Donald Osborne, Live Special Guest! — The Carmudgeon Show w/ Jason Cammisa & Derek Tam-Scott — Ep 233
The Carmudgeon Show
Donald Osborne, Live Special Guest! — The Carmudgeon Show w/ Jason Cammisa & Derek Tam-Scott — Ep 233
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113:17
Brand
Jay Leno
Jay Leno is a famous TV host who’s also very into cars. People often know him from his car-related shows and interviews.
Term
guillotine
A guillotine is an old device used for executions. Here it’s just a joke/metaphor, not something related to cars.
Term
service bulletins
Service bulletins are instructions from the car maker to dealerships. They can show what work was recommended or how dealers were supposed to handle certain issues or updates.
Concept
VIN
A VIN is like a car’s fingerprint number. It helps confirm exactly which car you’re looking at and can be used to track its history.
Term
caught on smoke
“Caught on smoke” is a colloquial way to describe visible smoke coming from the engine bay, often caused by overheating, oil/fuel leaks, or electrical issues. It’s a red-flag symptom because it can escalate quickly if the underlying cause isn’t addressed.
Term
color dependent
They mean the car looks good in lots of different paint colors. Some cars only look great in certain colors, but this one doesn’t have that problem.
Term
understeers
Understeer means the car doesn’t turn as much as you want. The front tires slide first, so the car feels like it’s pushing wide in a turn.
Term
G-Force
G-force is basically how hard the car is accelerating or turning. When you corner or brake hard, you feel more “push” in your body.
Term
characterful
“Characterful” is enthusiast shorthand for an engine’s personality—how it sounds, how it responds, and how it feels under load. Two cars can have similar performance but feel very different if one has a more engaging exhaust note or throttle response.
Car
Volkswagen Golf
The Volkswagen Golf is a compact car that a lot of enthusiasts modify. In this segment, they’re talking about building a Golf with a much bigger engine than stock.
Concept
engine swap
An engine swap means putting a different engine into a car than it originally came with. People do it to change how the car drives or sounds.
Concept
air conditioning
Air conditioning is the system that cools the cabin. The speaker is basically saying: in hot places like Palm Springs, you notice immediately when a car doesn’t have it.
Term
fuel injection
Fuel injection is how the car gets gas into the engine. Instead of a carburetor, it uses valves/injectors to spray fuel more accurately.
Term
RPM
RPM tells you how fast the engine is spinning. If the RPM drops by “25,” the engine speed went down a little to stay under the limit.
Company
FIVA
FIVA is an international group for old cars. They help promote and support historic vehicles, and the episode says they’re much more known in Europe than in the US.
Concept
historic vehicles and their culture
This is the core mission statement the speaker attributes to FIVA: protecting, preserving, and promoting historic vehicles and the culture around them. In practice, that means supporting events, documentation, and community efforts that keep older cars on the road and in public awareness.
Car
Maserati 250F
The Maserati 250F is a classic race car from the 1950s. It’s the kind of car racing fans recognize because it competed in Formula 1 and helped define that time period.
Concept
smog regulations
Smog regulations are the laws that control how much pollution a car can put out. Older cars can struggle to meet today’s standards, which can affect whether you can legally register and drive them.
Concept
DMVs
DMV is the government office that deals with car paperwork. If it’s hard to deal with them regularly, it can slow down things like registering or organizing cars.
Term
oil slicks
An oil slick is when oil leaks out and spreads on the ground. If a car is leaving oil slicks, it usually means it’s leaking somewhere and you should figure out where.
Concept
car valuation
They’re estimating what the car is worth. The price usually depends on things like how rare it is and how well it’s been maintained.
Term
modify
To “modify” a car means to change it from how it came from the factory. The guest is saying he doesn’t do it just to make money or to chase trends.
Concept
cut three inches out of it
That sounds like the car’s frame was physically shortened by a few inches. That’s a huge change, and it can make the car less “original” even if it looks right.
Company
bring a trailer
Bring a Trailer is a website where car enthusiasts buy and sell cars through auctions. The speaker is using it as the setting for a real example of a dispute.
Brand
Corvette
Corvette is Chevrolet’s famous sports car. In this conversation, they’re saying Corvette owners have been doing a lot of the right documentation and preservation work already.
Concept
Pebble Beach
Pebble Beach is a famous classic-car event where collectors and experts show off rare cars. It’s known for focusing on the car’s history and how well it’s preserved.
Concept
license plate frame
A license plate frame is the little holder around your license plate. People sometimes treat it like part of the car’s identity, especially if it came from a particular owner or dealership.
Concept
color code
Car paint has an official code that tells the shop the exact color. If you don’t have that code, the repaint might not match the original shade.
Concept
come off of his price by 5,000 euros
The seller lowered the price by 5,000 euros. That usually means they’re negotiating, but they still want more than the buyer is willing to pay.
Concept
parts book
A “parts book” is like an official reference guide for the car’s components. If it’s matched to the car’s chassis, it’s extra evidence that the paperwork belongs to that exact vehicle.
Term
fenders
Fenders are the panels around the wheel area. They can be removed and put back on during prep so the car looks right and is ready for delivery or display.
Concept
cars and coffee events
Cars and coffee events are informal meetups where enthusiasts gather in the morning to talk about cars, share stories, and sometimes show vehicles. The speaker emphasizes that these events are about community and conversation more than “showing off,” and that the variety can be huge.
LIVE
Do you know who I am?
No!
Attention in the gate area.
There's a passenger who does not know who he is.
If he can identify him, please come forward.
That's exactly the, hold on.
This is the intro.
So keep telling, we don't know who this is.
He just broke into the studio.
Would you please introduce yourself, sir?
Hi, I'm not sure who I am,
but I'm really glad to be here.
Thank you.
And I'm Jason Camisa.
That is Derek Tam-Scott.
And this is the Carmage show,
which is driven by Hagerty.
Today our special guest is confused.
He's drunk because we bought him four bottles
of wine at lunch and he's now gonna introduce himself.
I am a great friend of Jason Camisa
and a new friend of Derek Tam-Scott.
And I am an automotive historian.
Yes.
Appraiser.
Yes.
Consultant director of the Audrain Automobile Museum
and the North American representative for FIVA.
Which we will discuss in a minute.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you don't recognize him already,
this is the esteemed, what's her name again?
Jay Leno.
Jay Leno.
No, you know him from Leno.
You probably know him from Leno stuff.
This is Donald Osborne.
He is always well-behaved,
except when he's in the Carmage in studio.
That's what it turns out.
Derek has a lot.
You're welcome for the opportunity
to be anything other than perfectly polished.
Yes.
Only on the Carmage in show.
I don't think he dropped an F-bomb yet.
Can you do that for us, please?
Farfagnigen.
Fuck off.
Is that a spin-off at last?
Come on, it's like a wedding.
Everyone knows that song.
You have to choose a different Edna James song
that no one knows any other Edna James songs,
except for that one.
Well, it says something I know.
Well, if you suggest a song, we won't know it,
because you're so much more than me.
Is that a mid-P-off?
No, I don't regret anything.
No, I don't regret anything,
except appearing on this show I regret.
You haven't appeared, you can't regret something
that you haven't, a guillotine.
You are regretting appearing on this show.
Think of a song.
Any song.
Any song that I know.
I mean, this is all made into the episode already.
What about Wave?
Wave?
Yes.
Like Katrina in the Waves?
No, no.
Jobim.
Frank Sinatra sang this song.
How insensitive.
It's a different song, but that's a real song.
Oh, sorry.
That's a Jobim song.
Yes.
Tall and tan and young and lovely
Sir either of you.
Sorry, I'm sorry.
The Donald of Eponema?
No.
We needed it.
Okay, hold on.
We could do a, this is the end.
What was the Frank Sinatra song?
And now the end is near.
And so we face the final curtain.
So this is the end of this podcast, isn't it?
How about, rather.
Uh-oh.
Lovely, never ever change.
Keep that breathless charm.
Won't you please arrange it cause I love you.
Just the way you look tonight.
Holy shit, we did well.
Okay, all three of us knew.
So for the record, Donald is an actual singer.
We are hypothetical singers.
Theoretical singers.
I think I've shattered my share of windshields
on a road trip.
That's an expensive habit.
You know that I have this talent.
I can hit any note badly.
All of them.
It's amazing.
Derek can vouch.
We've road tripped together.
We have not.
No, we have not.
You still have your hearing.
You have road tripped down to see me.
I have.
We've never road tripped together.
I think it would be dangerous.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So, let's not.
Anyway, our special guest today as we introduced
is Donald Osborn, also known as Donallo Osborno.
Because he's...
Oh, you didn't know that?
I would.
Thank you.
Oh fuck, I have two Attalo phones
in the studio at the same time.
It's a great adversity here.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
That's the one Italian phrase Jason knows.
No words and back.
No, I don't care.
Ah, there you go.
There might be Italian people listening to this
who would judge me for my mispronunciation of fangol.
Anyway, you are also a New York Italian kind of.
I'm New York and I grew up very near Little Italy,
Lower Manhattan.
And now you spend a lot of time in Italy.
I spend a time in Italy, Italy, big Italy.
It's a little Italy.
Fuck them, the real one.
The real one, exactly.
So typically when we see one Donald Osborn,
you are well-dressed and you have a bow tie
and you act like a grown-up,
that's not going to be the case today.
It is absolutely going to be the case today
because first of all,
you generally see me all dressed up
because I know I'm going to see you, Jason.
And because this is the first time I'm working with Derek,
I said, you know,
we used to have a bull shit button.
Thank God you really broke it from hitting it so many times.
I can't imagine.
No, I am actually thrilled to be here
for a couple of reasons.
One, to plug what I'm here to plug.
But the other thing is also to be with you guys
because you and I have had a great deal of fun over the years
when we run into each other around the world,
having a great time.
And I thought, why should Derek be left out
of the great times that we share all around the world?
You know, it's just not fair.
Miserable's company.
Let's make that motherfucker suffer.
For a sufferer.
You think I'm not sufficiently miserable by myself?
No, no.
Actually, I've watched this program a good bit
and I can see how miserable you actually are
having to be here.
So I thought, I'd save you a little bit
by sharing the pain.
Thank you.
You guys have this sort of-
You were a scholar and a gentleman.
Oh fuck's sake, it's going to be one of those.
You two actually have a lot of comment
because you both have this sort of affinity
for Italian cars and weird full vias
and weird strange cars that no one's ever heard of.
You have these things,
I didn't even know what you're saying
when you say the words.
You're like, oh, I was driving this 1953
insert name of car that no one-
Ewek Roadmaster.
