuff they can reasonably afford.

Angel Sala-Belen: Right. Yeah, so the Porsches and all of that—most of us can’t afford it.

Matt Farah: Right. Our meat and potatoes are stuff people can afford, and Porsches. Porsches are very popular in Southern California. Porsches and Southern California go together really well because they’re really usable. You can drive one every day to work, drive it in the canyons, drive it to the track. You can do a lot with a Porsche. I sort of snowballed with the Porsche thing. I became the guy who’s driven every Porsche, and once you are that guy, then anyone who wants a Porsche, because there’s so many of them, comes to you. They go, “I’m looking at the 991.2 GTS, but I’m also looking at the 997.1 GT3, but I’m also looking at the 992 Turbo S. What do you think?” And you just go, “I don’t know.”

Angel Sala-Belen: Right. Do you want the one that has 200 lbs less because of carbon fiber or…

Matt Farah: Right. What ends up happening is I can come back to them with a couple of questions that will, in a totally binary way, figure out what their values are for that car. It’ll make the choice for them. And then what happens is, even though they’ve tried to ask me a rational question, when you go back and apply reason to their choices, you learn that there is no reasoning behind their choices. People will go, “Should I buy a Porsche 911 GT3 or a BMW M5?” One is a two-seat, very high-performance, track-focused sports car, and one is an autobahn-burning luxury sedan. And I go, “Do you need a back seat?” It’s a real easy question. Because if you want a high-performance car and you don’t need a back seat, you have to make a lot of compromises in order to have a back seat. The car will be more compromised than a two-seat car. And then you learn right away that they don’t actually care. They’re not choosing these based on needs. It’s just like, “Well, I like the M5, and I like the GT3.” And I’m going, “Well, why can’t you choose between this huge sedan and this small sports car? And you’ve come to me to choose for you, and you don’t know what you want.”

Angel Sala-Belen: People don’t usually know what they want until somebody comes and tells them what they want.

Matt Farah: No, what they want is to be told that the thing that they want is right. That’s what they want. So, as long as you don’t come back to them and say, “No, that car sucks,” then you’re alright. Then you can just let them fly like a bird. I say, “Whatever choice you buy, you keep it at Westside Collector Car Storage, and that’s what makes you a winner.”

Angel Sala-Belen: Yeah, that’s right. I’m going to pick the car that fits on this.

Matt Farah: Yeah, right. 6,000 lb maximum. That’s it. Let’s go.

Angel Sala-Belen: So, out of all of these cars you’ve gotten your hands on, have you amassed a collection of cars?

Matt Farah: Yeah, between my wife and me, we have like nine cars.

Angel Sala-Belen: Out of those nine, do you have a favorite?

Matt Farah: I mean, the thing is, they’re all different. Not everybody does this, but in my car collection, I’m constantly finding a little hypothetical niche to fill, a little hole to plug. What if I want to drive to Palm Springs for a weekend? What if I want to do this event? What if I need to do this? And then telling myself that it’s okay to buy a car to fill that niche. So, it’s like there isn’t necessarily a favorite because they’re each good for these different types of things.

Angel Sala-Belen: Yeah, like I’m not going to wear these shoes to go hiking.

Matt Farah: Right. So, it’s that kind of thing. They spread across themes. I like manual transmissions, typically naturally aspirated engines, and most importantly, the things that I buy. If I review a car, I try and put myself in everybody’s shoes. When people want to know what I buy, because I’m the guy who drives everything, what I buy and what you should buy are not the same thing. I want you to be happy, and if I just tell you to buy the thing that I want to buy, you might hate it.

Angel Sala-Belen: Well, you’re not wearing the same clothes, you’re not dressing the same, you know, obviously not picking the same ways of life, so why would you pick the same car?

Matt Farah: Right. Well, you should live exactly like me. Everyone should live just like me. But I have a Lamborghini Countach. That’s the game over, right? If you’re talking about a guy in his early 40s collecting cars, that’s it. There’s nothing above that. Maybe an F40 or something, but even then, I’d argue the Countach is more dramatic than the F40.

Angel Sala-Belen: Do you have a Miami Vice outfit that you wear with your Countach?

Matt Farah: No, when I drive that car, I try to dress as schlubby as possible. It’s mesh shorts, flip flops. It’s Sandler-core is how I dress driving that car.

Angel Sala-Belen: It’s the move.

Matt Farah: Yeah, mainly flip flops because I have to take my shoes off to drive it. The pedal box is really small, and I have big feet. Not because of dirt, but literally my feet won’t fit in the pedal box. It’s meant for little Italian people, so it’s this wide. Not all Italian people are little, but. I have a Porsche 718 Spyder, Boxster Spyder that I put a hot rod engine in. We took the engine out and put in a 4.5-liter high-compression racing engine. It’s insanely fast. It’s a Porsche engine, but it’s bored, it’s stroked, it’s high-compression, it runs on race gas. We did shorty gear ratios. It’s just stupid fast. It’s fantastic.

Angel Sala-Belen: All the sounds that you’re getting out of that.

Matt Farah: Yeah, like no burble tune. Yeah, it’s copying what this engine does normally. I have an Acura NSX that’s lovely—an older one. They’re great. I have a Ferrari 328, which is great because it’s got that old Ferrari vibe, but it’s new enough that it works properly. It’s not original. My NSX is very low miles, highly original, mint cherry. The Countach has some miles on it but is also very original. The Ferrari has been painted like four times. Nothing is original, so it looks fine. It’s not modded; everything’s just been replaced at least once. It’s the original color but not the original paint. It’s the original leather, and it’s got like 45,000 miles on it. What’s great about that is I can just use it as a car. I use it to go to the grocery store or run errands. It’s not just a special occasion car; it’s an all-the-time car.

Angel Sala-Belen: We were speaking to someone that had a mint collection, and he was saying that it was so difficult for him to get over the fact of taking it out onto the road. He’s like, “I can’t drive this thing. I have to put it in a trailer and take it to a car show. Then I get to enjoy it with people.”

Matt Farah: I can’t live like that. My NSX is mint, but I put paint protection film on it, and I will drive it. I’m not afraid to drive it. I did have a car, an E46 M3, that was so mint it presented as new. I would wash my hands before I drove it, and I’d only wear sweatpants. I wouldn’t wear blue jeans so I didn’t mess up the leather. After about a year, I realized this is dumb; I’m not enjoying this actually.

Angel Sala-Belen: I don’t have an M3. I have a 2001 E46. I love that thing. I drive that slow car fast. I love the feel of it, and I’ll just start ripping and tearing through those Virginia mountains.

Matt Farah: E46s are some of the best cars for drivers ever. It doesn’t matter which engine you get. I happen to think the 330 Coupe is really where it’s at. The spec E46 suspension you can do is just amazing. But I had this M3, and it was so nice I couldn’t drive it. Meanwhile, Zach, my co-host on The Smoking Tire Podcast, his daily is an E46 M3 with like 130,000 miles on it. He drives it every day. Here I am, babying this thing, not enjoying it. And the upside is like driving the car that my co-host is just dailying and parking outside by the ocean. So I thought, this is so dumb. Why am I treating this M3 better than a Countach? That’s stupid.

I have a lot of cars and am also testing other cars all the time. There’s only so much that I can drive any of the cars. If I put 2,000 miles a year on one of my cars, that’s a lot. But it’s not because I’m trying to keep the miles down; I just have so many options and so few places to go. So anyway, my newest car is a 1991 Bentley Turbo R. I’m very excited about it because the lease on my wife’s car is up, and we need something to drive until her new car comes in. That was a hole I found. I didn’t just lease another car. The electric Macan is coming out in September, so I had to buy something to cover in the meantime. She has two weird JDM cars that she could be driving, but we needed a car to fill this niche.

The numbers on this car are great: 6 ¾ liter V8, one turbo, redline at 4500 RPM, 380 horsepower, 480 lbs of torque, three gears, column shifter, top speed 140 mph. With three gears and 4500 RPM, this thing will do 140 mph. That is torque, my friend. I bought it off a guy in my neighborhood who died at 93. He bought it for himself for his 60th birthday—one-owner car, had it for 33 years, 20,000 miles.