Oh, okay.
Oh no.
You're also a bitch.
You make me look like a fucking idiot.
Now you and I have a great deal in common as well, Jason.
As a matter of fact, one of the things
that we have in common is right over my shoulder.
For the record, I was going to move the Ferrari out of the way
and you told me not to, why?
Because it is one of the cars
that I've loved more than any of the other cars
that I've owned.
I owned a wonderful 308 TT4.
I was the third owner of the car.
It was a super low mileage car, 29,000 miles.
When I bought it, it came with every bit of documentation,
including the cardboard hang tag from Continental Motors
in Illinois where it was sold new,
a copy of the check that the fellow wrote for the car.
That's cool.
And it also had a really neat bunch
of service bulletins as well,
because of course this is the time
when the Dino was the only Ferrari sold in America.
And so it actually had the service bulletin from 1975
when it showed the Ferrari dealers
how to put Ferrari badges on the Dinos.
Retrofit for all that.
So they could make them saleable instead of sale proof.
Correct, exactly.
Do you remember what your VIN was,
what your sharing number was?
I don't.
That's a look set up.
It'd be amazing if they were like neighbors.
What color was it?
Therein lies an interesting story.
But I'm hoping that the person who owns the car now
who is enjoying the heck out of it, I'm sure.
The car was Light Metallic Blue Azzurro,
Surro Metallicato with the Black Bada.
You don't like that?
No, I think it's wonderful.
The Black Bada.
I hate that I don't own it.
And a tan velour interior.
Oh, mega.
Yes, absolutely fantastic.
Although I found out after I bought it,
because I bought it because I love the colors,
but I found out that it was not the original color.
The car had been a color change.
It was something that actually I would have preferred.
It was Orometalicato with the tan interior.
Very, very, very gold, gold.
With that same color interior.
That's what Keith Martin bought, right?
Yeah, exactly.
That had 240,000 miles.
Oh yeah, this was not that.
Meaning that it did not catch on smoke when you bought it.
Because when I tested it on that car and it caught on smoke.
It didn't quite catch fire, but we did pull over
because we thought that was coming next.
Yeah, well, that is something that you have to
occasionally deal with when dealing with Italian cars.
Where Italian men, occasionally I just burst into flames.
That I can believe.
I definitely smoke.
Anymore, that's bad for you children.
No, no, no.
But it is something that, that 308 GT4 was a car
that literally put a smiley grin on my face
every time I drove it.
And just amazing, and I often would amuse people
and as do you, I'm sure, and as do you,
since you own that car.
With telling people that it is so much better a car
than the 308 GTB and GTSR.
Yes, people get so upset when I say that.
And I'm like, I know it's pretty,
but they drive like shit.
Oh, you're talking about the GTS and GTB?
Yes, yes, yes.
And the Ben & Brenner cars, yeah.
It sounds like the typical stuff that you hear
from like Porsche Cayman owners were like,
no, it's better than 911 for these 113 reasons.
And you're like, oh, you just have a complex, don't you?
And so everyone who has a GT4,
it's assumed that you actually have a complex,
but it's okay.
It'll be our little secret.
They'll remain persistently affordable.
And I could buy another one because I...
You better hurry up, because I'm doing everything I can
to raise the value of these cars by putting them in.
These cars, not the Caymans.
No, not the Caymans.
No, I want another GT4.
Yeah, they're a fantastic thing to be that car.
As well as you should, as well as you should.
It's a terrific looking car.
And it's also one of those shapes
that is not color dependent, which is very interesting.
Not red.
I would choose not red.
As long as it's not red.
It's a very funny thing.
I mean, it depends.
First of all, one that's red, sort of boxer paint,
red with black bottom, I think it's really terrific.
And I've seen a bunch of 208 GT4s that are red and idly.
I don't know why they seem to be more acceptable
than somehow a 308 in America and red.
But there are very few cars that I like in red.
And that's one of them.
But for that period of time, especially,
it was a period of silver, blue, black, green.
Pre-yuppie.
Exactly.
Before everyone thought of Ferrari had to be red,
which really arrived in the, yeah,
arrived in the 80s.
Rosso, of course so, as I call it.
Can you translate that from Italian for us?
That means red, of course.
But Corset is a different thing.
Of course, yes, of course.
But not on the racetrack.
To see, exactly.
Exactly.
Yes, I don't particularly care for those cars in red
and I cannot deal with the U.S. bumpers.
I can't.
I can't.
So to give Derek credit for a minute,
what he told me when he pulled up to my house
for a barbecue on what date?
February 28th, 2016.
He's weird like that.
And the quote out of my mouth.
Which will live in infamy.
Yeah, because it cost me a lot of money.
So what the fuck are you doing with that ugly white Ferrari?
First of all, it's not white, it's ivory.
Evolio Bianco.
Sorry?
Evolio Bianco.
Or Safari.
Evolio is an official name for this.
And I thought it was ugly.
And I said, what is your favorite part
of the way this car looks?
And you said the curves.
And I felt your head to see if you were febrile.
And it is actually, it's the very subtle curves on it,
but it's actually the way the under of the bumpers comes up.
You're a style, it's the same sort of general idea.
Or Kuntash.
Kuntash does the same thing?
Like in between the wheel base.
The way that they're.
No, I'm talking about on the overhand stage.
The overhand stage.
They come up to like a bullet.
Kuntash does do this one as a P400.
Periscope.
Really, really, really good.
The only Kuntash.
But there you are.
The opinions were flowing.
I realize something else actually.
I think this show is just going to be you and me, Derek,
because I just realized that my good friend, Jason Camisa,
completely insulted and completely dissed me
because he bought your 308 GT4.
I offered him the opportunity to buy my Delta Integrale.
And he said, oh no, I cannot have a car
that is so nice and so expensive.
I cannot do that.
No, no, no.
The fuck are you talking about?
First of all, I've never talked with that accent at all.
I never do accent to begin with.
No.
So what was the deal?
I have photographs of that.
I've got photographs of you standing next to the car.
But okay, I got four less money or thereabouts.
I don't remember exactly what you were asking for it.
But for similar money, I got twice as many cylinders
and four times the oil leaks.
Number one, you and half the driven wheels.
Also half the driven wheels.
So okay, I don't do, there are things vehicularly
that I don't do.
Speed, I don't do that.
Shut up, just acknowledge.
We work for an insurance company here.
I don't do turbos and I don't do all the drive.
Typically.
I love a Delta Integrale,
but I did not love the driving experience of that car.
I love the way it looks.
You were out of your mind.
Clearly.
Clearly he is out of his mind.
I listen, there are things that that car does really well.
They are not important to me.
Being a really good car.
Handling and balance.
Not important to me.
The balance understeers like a fucking Camry.
Which car did you drive?
I'm not mine.
Yours.
I don't think so.
And I've driven many of them.
So here's the reason why I didn't choose yours.
It was an eight valve early car.
I had already driven a 16 valve late car
and a 16 valve Evo.
And there was a spiciness to those cars.
But you don't do speed by your own testimony.
I do acceleration.
Ah, I see.
So he doesn't do speed, but he does acceleration.
And where exactly Derek does acceleration take one?
To slowness?
Yes, obviously.
To the braking zone.
To the braking zone.
I do cornering.
I do acceleration cornering.
What I like is G-Force and not so much speed.
I love a Delta, but they are acoustically almost absent.
By the standards of my cars, they are very quiet.
They're very smooth.
Those engines aren't the most characterful.
It's a weird thing to say about a Lempredi-Force owner.
It's incredible.
But they're not the most characterful.
Literally.
Hold on, wait, wait.
You and I share.
I've never actually heard of the.
You've also had a Volkswagen Scirocco 16 valve.
Indeed.
Yeah.
And you want to compare that 16 valve
to that fucking Lempredi 16 valve?
Yes.
And how do they compare?
Lempredi all day long.
Because you like to be broken down inside of the road?
You like an engine that's leaning forward
and into the back of the car in front of it?
Yes.
I don't.
In all honesty, to me, a Delta and a Garelli,
I love them.
I think they're great looking.
Some of the best gauges ever made.
But they don't.
They're not insane.
They're very, they're very.
Competent and symbolized.
It's a WRX.
Not insane.
This is a fellow who's owned more Jetta's,
Golfs and et cetera than anyone.
And they're not insane.
Okay. A Golf is insane.
On whose world?
I put a fucking VR6 into my Golf.
Okay.
And it's a cabrio.
Both of my Golfs.
And a 16 valve into my Rabbit.
Which is also a Golf.
In other words, you take a car, which is not insane,
and you have to make it insane by putting other engines
into it as opposed to an Italian car engineered
from the ground up to be perfect as it is.
You mean insane?
Insane.
Yeah, correct.
No, they just don't, that, joking aside,
that engine is too civilized for me.
The VWs are really, really long stroke.
They're very talkative.
They make some of the best noises in four-cylinder dome.
That one just doesn't.
Why did you sell it?
You didn't love it enough to keep it?
Oh, hold on.
Thank you, Derek.
I will explain that completely to you, Derek.
You're welcome.
I always loved those cars, and I wanted one.
I found that car at a friend's in Italy in Bergamo.
And the idea was I was going to buy it,
bring it back to the States,
enjoy it for a while, and then sell it.
The car was delivered to me in Monterey,
and I drove it for the month,
and I said, if I do not sell this car now,
I will never sell it.
And at the time, I lived in Palms Springs, California,
where you need air conditioning in a modern car.
The car had no air conditioning.
Air conditioning didn't come till the Evo.
I like him because he called the Integrale a modern car,
and it's 40.
You two are the same basic person.
Yes, I know.
It's really weird.
But yes, it is a modern car.
It's got fuel injection, and then, you know.
Like actual fuel injection, not even like CIS.
Shit, fuel injection.
I had two cars delivered to me
that August that I bought in Italy.
One was Delta Integrale,
and the other was a 1960 Fiat 500.
And you kept that one?
I kept it for a while longer, yes.
Yeah, I don't, but you've had an Integrale.
How did that happen?
Tears.
Yeah.
There we go, better.
Tears falling down from your face,
and money falling out of your wallet.
It was kind of a garbage example, and...
Had it lived in Japan.
I don't remember.
It might have.
Was that a problem?
Yeah, you know, everyone lives in Japan.
No, always one, Italian delivery only,
Italian owners, Italian service.
How about that 2.316?
Swiss is okay.
Swiss is okay.
Yeah, Swiss is okay.
Swiss is always probably the best.
Well, not always the best,
because they have those horrible low speed limits
in Switzerland, so you have to make sure
that the Swiss owner brought it down to Italy
to drive occasionally, yeah.
Yeah, there's also, there's some restrictions
from a legal perspective,
in terms of specs on cars in Switzerland,
so you sometimes don't get the coolest stuff.
The 205 rally was fuel injected there,
because Switzerland.
It's so funny.
I'm trying to think of a Swiss citizen
buying a 205 rally,
and actually keeping it in Switzerland.
Yeah, it's a very strange idea.
It's so on Swiss.
It would be a very young Swiss person.
Yes, okay.
Defiant Swiss.
Yes.
Oh, those Swiss rebels.
Swiss rebels.
It happens every once in a while.
I'll set my clock one minute late.
Oh, we cannot do this.
We're just going to piss off everybody with this episode.
You do know the name of the show.
Yes.
And that's one of the reasons also
that I was really dying to do this,
because I thought, Carmudgeon,
I was so angry with you for actually coming up
with that name, because I thought,
that is something that would have suited me perfectly.
Yeah, you could have had a whole career, Donald Osborne.
I could have.
Instead you're just a,
instead I'm just this thoroughly professional,
accomplished, knowledgeable, serious person.
And I could have been another Jason Camisa.
So modest.
That's amazing.
Do you talk to Jay like this when you're on a show?
All the time.
You're like, can we talk about Jay for a second?
Absolutely.
Because Jay listens to the podcast,
so he's going to hear this shit.
He's going to hear it.
Is Off Camera Jay not even cooler than on Camera Jay?
Now, I would say absolutely,
and in the ancient computer language,
wissy wig.
What you see is what you get.
And he is.
That's old.
No, but hold on, there's a bonus.
There's a bonus round of Jay that you get in person,
which I really wish he could show the world and he can't.
And I, maybe I'm telling too much.
No, no, let's let me.
Dirty mouth.
I was going to say, okay, there are two things.
I'm glad you brought that up.
There are two things about Jay that I think you get
in bonus or to private Jay that the public does not get.
One is that he's much more serious than people think.
And the other is that he tells the best dirty jokes ever,
which we'll never, ever hear in one of his shows ever.
No, that's not true.
I was at the Peterson Museum and he did a 45 minute set
from total memory.
Like did not have a cue card dinner.
No, no, he doesn't do that.
Didn't miss a beat, had us howling,
and he told masturbation jokes.
He was talking about jerking off
and it was fucking hilarious.
Because not A, it was Jay,
but B, the average age in the audience was 114.
And all of these old-
And most people have never masturbated.
They were hysterical, because apparently they had.
So he single-handedly proved
that centenarians masturbate, especially the women.
No, it was, it was a really,
he walked that line, stop it Derek,
because I know Derek's never heard of masturbation
before we'll have to explain this afterwards.
He told the line absolutely perfectly
between just being suggestive enough in these dirty jokes,
but never being vulgar.
It was expert to watch.
Jay as a comedian is an expert
because he mentioned he didn't use cue cards.
He doesn't, he prepares a set of jokes,
which he does in a show.
But he depends, he doesn't play big arenas and all that
because he needs to feel the audience.
He needs to know what's happening.
And he will tailor the delivery to the audience.
He obviously very quickly figured out,
okay, this is a group I can play with.
And so I'll do this.
But if he's doing something,
benefit for the Catholic Charities,
probably not gonna do that.
Probably not gonna do that.
It was amazing to watch him go right up to red line
and back off 25 RPM.
And then just stay right there.
It's great.
It's fantastic.
Not one person was offended,
standing ovation at the end of it.
It was just, it was really good.
Anyway.
Well, I think that's one of the other great attributes
is the fact that there are people,
because you know you are out there
in the world of social media.
So you know that there are haters.
And there are haters every.
What?
Not here.
Not here.
Not here.
We don't have haters.
Exactly.
They're all haters.
We don't have non-haters.
The nature of car imagination, yeah.
There's people who aren't haters.
But it is, and by the way,
he reads all of the comments that come in
on the YouTube channel.
And it's one of those things though
that you can tell that he is
tremendously loved.
And he gets hate from both sides.
So it's clear that he is his own man.
So it doesn't matter.
He is who he is.
And that's what it's going to be.
And he tells wonderful truths, which is great.
And he's also not afraid to make fun of himself.
And that's something that I also admire
because I cannot make fun of myself.
I cannot do it.
Oh, we'll do it for you.
Don't you worry.
I just cannot do it.
No matter what.
No matter how perfect I get,
I just can't find that way to make fun of myself.
And...
That's a fault.
Not saying you can make fun of yourself.
Well, I guess it is my only fault
because I just can't make fun of myself.
Similar.
I thought I was wrong once, but I was wrong.
You made a mistake.
It is, and we're going to come back to Jay
during our conversation as well.
But if I might, I don't want to take over your show
because I am a humble guest.
I think we've just had a...
I'm a humble guest.
A hostile takeover.
Exactly.
A humble takeover.
Go ahead.
I am very humble, if nothing else.
My greatest attribute is my humility.
Humble and delusional.
So winning combination is fine.
Exactly.
But I'm sure that the folks listening to this
are wondering why the hell I'm here
because they think of Donald.
Isn't that guy that does all these really high class things
and circulates with only the best people?
The truth of the matter is I had this free ticket
on United Airlines and they can go anywhere you want
as long as it's San Francisco,
as long as it's on a Monday to fly out
and see Jason and Derek.
But I wanted to ask you a question
because I know that you guys like to challenge your audience
and ask them sort of what they think,
not that you care what they think,
but you ask them what they think nonetheless.
So I'd like to ask you guys a question.
What is fever?
Oh, it's when you're sick and you're febrile
and your body temperature rises above 98.6,
whatever, a 37 degree centigrade.
Derek?
What's fever?
Oh, that's what you give me.
You give me fever.
Oh, it's another messed up musical.
Féderation internationale des Automobiles-Ansions.
Wait, it's the International Federation of Ancient Vanguards.
Something like that, only not quite.
The, yes, FIVA is the International Organization
for Historic Vehicles.
And why should you care about historic vehicles
here in the Carimagin Show?
I'm not quite sure.
But nonetheless, here I am.
Do you think you're in a Soco era
on Mercedes-Cons, Ancien?
I'm really glad that you brought that up
because, yes, in fact, they do.
Because an historic vehicle is a vehicle
30 years old or older.
Literally everything I own.
Exactly.
And it's a very funny thing that FIVA is an organization
that is very well known throughout Europe
and also in Asia.
It's not very well known in the US.
And that's why I asked you the question
because I knew that it would be great to have this thing
right here.
It's a little booklet.
Féderation internationale véhicule ancien.
Right there.
So we, in case you haven't noticed,
I will hold this to camera.
You can see it for yourself.
Here, how about this one?
We gotta focus, but here, put this on his head.
Okay, so you were here to tell us about FIVA.
Well, Derek actually was going to say something
about a booklet.
Yeah, so that's the context
in which I've encountered FIVA the most
is the little booklet.
It's like a technical passport
that allows you to participate in certain events
because there's a sort of, I guess,
a standard to which a car must be kept and prepared
and presumably not modified or butchered
in order to get the little passport.
And so if you want entry into certain events,
it needs to have a power.
It helps to have a FIVA passport.
The FIVA card.
Now, we have to be careful
because the passport FIA issues passports.
Got it.
The FIVA identity card is what you're talking about.
And it's something that, that is the perception
of probably 98% of enthusiasts in the U.S.
have no idea what FIVA is.
And the 2% that do know know it
because of the FIVA identity card
and largely because of events like the Milimilia
and the Concorso Delegante Villadeste,
where I've seen you at both of those events, actually.
Jason, I have photographs of you at both those events.
Are they flattering or unflattering?
I was in a fucking unflattering, completely.
It was five o'clock in the morning, Italian time,
and it was, I was in a friggin' 1.3 liter rental car
for the Milimilia, except to none of your shit.
Also.
That's a lot of CCs for the Milimilia, to be fair.
15 Milimilia.
Yeah, that's also true, but it was some horrendous.
Anyway, guilty is charged.
But, exactly.
But there is something which is much more important.
The message, the mission of FIVA,
is really so much more basic than people think.
It is literally to protect, preserve,
and promote historic vehicles and their culture.
That sounds like something we can get behind.
Exactly, and because people also think of FIVA
as being something for people with very fancy,
very rare European cars that wanna do things in Europe,
and that's it.
But, again, it's an international organization
with affiliates in 85 affiliates in 70 countries
around the world, and 2.5 million enthusiasts
around the world are members of FIVA.
How many of those enthusiasts are in the US?
Has FIVA actually been present in the US,
and I just don't know about this?
Yes, FIVA has been here, and one of the things
that I've been charged with, I was recently named
the FIVA representative for North America.
That and...
Pents the plaque.
Pents the plaque, exactly.
And...
Do you have a fucking pin on, too?
I do have a FIVA pin.
Oh, my God.
Actually, I've never let him in.
Exactly.
That's the first time we've had anyone...
With a pin.
With a pin.
We've made it.
That is some other old...
Is that the Monopoly car?
It is not, in fact, it is a Maserati 250F.
Isn't that the same thing?
Is it a Monopoly car?
F stands for fungal.
It's a part of the jewelry line that I do.
D.W.O. style.
Check out.
D.W.O. style.
D.W.O., yes, my initials.
That means something different where I come from.
Does it?
D.W.O.?
Yeah, it's the precursor for D.W.A.,
which is Driving While Awesome.
That's another thing, but not that.
Driving While Outstanding?
No.
Thank you.
Oh, you know, it is so gracious to be on this show.
Neither of you know.
I feel so welcome.
Exactly.
And...
Wow.
FIVA was known in the U.S. for the FIVA identity cards.
And there was an effort made, in fact,
by our good friends at Hagerty,
which started the Historic Vehicle Association
back in 2009, 2010.
And it became the national affiliate of FIVA in the U.S.
And one of the things that FIVA does throughout the world,
and frankly, it's most known for around the world,
is advocacy.
So, for instance, FIVA works with their Italian affiliate,
which is the ASI, Automoto Storico Italiano.
And ASI is the organization that decides
what is an historic car.
So it tells the Italian government,
these cars on our list are historic cars,
so therefore, they get tax breaks,
they get registration benefits, things like that.
The United States doesn't have a national auto club.
No.
Like that, like the ADAC and...
We also don't have a national DMV.
Correct.
50 of them.
50 governments setting...
D.C., right?
Yes, exactly.
Although, D.C. actually set its own rules, I think.
I don't know.
Look over there, it's too close to people
with too much power and a lot of guns.
Exactly.