Angel Sala-Belen: You obviously have to mod that thing.

Matt Farah: I already modded it. I did the French market yellow fog lights, so it looks like a mafia boss named Jack is here to come murder you. It’s great. And I put Bluetooth in it; it needed Bluetooth. Besides that, it’s fine.

Angel Sala-Belen: Does it have anything in the market where you can kind of make it work to mod it up, like any kind of bolt-on things in the market that would match up?

Matt Farah: The stuff you would do to it is off later Bentleys. If you got the cylinder heads off a ’97 Bentley Turbo R, you could do that. In ’94, they went from a three-speed to a four-speed, so you could upgrade that. You could do a Gear Vendors overdrive or different final drives. You can’t do much in the way of wheels; there’s only one tire size that fits these cars, and they’re Avons. They’re so expensive—like 500 bucks a corner. What’s fun about it is cruising with the leather, wood, metal, and torque. I drove it to Vegas a couple weeks ago. It was the best.

Angel Sala-Belen: I bet it felt like you were just riding on a cloud.

Matt Farah: Yeah, it’s a hydraulic suspension. It’s sporting, but it’s like a Citroën. It’s really nice. The only thing I think it needs is possibly that four-speed gearbox for the overdrive. At 85 mph, you’re turning like 2400 RPM when it doesn’t need that at all. When you’re cruising around town, it upshifts at like 1800 RPM, so it’s like there should be another gear there. Obviously, Bentley figured that out eventually. But for what it would cost to do the swap, I don’t care. Am I going to save a little fuel economy?

Angel Sala-Belen: But like the experience.

Matt Farah: I have a lot of experience in my life. I don’t wrench. I don’t know if you guys know this—I don’t wrench; I just drive. I make videos. I create content. There are people who look down on me for not wrenching. I don’t care. Wrenching hurts me physically; I don’t enjoy it. I don’t get it. There are people who do—bless them. I will work hard at my job to pay them to do it. Also, I don’t want to get in a car and drive it fast when I’ve worked on it. I want a professional to work on it so I can go push the car and it’s good.

I’ve been starstruck, I suppose, by a couple of cars. It’s not like make-model. I’ve seen all that. You get used to stuff, so it takes something pretty weird and unique to make me go wow. But the Back to the Future DeLorean—the hero car post-restoration when it was revealed at the Petersen, up close—that was special. Back to the Future was a very important movie for me from a car perspective, a filmmaking perspective, and a childhood perspective. To sit in and experience the Back to the Future car was very important. Ayrton Senna’s Formula 1 car—when I got near that car, I got this warmth vibe that I thought was very unique to people who love cars and driving. Senna is the best driver who ever lived. Those two cars probably made me feel the most.

When I was five, my dad brought me my first car magazine, and it had the DeLorean on the cover. This led to Back to the Future. Most people who know about cars know it wasn’t a very good car, but that doesn’t matter to a five-year-old. To a five-year-old, it looks like a spaceship, which is part of a bit in Back to the Future where they pretend it’s a spaceship. Seeing the image of that car in the magazine made me realize that cars could be more than just transportation—they could be special. So there’s that. Then there’s my ninth birthday when my parents got me a go-kart. Now I’m driving, getting good at it, and I can go fast. So there’s that. And then there’s stuff like the first time I drove a Ferrari. There’s a bunch of those other firsts. If I had to go back to one moment, it would be the car magazine one. That was when I realized cars are special and more than just transportation.

You can find my car review videos at The Smoking Tire YouTube channel. You can find my podcast, The Smoking Tire Podcast, at youtube.com/thesmokingtirepodcast or download it on any podcast platform. It’s on all of them. You can read me every month in Road & Track magazine; I’m the editor at large. If you’re in Los Angeles and want the best, most thorough, safest place to keep your car, Westside Collector Car Storage in the South Bay and Playa Vista.