But, so, that was one of the challenges
that the HVA faced.
And they realized that it was a very big job
to try to be a legislative advocate in that way.
And so, they picked a slightly different road
to travel with it.
And I think one of the most important things
that the HVA has done is to set up the entire program
of cars in the national register, historic cars.
And so, HVA, now the Hagerty Drivers Foundation,
is certainly a great partner with FIVA.
They helped to administer the FIVA Preservation Awards
and a number of concours around the country.
And we're looking forward to partnering further
with Hagerty and the Hagerty Drivers Foundation
as we reintroduce FIVA to a much wider base
of American enthusiasts.
Because this is something that, frankly,
should be as important to the owner
of a 66 Mustang convertible
as to the owner of a Mercedes 540K.
And listening to some of your shows,
and I know that you probably don't generally have guests
on who have actually heard your shows before,
but it was really interesting.
Said that they won't come here.
One and done.
But it's really interesting that it pleased me greatly
to hear you guys talk about so many of the topics
that are really vital to this.
You spoke not long ago about the importance
of doing inspections in cars
to try to discover whether a car is genuine or not.
What the FIVA Identity Card is all about
is not telling you whether your car is good or bad.
It is a knowledgeable, ethical, trained, professional,
looking at your car and observing it and saying,
this is the documentation that the car has.
This is what I observe when I inspect the car.
This is the specifications as it left the factory.
This is what I see today.
And so therefore documenting how the car relates
to its original construction,
its condition of originality in terms of materials
and all of that.
And also it sets something up for the car for the future
because the next owner would love to know
what it is that that car has had done to it.
You, my friend, are a great fan of modifying cars
and that's fantastic.
And if somebody could realize that, yes,
this BMW, station wagon, has these variations from stock.
These things that were done, these things are reversible
if you wanted to restore it to factory condition.
These things, so everyone knows what it is they're getting.
If it's done right and if it's really embraced
in the way that we hope it can be,
it'll also, frankly, stop, I think, a lot of fraud
because people try to make the story of a car better,
which is so wrong.
Yeah, yeah.
It is, I mean, especially in our industry,
it's just it's rife with opportunities
for people to take advantage of others.
And they certainly do.
And you can do that with the car
or you can do it in other ways.
But certainly having some sort of, I would say,
objective or third party verification of what the car is
and isn't is an incredible value add.
The advocacy part, super interesting to me as well.
I think that the interests of vintage car owners
are not well represented or protected in the United States
at all, especially compared to, like you were saying,
Adak in Germany or Aziz in Italy.
I mean, they're treated as cultural heritage
in a lot of other places.
And we sort of all instinctively, as Americans know this,
but there's not a lot of protections for it
or sort of organizations that are lobbying
to preserve our rights.
And we've discussed this in the context
of the smog regulations for the California Lenos law.
I mean, why should a 1977 308 GT4, this is a 75,
so thankfully it's exempt,
but a 77 would have to meet, you know, unrealistically,
like technically impossible to achieve standards
as far as four Webbers could do
and you can't register them in California.
And it's, I think, unforgivable.
So certainly a sort of organized movement
to try and protect the rights of car owners,
vintage car enthusiasts is sorely needed.
And I don't know, like you say, 50 DMVs,
so that makes it quite difficult.
Challenging.
To organize.
It's having to deal with one on a monthly basis.
It's fun enough to fucking make it.
And that's something I'll be totally honest here.
The organization that we're setting up here in the US,
and I'm also very excited to say that this,
the Carmagen show, is the first announcement
of this new organization, Friends of Fever USA.
And to find out more about it, here's the plug,
you can send an email to friendsoffeverusa at fever.org.
And we will keep you posted on the developments
as we roll this organization out.
And we're going to also be collaborating
with clubs and organizations.
That's something else which was not really looked at
in the past because there are a lot of very, very, very
talented and experienced and expert people in the clubs
that are already looking at cars,
they know what to look for, and they know how to look for it.
And we need to make sure that we can take advantage
of their expertise as well.
Not make the mistake, and again,
and I've got lots of great friends at Ferrari,
but when Ferrari Classic A was first introduced,
there was a nightmare of the fact they came in and said,
we know all about these cars, we have all the records,
and we will decide what is good and what is right.
Thereby overlooking the work of decades of people
who were interested in historic Ferraris
when the factory could care less.
Correct.
And so that's something that FIVA, in fact,
has just collaborated with Ferrari Classic A,
so that when a car goes through Ferrari Classic A certification,
it can also get a FIVA certificate as well
because the work's been done.
We know what the history of the car is.
Well, in Classic A, still getting rid of the sort of hangover
from this early era of them sort of, you know,
off-roading a little bit, shall we say?
And maybe away from the expertise and knowledge,
especially if there were people who'd been doing it
for decades but weren't officially affiliated with Ferrari
and then, you know, that information
wasn't making it back to Ferrari,
it was just a bit of a mess.
So they definitely learned a lot, we hope,
from how that all went when they started.
This is Klazic to those of us who pronounce it correctly.
I think Americans mostly mispronounce it as, yeah,
Klazic.
Klazic.
Klazic.
Which is something that you get as a side with your bruschetta.
Please stop saying.
You want to express an espresso, bruschetta and some Klazic
while you're waiting for your car to be clashed.
But yes, we do know, of course,
that is the Klazicay certification.
But it is something that we do know now.
We do know that.
We do know that.
But it is something that it's very important
for people to understand what FIFA's goals
and objectives are.
And one of the goals and objectives is also to help all of us
to feel more like curators and stewards of our cars.
Because that's something, again,
I'm speaking to the choir here, God knows,
because people who want to know where their car came from
and how they're going to pass it along to the next owner.
One of my favorite movies in the world
is a very bad movie called The Yellow Rolls Royce.
Have you seen that movie?
You must watch it.
It's one of these 1960s, I think it's the late 60s.
Hollywood all-star epics.
It's got Omar Sharif, Shirley MacLean.
Anyway, it's an all-star movie.
And the movie is about a Rolls Phantom town car,
which is delivered new by Rex Harrison.
Thank you.
Rex Harrison is a member of the nobility
who works in the British Foreign Office
and he buys this new car for his wife.
And he's very excited about giving it to her on her birthday.
But his wife is having an affair with his charge daché.
And he discovers the two of them
canoodling in the back of the car.
So the car, he's through with that car, so he sells it.
We next see the car, it's in the south of France
and you see these Chicago gangsters
and Shirley MacLean is this gangsters mob from Chicago.
And so she's really bored in the hotels,
like what are you doing here?
I'm just gonna go for a walk.
So she goes for a walk, she walks by this garage,
which she sees the car.
That's a great car, I wanna buy that car.
Okay, whatever you want.
So he buys the car, she also ends up running off
of somebody else, so there's the car.
So that's what the Yellow Rolls Royce does.
We next see the car, it's in Greece during the war.
And oh god, Ingrid Bergman plays this woman
who's now running people in the underground
out of the country by smuggling them
in the back of the Rolls Royce.
And it's just a fascinating thing
because you see three very, very, very different lives
in which this car is inhabited, the car is the constant.
Yeah, did she become a Putana also?
She didn't know. She didn't know our Italian word.
We're in Greece now, so it's okay.
But you know, it's again, it's like that two,
that two-oh-eight, sorry, that three-oh-eight,
it's not a tax special, that three-oh-eight,
you know, it went to its new owner from Swing Motors
and they had a great time with it
and then it went to Derek and then it went to you
and then it's gonna go on to somebody
who will really love and appreciate it.
And that's a wonderful thing, a beautiful thing, you know?
How rude.
No, no, no, no, did I mean it that way?
No, no, no, no.
Nine years of cleaning up oil slicks
under that thing.
Oh, that actually was the funny thing.
I'll just take a little aside here.
When I bought my three-oh-eight TT4,
I bought it from friends, have dealership up in Vermont.
And we had some friends that have a place at the resort,
a condo at the resort of the trap family singers in Vermont.
And so we said, oh, we're gonna be up in Vergen's,
we're gonna, we'll drive down on my way back to Connecticut,
we'll stop off and spend the night with you, great.
So they were very excited, they said,
oh, what a beautiful car, it's wonderful.
Here, pulled into our carport.
Next morning we got up and they said,
oh, it leaked oil, it's like, yeah, we hope so.
It was like, you know, if it didn't leak oil,
then this is gonna be a problem.
Something's probably wrong.
But no, it was a fantastic car, I love it.
So here's a question about FIVA.
The identification card, that is available.
So that's only available to cars that are on the list?
No.
Or is that just Italy?
The list was Italy.
Okay.
So for the US, and this is not the case now,
I want to hasten to explain,
that we do not have Friends of FIVA USA
as an up and running organization right now.
Right now the US does not have an ANF,
a FIVA official affiliate.
So people who do need FIVA identity cards
to do events in Italy, like the Milimilia,
can get them done directly through
the FIVA technical commission, which is based in France.
So it's a slightly slower process,
which we are bound to determine to simplify
as the time goes on.
But eventually we'd like to make sure
that the FIVA identity card is something
that would be of value to all enthusiasts,
because it will be a way for people
to document what their cars are,
and also frankly help, especially in today's world.
For instance, I won't go there.
In today's world, when people are selling cars online,
it'd be good to be able to put on your listing
that this car has a FIVA identity card.
So, ah, I know therefore that the facts written
on this card have been documented by someone.
And that's widely used in Italy for an ASI certification,
and people will put it as like a three sentence description.
One of the things we'll say that it's got an ASI certification
because people understand that that speaks
to the car's legitimacy in some sense.
But does FIVA not issue a card
if a car's been modified too much?
I'm very glad you asked that question,
because again, wow, you are great.
It's as if you like hosted interview shows before.
I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.
This is just, somehow I ask good questions,
or he's a kiss ass.
No, it is, it is, it is very important,
because in the old days, the FIVA identity card
had grades on it, A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2.
And that's for condition or for originality?
Condition and originality.
And FIVA went away from that for a variety of reasons,
not least of which is because they felt
that the cars were being used far too commercially,
and also that people had a great deal of interest
in making sure that I only want an A1 for my car.
If you can't make my car A1,
I'm gonna take it someplace else
and make sure that it's an A1.
And so also the point is that FIVA is not there
to tell you if your car is good or bad,
or that original is good and modified is bad.
It is simply what it is.
Now, there is a point at which a car might not qualify
for a FIVA identity card if it does not meet
certain basic criteria as listed in the technical code.
For instance, first of all, it has to be 30 years old.
So then you look at the chassis,
drivetrain and body.
If the chassis has been modified from the original,
chances are it's not going to get an identity card,
because it is not, FIVA takes the position,
and this has been discussed in lots of cases
like the famous Bentley, old number one in the UK.
What is the heart of the car?
Oh, this is the ship of Sisyphus, that's the Sisyphus.
Exactly, and it's one of those things.
I actually had a stirring conversation
with a FIVA colleague about this, and I said,
yeah, I get it that the chassis,
because this as an appraiser,
obviously I have to deal with identification of cars.
And I get it, okay, the chassis is the thing
that defines the car.
Great, so what do you do for Lotus Elite,
where you restore them by replacing the chassis?
Yeah, yeah.
And galvanized chassis is on a whole bunch
of different things where you're like,
is this still the same car?
Is there a competing claim for the ID number?
Where does the serial number appear?
Is it on a plate that's affixed to the chassis,
or is it stamped into the chassis?
And you get into lots of 1930s,
Cadillacs, 1930s Cadillacs,
were titled by their engine numbers.
You replace the engine, is it no longer that car?
The chassis had left the factory.
That was the thing in California for ages,
they're on the old pink slips,
it says serial number or engine number,
and we would get this most recently with Porsche 356s,
because you can take the engine in and out in 15 minutes,
and so if the engine breaks, you replace it,
and then now you don't,
that your title no longer has a number on it
that appears on the car anywhere,
and that we still deal with the hangover of that,
if it's a long-term owner car that's been
with the same owner since pink slip days,
which was the 80s.
Well, they can give you one of those quality
California DMV-generated vins.
Yeah, California-assigned vins.
Whoa, scary.
But this is the entire point that the FIFA identity card
is to say, okay, this is what I see, yes.
This vehicle was built by Porsche,
by Ing F Porsche Age in 1957,
but it does not have the engine
that was installed in 1957.
Great, that's fine, as long as everybody knows it.
One of the things that I love,
and again, that's really embraced
in this whole few of a philosophy,
is what used to be the case
in the vintage Bugatti and Bentley world.
People wanted to keep those cars on the road,
they wanted to use them,
so if they had to replace the engine,
they had to replace the gearbox,
they had to replace the rear axle,
they did it to keep them running,
but everybody knew what was done,
who did it, when, and why.
Yeah, it was a small group of people who all knew,
that car has a Bugatti owner's club serial number,
so it's kind of a Bugatti,
but not entirely a Bugatti,
and if it's a Crickle with Bentley,
you talk to Claire Hay,
and there's just this group of people
who all know that stuff,
because there were 200 of them made or whatever.
Exactly.
So it's small and everybody knows
what rock to look under.
It was all done via owner's groups back in the day.
Correct, and that's one of the reasons
why we really want to lean into some of the clubs,
and also, frankly, to help,
there are a lot of good mark and model registers
out there as well,
and to also, I hesitate to say help educate,
but to help sort of advance the register,
because a lot of the registers are simply
information that's supplied by a member.
So, yeah, my car is this chassis number,
this engine number, all original.
Great, it goes down to the register.
The same guys who say,
well, this one's worth more than all the other ones
that have sold recently because it's mine,
and you're like, well,
I don't know if the market's gonna see it that way,
but sure.
Provinance, I mean, ownership is important.
I mean, like, wouldn't you pay more for a car
that they own in the Camisa collection?
Answer very carefully.
Depends on the condition and quality of the car.
Do you find that my stewardship of my car
is anything less than-
Do you need to go listening to this?
I'm eating popcorn to sitting back, watching this.
No, yes, I most certainly would probably do that.
But in all seriousness-
Listen, you shit.
If you ever try to buy that Ferrari back,
it's gonna fucking cost you a friend
because of that comment.
Right, I'm not selling it to you.
Well, I think, well, you know,
if you ever want to find an accredited appraiser
from a major group who is known throughout the world
for the quality of his appraisals-
I should look at someone else.
I'd be really glad to give you an appraisal of that car
because I think that car would probably be worth
somewhere in the ballpark of $350,000, $400,000.
What sort of dollars?
$9.00?
$9.00?
Shit, yeah, definitely wasn't USD.
Not USD.
No, in fact, the first time I think we ever hung out
outside of an event, we would run into each other,
I showed up with my Chiraco,
and we were in Palm Springs, I just happened to be there.
And I asked you-
Have a great photo, by the way,
of you and me standing with the Chiraco-
No, the Chiraco and my XJS Convertible.
Right, you have some pink champagne color.
Oh, rose quartz?
Rose quartz.
Wow.
I had a rose quartz XJS Convertible
and a XJ8 Vendin Pla, as well, the same color.
That was a great color.
I mean, I thought mine was champagne.
I did not show the desert dust, always look clean.
Well, mine was champagne, yours was champagne rosé.
But, you know, I did actually ask you,
I don't know if you remember this,
to praise my cars for me.
And it was all because I was in the process
of updating their values for Haggerty's guaranteed insurance,
and I'm not gonna turn this into a Haggerty valuation plug,
but you taught me the best lesson
that I've learned in insurance, which is you're not,
and when it comes to a classic car agreed value policy,
you're not necessarily ensuring for replacement,
for market value, ensuring for replacement cost.
Exactly.
That day after we spoke, I tripled, or quadrupled,
I think it was almost four X,
the total valuation of my fleet,
because as you said, I want you to imagine
an asteroid falls on your Characo,
you're gonna sit back and find someone like me,
I'm meaning you, to go fly around the world
and look for that car's replacement,
and you'll fly to Hungary with me
and say, no, that's not the wrong car,
and then I'll find one in Germany,
and then it's gonna come back,
and what will it cost to pay someone
to build the motor that you built,
but the transmission you built,
and to do all of the modifications and things
that you've done to this car while you sit,
and I think this was the quote,
on your fat ass eating bonbons,
and it's all done for you,
and the car is presented to you with a red bow on it,
with sales tax paid on it, and I thought, oh, shit.
And can you imagine the benefit to you
that your car had just received its FIVA certificate
that listed all of the modifications that were made,
but the condition of the car was?
One of the things that I find the most important
of in my car stewardship, thank you very much,
to Tim Heifetz-Scott, is I will modify some cars, right?
Some of my cars, my Mercedes is so incredibly stock,
I will not replace the radio,
I will not put a non-Mercedes battery in that car,
because I believe it came out of the factory perfect.
I have not modified this car at all,
even though it came on technically the wrong wheels
and some wrong badges and stuff like that,
I don't feel like it needs any of those things,
but how long has it lived with those wheels and those badges?
I don't know, 40 years.
And to me, a car gets to tell its life story.
This is my thing,
I don't necessarily put a value judgment
on modifying these cars,
so like, first of all,
I don't typically get into a car to make money on it,
that's number one, hold on,
I never get into a car to make money on it.
I don't really care,
it's nice when it doesn't lose value,
but all I want to do is document what's there,
what's not, what's been changed,
and that's why every one of my cars has a spreadsheet
with not only every cent I've spent on it,
but every tank of gas, every oil change,
every other maintenance item,
because when I go to sell a car,
I hand somebody a thumb drive with terabytes,
that's a slight excitation,
definitely many, many, many gigabytes of photos
and documentation of everything that has been done,
so they know what they're getting into.
And so if I could have a third party come by,
especially when it starts out,
because there are plenty of times I've bought a car
and maybe it wasn't exactly as represented,
it would be really nice to have had somebody else
have gone through it and say,
you know, this is not correct
and this is not correct and this is not correct.
It's not that I'm never gonna buy a car
that's been modified, that's the furthest thing
from the truth, but I wanna know what I'm getting into.
Correct, it's just about knowing what an object is
and the life that it's had.
I've had this conversation with lots of people
and I know that you two guys agree with this,
because I've heard it on your show.
There are things that people did with their cars
the day after they took delivery, brand new.
And so are you going to-
Or that the dealers did before they did, right?
Dealer installed AC.
Are you going to, in restoring or preserving this car,
take it back to its condition the day it left the factory
or the workshop disregarding 50 years of its history
as an actual object that was used and enjoyed by people?
I think not.
Here's a question for you though.
When you say the chassis of the car,
if it's been modified at all.
Not modified at all, no, no, I didn't say that.
Modified substantially.
So for instance, you have a long wheelbase X,
but the short wheelbase Y model is much sexier.
So you take the long wheelbase, cut three inches out of it
and have the replicas that got a body made for it.
Okay, that's major.
But something out of curiosity just for the audience,
for things that are more important,
that car has Euro bumpers on it.
Other ones of my cars have Euro bumpers on it.
In the case of the Ferrari, it required metal cutting.
I mean, they had to be cut out and panels welded in
to sort of uncover the unsightly American stuff
that was put on it.
Is that enough to qualify to say
it's been modified enough that it's out?
It will, no, no, no.
It would be, first of all, it's body modification.
And so the rest of the body has not been modified.
They haven't modified the doors, the roof,
the opening panels.
You haven't done any of that.
So you're talking about re-bodied stuff.
So, but I mean, again, it would be noted
that this was a US delivery car
that has been modified for European bumpers.
And so to that point, there are vehicles
that would probably not be eligible
for a FIIA identity card if they were, for instance,
I know this is a conversation you guys had recently too
about restomads, because a car can start out life
as a 1969 Camaro, but then it's restored
with a brand new custom chassis
and a contemporary Corvette engine and drivetrain.
It is no longer a 69 Camaro.
I think that's easy to agree on.
Well, there are some people that say
if the car looks like the car that it started out as,
then we should be able to call it that.
If you've changed everything.
Yeah, this is the classic ship of Theseus
or whatever the parable is,
but if you replace the entire boat one piece at a time
over the course of its life,
if it's the identical piece,
like maybe you could claim that identity,
especially I think the lack of claims,
alternate claims to the same identity is helpful also.
Correct.
Like there was an orange Carrera RS
that sold on bring a trailer a couple of weeks ago.
And there was a huge food fight
because there were two cars claiming to be the same car.
And one, I know, especially easy with those cars
because you buy a 911 T or 912 for $64
and then spend a hundred grand on it.
And suddenly it looks a lot like a real Carrera RS.
But people always would get into food fights over this,
especially with RSs
because there was such a big value difference
between a 912 and a real Carrera RS.
And then there were certain parties
that were known to do this repeatedly.
And so then if the car has that ownership
and that's history, then it's like,
oof, that should be avoided.
The best part about having shit boxes.
Yeah, there's no financial incentive to do that.
It's also hard to do with something like a McLaren F1
because it has a carbon fiber monocoque.
There's no Fiero that you can go buy and hang new stuff on it
and have it suddenly look like it's a legitimate this or that.
I would probably say in the case of the F1,
it's because we know how many were made
and where they went and what happened to them.
There are people today,
and there's certainly a financial incentive,
you can build a new McLaren F1, a fake one,
for a lot less than $20 million you get for a real one.
So there are people who will definitely build you
a McLaren F1 if you'd like.
Yeah, the fact of the matter is they are supported so well
because they are so significant.
That's one of those cases
where you could actually execute on that.
Yeah.
So for the consumer in America who is a car enthusiast,
who, which of those people are sort of,
what is the quintessential target for FIVA
among American car enthusiasts?
Who is it for?
I would say it's for everyone.
Now, will everyone find equal value in it?
Probably not.
But certainly at the very least,
if FIVA in the USA can talk to people
about how they should document their cars as they own them,
to look for the history where they can find it,
even if they haven't done that before,
and also sort of set up a world
in which they can lean on their club resources
on other organizations, the classic car club,
well, easy for me to say, classic car club,
I can't say it at all,
classic car club of America, antique car club of America.
No matter what it may be, the Corvette,
folks are obviously very, very invested in this.
They're way ahead of the curve on all of this.
But it's actually interesting too.
I was having a chat not long ago with a friend
who was very involved in the Corvette authentication world.
And at first I thought that what it is
that we're looking to do with FIVA
might be something that might slightly rub him the wrong way.
But he actually didn't have that attitude
because he agreed with me that he would love
to also see a world in which people did not routinely
re-stamp their blocks to make some matching,
because he is a realist, he's a Corvette enthusiast,
he knows that these cars were sold new to be driven hard.
And when you blew up your engine
in your two-year-old Corvette, you did not go to the dealer
and say, could you please rebuild my original block?
You wanted a brand new one off the shelf
from the parts department.
And that should be celebrated.
It's like, yeah, this car was actually used
the way it was intended.
So there is, I think, a value for all enthusiasts,
no matter what it is that you own.
I think that one of the things that we're going to be doing
this year when I'm speaking to my colleagues at FIVA
here in the US are going to be speaking
with principals and key stakeholders in the clubs
around the country, which we're doing,
and also some of the organizations,
is saying, this is what FIVA represents.
How can FIVA help you and your members?
What can we do that makes this a value add for them?
And that's what we're looking to do, sort of the heart.
I'm just going to skip to this and I want to get back
to something else that you said a moment ago, Jason.
We are going to sort of celebrate the idea
of the range of cars that can benefit
from FIVA documentation by, we're having an induction
of Jay Leno into the FIVA Hall of Fame this summer in LA.
And we're also going to, at that event,
present him with six FIVA identity cards
for four cars, a fire engine, and a motorcycle.
Because FIVA is not just not-
It sounds like a start of a joke.
Exactly, four cars, a fire engine, and a motorcycle,
drive into a-
Drive into a drive-in.
But it is something that, and Jay as a collector,
we talked about Jay as a person a moment ago,
Jay as a collector is also so fascinating to me
because one of the other reasons why everyone loves Jay
is that Jay is every man.
He has cars that are unbelievably rare
and horrifyingly valuable, and he has cars
that you couldn't get more than $10,000 for.
It doesn't matter, he has them all
because of what they represent to him emotionally,
about their history, about their stories,
about their engineering.
And that's what, all these things are important,
no matter what the cars are and where they are in the range.
I think that's a critical sort of thing to identify.
And I think it's not something that a person
might necessarily fixate on as an early enthusiast,
it's sort of like the idea of stewardship
or the history or all of that.
But for me, and I'm sure this has happened to you
as you're appraising collections,
you walk into a room full of incredible cars
and they're sort of, they're pretty cool
and they're quite interesting
and you know what they all are.
But then you walk around with somebody
who's really passionate about them,
who knows all their stories forwards and back
and it suddenly, and you talked about this
in the context, Jason, of going to Pebble Beach
where you're like, these are all very incredible cars,
but if you got to hear every single story of each car,
then you'd be like, this would transition
from being like a pile of stuff.
It's a parking lot of.
To being like an incredible,
just an endless range of incredible stories.
And they go from being sort of just physical objects
to being much more than that when you get that context.
And I think that encouraging all enthusiasts and owners
to think of their car not just as a thing
that they're getting to use
or it's a tool to go driving or whatever,
but like in terms of its story and its significance
and finding out like that the original owner
bought this car new in 1992, December,
and in January of 92, his company IPO'd.
And that's where the money came from to buy the car.
And like I recently did that on a Mercedes
that wasn't worth any money,
but I thought it was super cool
that he had gone through this trouble
to order and spec this car in this way with his IPO money.
And so I love sort of learning the stories of cars
and I would encourage every enthusiast,
no matter how pedestrian or not pedestrian your car is,
that it has a story like this,
especially if it's decades old.
It's worth learning.
I suspect you, speaking of masturbation,
touch yourself to the idea of anthropology of old cars.
Sure.
You get off on finding old receipts and old stories
and whatever.
So do you?
Yes.
100%.
All three of us here at this table.
It's archeology in a sense.
Yeah, it is.
It's exactly what it is.
It's archeology, sociology.
It's so cool to,
we have this object that is now 30, 40, 50 years old,
whatever, how old it is.
And now you're going back and envisioning the person
who bought it from the dealership
and what was going on in their mind.
It's why in that car, there are two cassette tapes,
which I don't think you did this, right?
No, I did this when I got it.
So this car is-
Pinot d'angio.
Okay, Pinot d'angio is the cassette
that you have in the car that I've kept in there.
That's your contribution to this car's permanent history.
Oh yes, you also have Danny Carmasi.
Danny Carmasi.
So three owners, four owners ago was Danny Carmasi,
who was the drummer for Hart.
And I looked up when he bought the car
and one of their tapes had,
one of their cassettes albums had just come out
and they were in the process of recording the other.
And so I bought both of those cassettes
and they live permanently now in the glove box.
Denny is friends with Sammy Hagar,
very good friends with Sammy Hagar,
who is right down the street effectively.
And Sammy saw the car and was like,
holy shit, it's Denny's car.
And I ran over and it was in a poultry shop.
And I told the guys, next time you see Sammy,
tell him I need to send these two cassettes to Denny to sign.
Sign them.
Right, because I want the autograph
of the guy who owned the car when he bought it.
He was the, I think the third owner of this car
changed hands so many times,
but he had it for 16 years and I love that.
I love their 14 years.
I love the idea that he is now part of this car
and that goes forever.
That license plate frame you put on the car
is the Ferrari of San Francisco, right?
License plate frame, that's part of the car
you're never gonna back, sorry.
The deal is that if I get the car back,
the frame comes with it.
Or if I were to buy a Ferrari,
then you might consider giving me the frame.
But there'd be an upcharge
because I touched it up and made it prettier.
No, and also there's no Ferrari dealer
in San Francisco anymore.
It's a picture of a particular moment
because now the Ferrari dealer has moved to the suburbs
because San Francisco is too rough for a Ferrari dealer.
Not the place for a Ferrari dealer.
But the point is all of these little things,
joking aside about the license plate frames,
all these things add to the car's history.
I found, so a friend of mine bought
a warehouse full of documentation
from what, Kennedy Garthwaite.
Yes.
Which was the distributor of Ferrari back in the day.
And I have the original, he found,
he's asked me what my serial number was.
Little L Garthwaite, he's a great guy.
And I got a book with the actual invoice from this car.
Like, it's the coolest thing.
I wanna put this in a fireproof safe.
I need to scan it all.
You should, first of all, you should.
I'll tell you two stories, one tragic, one great.
The tragic one was I bought many, many years ago
a Lancia Fulvia Zagato.
A terrific car that I bought from a friend of mine
in Pennsylvania, I was living down there.
And he was the second owner of the car,
but he never put on the road.
And I looked at it in the back of his barn
for ever and ever and ever.
And I kept saying, I love the car, love the car, love the car.
No, I'm gonna do something with it one day.
So one day I went to visit him and he said,
it was painted, it's painted a beautiful color.
Verde Ostende, this incredible dark green.
With a tan interior, neat, neat, neat thing.
The original owner had lived in New York City in the village
and has been in every day car.
And so it had been dinged and repaired
and dinged and repaired and dinged and repaired.
And so the paint was fairly rough-ish.
And he said one day, you know what?
I'm gonna rebuild that engine, get it going again,
paint it red and sell it.
I said, you are not painting the car red,
I'm buying it for me exactly as it sits.
So I bought the car and this is,
I know it's hard for you to believe
because you're so young, pre-internet days.
So I buy the car, a friend takes the engine out to rebuild,
great launch mechanic.
And the friend that I bought it from said,
I've got this really great body guy
up in Albany, outside of Albany, New York.
It's really terrific, does great work, great, okay, fine.
So take the car up to him and I said,
yeah, I want it repainted, this color is great.
So of course, what does he do?
He strips every bit of paint off the car.
He's got no reference point for the color.
And of course this is not the time
when you can sort of go online
and get the color code and find it.
So he said, well, I couldn't find the color,
but I think, I painted the color, I think it's close.
So I drive the four and a half hours up to his shop
and I walked to the door and I said,
oh my God, he's painting my car kelly green.
It wasn't actually, it was alpha green,
that alpha green they did for spiders.
Oh, it was a mosquito.
Yeah, and so, and I thought I hated it,
but I got used to it after a while.
But the thing was I had bought the car
and I later discovered after I bought the car
that had been sold new by a very good friend of mine
in New York, who was still a VW deal at the time,
but he had been the launcher dealer.
He sold the car new and it had all of this paperwork
from when the car was new and all service
that his dealership in the Bronx.
And I was on a business trip out to California
when I was working for Macy's and I thought,
oh, I'm gonna read all these things on the flight.
I left the folder in the seatback pocket of the plane.
No.
Oh yes.
And I discovered it when I was in the terminal.
Oh my God, I've got to go back.
No, sorry, you can't go back on.
Bullshit.
I'm sure, you know, just turn in a claim with lost and found.
Of course, the cleanest came first, paper.
It was gone.
Oh.
So I recently, this is the teary part of the story.
I recently bought one of my dream cars,
my 1991 Alfa Romeo SS8.
SS8, yeah.
And yes.
And it's a car that I've loved.
I was at the 1989 Geneva show when it was introduced.
Phil Manley loved it.
Said I must own one one day.
And so 37 years later, I found one.
I was also very careful about what I wanted
because I liked to drive.
I didn't want one of these zero kilometer cars.
You know, not, not for me.
So I was looking all a bunch of cars
and they were all needy in some fundamental way
that I didn't want to deal with.
And there's a car for sale at a dealer in Milan
and the price is ridiculous.
I said, ah, and plus the mileage is too low.
It's got 4,400 kilometers from there.
I don't want this car.
Except let me just go look at it for reference.
I went and looked at it.
Oh my God.
Took it out for a drive.
Said, ah.
And so I made an offer at the budget I wanted to spend.
The owner said, no, grazie.
But he had actually come off of his price by 5,000 euros.
It was still far too high.
And so I thought about it and thought about it.
I countered at another point.
I said, no, this is my price.
Maybe I won't sell it.
I thought, okay, fine.
You know what?
When you find the car you've been looking for for 37 years.
Just fucking buy it.
Just buy it.
And so I bought it.
But the reason that, but I bought it is not the fact that the car was just perfect.
Because again, even though it was a fairly undriven car, one owner car,
it had just had a complete service four months prior that dealt with all the things you don't
want to deal with on the car that's been sitting.
And it had every document, the original deposit with alpha when you had to order the car.
The, not only all of the original books in their leather folder,
but the leather folder was inside the paper bag that it came in.
It had the parts book.
Each of these came with a parts book, which was numbered to the chassis.
This is why you can't, when you are into paperwork and you find a car that's documented like this,
you have to do this really tough thing, which is not appear too excited about it.
Because then they know they have all this leverage and then you're just fucked and they're going
to hose you because they know that you know that it's impossible to reproduce that.
And once you're in that place where you can't walk away or what is, you know,
what is the best alternative to walking away?
I don't get this car and I never see another one like this again.
And it's the end of the world, right?
So you, the best, you only have one choice, which is to buy the damn thing.
And then they know that.
And so they really have you over a barrel.
It's tough.
And with this whole idea of what fever represents, I know that I am obligated to be the steward
of the documentation of this car.
So you're going to have a spreadsheet with every tank of gas you put in it?
I have the first notes from that first photo that you saw on the auto strata coming back
from Milan to Bergamo.
And you and I have both found cars where you have, you know, some old man scribbling,
absolutely little policy writing with every single fucking tank of gas.
I love it.
But I have 29 years of Volkswagen of Scirocco gas at this point.
It just starts, it's unreplicable.
But again, that's one of the things I was only partly talking about having a car with
Jason Camisa provenance, because when someone buys a car from you and they get all that,
it's like, wow, not only did I buy this car from this guy who's clearly car nuts, who
lived and breathe every moment of this car and for good and for bad.
And it was just a part of his life.
That means so much more than just something anonymous thing.
Right.
They know that the car meant something to the owner, right?
You know, somebody kept all of that documentation, they cared.
They cared enough to not just view it as an object.
And this is an unfortunate trend I see in the collector sphere where there's a lot of collectors
with huge volumes of cars and they just don't have, forgive my French, they don't have enough
fucks to give about a hundred cars.
And so the cars sort of just sit there and they don't really care about documentation.
How could you give a fuck about a hundred cars?
Yeah, right?
I just, I've never understood that.
And with apologies to Jay, right?
Jay seems to actually somehow give a fuck about a hundred.
He kind of has the time to dedicate it full time to being his life, right?
Well, I ask Jay all the time, you talk about, you know, what Jay is like away from the spotlight.
He and I joke about the fact that he and I are so completely different because I like to take a vacation.
Jay has never taken a vacation.
And he makes a good point.
He said, what am I taking a vacation from?
And two, he doesn't ever want to be away from his cars in his shop.
And even he drives and rides everything.
He doesn't buy anything that he does not ride or drive, doesn't buy anything to look at it.
People try to sell him race cars all the time.
He says, I don't race.
I'm not going to buy that.
And he will have as much fun, you know, taking his pierce arrow out for an hour and a half drive
and then spending three hours greasing all the chassis points.
That turns them on as much as, you know, the drive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So my question for you, what else is in your garage?
Oh, you know, it's very funny.
I was recently doing my taxes and I discovered have a two accountants, one in the same frame.
One does my personal taxes and the other does my business taxes.
And the one does every business taxes.
We're going through and saying, well, you know, what about this Donald?
What about that?
And I realized that I actually sold three cars last year.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
I sold my Panda, my 87 Panda.
I sold my 53 Jaguar Mark 7 and I sold my Roma.
Oh, I forgot you had a Roma.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Did you love it?
I adored my Roma.
It was absolutely fantastic.
I drove it at 7,500 miles on it when I sold it.
I got it in 2022 and it was phenomenal.
And that was again, one of those things sort of a lifetime.
I said, I'm going to buy a new Ferrari at some point.
So I said, I'm going to do this.
And I saw the car.
I thought it was incredibly beautiful.
The most beautiful Ferrari I think they've made in at least 40 years.
And so I said, if the car drives anything like the way it looks,
I have to have one.
I drove one.
I said, okay, this is it.
And it was actually very funny because Frank said, oh, you want one of those?
Good.
Sell all your old cars.
I said, okay.
Well, I said, oh my God, you really do want one, don't you?
And I didn't have to sell them on old cars.
But I was following the production of the car.
And I thought, oh, this is interesting because we're going to be arriving in Italy around
the week that it's going to schedule to be completed.
So I contacted some of my friends at Ferrari, actually one friend,
and said, is there any chance that I can come to the factory and see the car?
Wouldn't that be exciting?
So she said, well, what's the production stay of the car?
I gave it to her.
I said, oh, I'll get back to you.
I said, oh, something that you'd never imagine.
The car was finished a week early.
Ferrari's never done that.
So she said, well, so the car has actually been handed off from production to distribution.
But I can get it back from distribution if you want to come see it.
But it'll delay delivery.
I said, I don't care because we're in Italy for a couple of months.
So it doesn't matter.
It's just going to sit in the US till I get back.
So she said, okay, she can do it.
And so we went down to Maronello and they treated us to a nice lunch at the Montana restaurant.
Frank and I had a private tour of the Ferrari factory.
And at the end of the tour, I saw my car.
They pull off two fenders and just put them on it as you're walking down the line.
It was actually sitting in the display area at the Classique office, which is where the race office is.
And the Corse cliente office, I should say.
And so it was absolutely unbelievably exciting.
But they said, don't take a lot of pictures of it because it doesn't have your tires on it.
It still had the test tires on it and all that.
We haven't cleaned it.
Don't worry about it.
Why did you sell a panda?
I have to know this.
The panda was our everyday car in Italy.
We have an apartment in Bergamo and again, talking about measuring for garages.
We lived in this building, an early 19th century building and the garage below and these giant pillars.
And so I had to measure car.
It was just too wide for a modern Cinquecento because you had to be really careful.
So I thought, well, what can I fit in there?
So I said, oh, a panda.
And so I love the panda and a very good friend of mine, a wonderful restorer in Bergamo, Giovanni Gatti,
had a family friend who owned it.
It's the second owner.
This old lady had this car, 75 CL, so a fairly base model.
Didn't have a package shelf in the back and only one exterior mirror.
Perfect for fitting between pillars.
I put a right-hand mirror on right away.
It was the perfect car, though, so incredibly safe to drive in Italy because Pope John the 23rd was born in Bergamo.
So she had a medallion of Pope John the 23rd and two St. Christopher's like this car.
So it's an incredible fortune.
Exactly.
So it was fantastic.
It was a great everyday car there.
And then we gave up the apartment that we had there right before the pandemic.
And so we were looking at moving, shipping some stuff back from the apartment.
So I got a quote for, I think it was $5,800 to ship the stuff from the apartment back,
but I had a quote for $3,500 to ship the panda back.
So we put all the stuff into the panda and shipped it to California.
So I kept it there for a number of years and then moved it back east.
So I was probably the only person in the world that had a panda and a Roma at the same time.
So it was fantastic.
I loved the panda.
It was fantastic.
But I made a fairly fatal mistake with that as well because it needed some engine work.
And so there's a fellow who was a mechanic in Rhode Island who I'd known and he said,
oh yeah, sure, I can handle that for you.
So the problem is that while you have someone discovering what an engine is as they're rebuilding,
I bought all the parts myself in Italy, shipped them back or carried them back.
I paid more for the engine rebuild than, well, 10 times for the engine rebuild for what I paid for the car, A.
And B, I could have simply stripped the car, flown to Italy, bought another one and shipped it back
for less than I paid for the engine rebuild on the car.
So that was something you learn.
You live, you learn.
But yeah, I mean, driving cars is important, which is also one of the, I said,
the missions of FIVA to protect is with the legislation to preserve is fairly self-evident
and to promote the use of historic cars because for FIVA, it's very important that cars are used.
And that's one of the things that is looked at, frankly, in the history of the car and in the inspection of the car.
You know, cars are absolutely wonderful things that SCI just bought has now 4,500 kilometers on it.
I intend to drive the wheels off of that car because it's an opportunity.
My 308 TT4 had 29,000 original miles on it and I sold it had nearly 40,000 miles on it because it's about using the cars.
And that to me is the highest form that a car can take.
And we preserve cars so much better when they're being used and maintained properly.
And that's what this is all about.
Yeah.
Are you certain to risk?
That's the only, the thing, the part that sucks is you expose them to people on the road who are not paying attention.
Giving people a reason to use cars, I think is important.
I mean, obviously, like I think that values of cars, the value structure of old cars would be very different.
Were it not for events like the Milimilia and the California Mila and the Colorado Grand.
That keeps those cars relevant in a way because it's a cool event.
And if you want to do it, you got to buy an old car.
And there are so many people that you encounter on those events who say,
I don't have a particular interest necessarily in cars of this era, but I want to do this event.
So now I have cars from this era and actually I quite like them and now I'm into cars of this era.
But I think that there's, you know, any time we can create desirable events or venues for people to use cars of any particular era.
Like if there was something that was, you know, and there are a few rally events that are interesting for cars from that are not old enough for the Mila, but still old.
I think that that would only add value.
And I think in Europe, there's a lot of stuff like that, like journée d'automne and all that stuff.
But here in the U.S., there's just not really enough of that stuff in my opinion.
That's one of the other things which I hope and we hope that we can really promote through FIVA to get people out and using their cars.
To your point, there's in Italy and northern Italy alone, practically every weekend throughout the year except for perhaps February.
This is an event.
And Christmas.
And Christmas.
I think this is actually a Christmas round.
But it's amazing the way people use their cars there.
And we can get more of that.
I mean, we see, frankly, some of that, I'm sure that you guys go to cars and coffee events.
I know in Rhode Island, the Audrain Museum runs a series of cars and coffee events from April till November.
And the turnout is immense.
I mean, people love getting out and just sort of chatting with people and sharing stories about cars.
And it's not so much about showing your car off.
Because, you know, everything, you'll have everything, you know, add a car and coffee from a Bugatti Veyron to a Unimog.
I mean, you know, it's a...
Well, to a GTI.
I mean, to something completely pedestrian.
Exactly.
Yeah, the cars and coffees around here are nuts.
Nuts.
The breadth of what you see.
And it's never about...
And no one trailers a car to cars and coffee.
So if they do, oh my God, please.
If you do, it's the wrong...
It's the wrong kind of event for you.
I mean, I've seen people trailer stuff here.
Oh my God.
Yeah, but not the one that we go to anymore.
I mean, but there's the...
What I like about it is there's not an obsession.
I feel like part of...
There are parts of America that have car culture that are rooted in who spent what on...
I don't have a taste for that.
And so the typically the cars and coffees that I go to are multiple brands,
multiple nationalities and multiple decades.
Right.
So you'll see everything from 30s cars to a modern GR86 with no like,
ooh, somebody bought this Lamborghini that they wrapped in chrome red,
fucking horrible, whatever.
I can't.
I can't wear that shit.
That's a function also of where we live.
I'd say that that type of culture is not as prevalent here as it is in other parts
of certain other parts of this country.
And that's one of the...
One of the joys of living around here is we can drive old cars most of the year.
Well, you know, to your point about exposing cars to risk,
yes, you have to be thoughtful about how you do it depending on what the car is.
And one of the things that I find it very interesting to have conversations with people about
are people who restore cars or have bought restored cars and say,
the car's too perfect to use.
No, your car's been painted.
You get a rock chip, you repair the paint.
Yes.
If your car is completely original, every surface is original.
That's the really scary part.
Okay, that's a totally different conversation.
But look, I don't 100% agree with you on this one, I'll be honest,
because there are, right?
There are.
So last week we talked about that car, that I just had some rust fixed,
and this local artist, he's amazing at mixing paint
and just doing amazing body work to make it look perfect.
He took one look at the car and was like,
oh my God, you should paint this whole thing because it's scruffy, right?
And from here, it looks absolutely perfect from up close.
No, I don't want to ever have another perfect car.
It doesn't matter whether it's been repainted or not,
or whether it's original repainted.
If it's original, it's even worse.
But if it's been repainted, then I'm going to have to do it again
because I know at one point it looked this way
and now it's going to look less than and that's painful for me.
Well, you should, I know that what I say means nothing,
but I know that you respect Jay.
And Jay's mantra with a restored car is you restore a car to 100%,
100 points, and you drive it down to 70, and then you repeat.
He's got a lot of money.
He's got a lot of money.
You can't do that if a paint job is something
that is a stretch already for you to begin with.
No, no, no, correct.
And insert a picture of you driving my E30 through a fucking river, right?
I mean, my E30, I hit a gear in it.
This is my wagon.
I asked you to do it so I could take the picture of vice versa.
Whatever it was, I think you were driving.
You hit a deer and then drove through the water after the deer?
Hit a deer.
The car was rough when I bought it.
The deer actually did the driving.
The deer, deer.
He's still, he's actually.
Let you put the deer in the driver's seat.
Sorry.
Is that an actual?
That's not.
That was an original composition.
We just got to witness.
No.
I mean, the car was kind of a scruffy car that I bought very inexpensively
and then I hit a deer and then I was at a crossroads, right?
Hagerty, I had Hagerty under intro of the car because I hadn't met you yet.
And I forgot to sort of adjust what it was worth and it was going to be totaled.
And that was the end of that.
And I said, absolutely not.
Not happening.
So they gave me less than total and I threw in almost two X the amount of money that they did.
And I said, this is my opportunity.
If I'm making, if I'm mixing paint, I'm making the car perfect.
And I got first place concor at the car.
And I then I proceeded to drive the shit out of it over the last 10 years.
Bravo.
But I look at the front end of this car and it's stone chipped to shit.
Okay.
But you can weigh that against the experiences and mileage and joy you've just experienced.
Thank you.
And say, is it worth it?
But it used to be perfect.
Can I introduce you to Derek?
And it could be perfect again if you just throw a pile of money at it.
You know how big that pile of money was.
But you know, there's two things.
Let's get back to that.
What would you rather have?
Money.
Beatrice.
This is where the lesson for me was I bought my shit box.
So this is an excuse to buy yet another car.
Everybody wins.
Because you bought another car.
I'm still going to drive the car, but it still, it does pain, pain me every time.
It looks not bad.
It should not pain you.
Not as much as the joy from using it.
Fine.
To get back to the 308.
Just Ramon.
To me, the highest form a car can take is something that they call in Italy conservato, which
is not a preserved car because it's not a car that was locked away when it was new and
never driven.
It's a car that's been used.
The paint fades.
You repaired it.
You got a little dent.
You fixed that tear in the interior.
You repaired that.
So things were done to help maintain the consumables and to keep it on the road.
It's a car that has lived its life and shows the life it lived.
Now that car, that 308 shows the life it's lived.
It's a real car.
I love that.
I love the most about that.
I love that.
And now if you were to choose to totally do a all nuts and bolts restoration of the car,
that would be fine too.
I would never drive it again.
But once you did it, why not?
I would never drive it again because why would you go through that expense to make it perfect?
Who was the last new car you bought?
My e-golf.
And did you actually drive it?
Here's the thing.
I paid $9,845 for it.
It's got seven inches of range and it's just worthless.
When you first got it, I think we went out to lunch with you.
Probably did.
I don't look.
No, I don't buy new cars.
I'm in the business of telling people to buy new cars.
I don't do it because I'm fucking poor and cheap.
Do as I say, not as I do.
No.
Look, I'm not telling what people do.
I'm never going to tell people what to do.
I will say, however, that a car, the purchase of a new vehicle is in most cases a deal with
the devil because you're buying a depreciating object.
You know this going in.
Now, if I say I'm going to buy this $50,000 car that will be worth $20,000 in five years,
so it's going to lose 30K in value, but it providing me $30,000 in service or benefit,
meaning I can get to work and all this other stuff, then it's totally fine.
The only thing I ask of people is really look at the total cost of ownership when you're
making your decision.
In my case, I don't have a commute and I drive to work and have that car that starts
and runs every single time.
When I left Motor Trend, I made the decision to quit.
I leased an e-golf because I suddenly didn't have oversight and what my life was going to
be like.
I didn't know what I was going to do next.
I knew I wasn't going to have any income and that was an $83.77 a month lease.
That I knew I could afford no matter what.
Working at McDonald's, you can still swing that e-golf.
Exactly.
I can always do it and it's practically free to operate.
At the end of that three-year lease, I had fallen so much, two and a half years.
I had fallen so much in love with the car that I bought another one.
As timing allowed, there were all kinds of benefits, all kinds of whatever, markdowns
on the car, incentives.
I actually did buy the car before it even landed at the port for $9,845 plus tax.
It was like 11-1 out the door.
I've driven that car now seven years.
It was August 14th of 2019.
It's coming up in seven years and it's still worth more than I paid for it.
Not counting the tires and all the wheels and the upgrades I've done.
Come on.
If somebody hit that car and it's still all original paint, I have scuffed it a couple
of times.
I mean, I'm not perfect.
I have definitely fucked up the wheels a couple of times.
Not perfect.
Close.
Nearest makes no difference.
Excuse me.
Breaking news here in the Car Mudgeon Show, Jason Camisa is not in fact perfect.
Film at 11.
Yes, thank you.
I think it's going to be a long film while I list all my fucking problems.
It's still original paint.
And one day I will go sell that car and I will have to explain every bump and scrape
and that pains me.
But I don't like the idea of taking something that was once perfect.
And I like the idea that over time, my cars tend to get better and look younger and better.
Even the same beauty regimen that you yourself follow.
No, I have gone to shit.
That's why the cars are so nice.
It's like a portion of Dorian Gray in reverse.
The cars are getting younger.
Got it.
Got it.
Got it.
Yeah, I'm only 27 years old.
No, I mean, it pains me that when I see a visible decline in the condition of a car,
it just bothers me.
Something I wish I didn't.
But it's trading off for joy and experience and stories.
Just coming back to what Derek said before and just repeated.
When I sold my Roma and I sold it because we were spending more time in Italy and
undriven cars become unhappy very quickly.
And I thought, why am I going to have this wonderful car sitting in a garage in Rhode
Island when I'm not driving it when I can sell it and buy a fun thing to drive around
Italy?
So that's why I got the SC.
But the point was people said, oh, did you make money?
I said, of course I didn't make money on it.
I said, oh, well, are you OK?
I was losing $100,000 in the car.
I said, yeah, I had it for three years, put 7,500 miles on it.
I worked out my cost per mile and then looking at these other people selling cars, they haven't
driven with 600 miles.
And they're losing as much as I did and did not have 7,500 miles of absolute joy driving
the car from Carmel to Reno and down to Big Sur on Sunday mornings and Vermont.
That's to me.
That car paid me back handsomely.
That's the only thing I ask of people.
Look at the actual true cost of ownership and decide whether that's worth it to you.
Right?
Cost of ownership on any golf?
Zero worth it to me.
Cost of ownership for a Ferrari could be far in excess of zero.
If it's worth it, it's worth it.
But again, it's not.
I didn't lose anything on it because I used the car, had it in my life.
I spent nothing on it.
Seven years total maintenance.
I didn't spend the nickel on the car.
Hold on.
Which car?
The Roma.
It was seven years?
Seven years.
Total coverage.
You don't pay a nickel on the car.
Yeah.
For a point.
You didn't lose anything.
You exchanged dollars for experiences.
Exactly.
And I mean, I could not have had the experience of a private tour of the Ferrari factory seeing
my car in Modonello.
I mean, sorry.
I'm taking an important bucket list item of buying a new Ferrari.
So you, I asked you what's in your garage and told me what isn't.
What isn't.
That's correct anymore.
What is currently in the garage.
I'm going to allow you to carry on with that.
The FZ.
We know the FZ.
Well, in the United States, there is the 1999 SLK 230 five speed manual.
Thank you very much.
It's a 230.
Not a 230.
230.
230.
So 320 for all six speeds.
Yeah.
And a 1962 Lancia Apia Berlina.
I don't know what the fuck that is, but that's Derek Beat because it says Lancia on it.
The predecessor, God, you know better than to say Lancia.
You just did that to annoy me.
Of course I did.
I was the first guy.
Him saying Lancia, espresso bruschetta.
Classy.
My mentor who introduced me to the greatness of Lancia as I once asked him why people sometimes
pronounce it Lancia.
And he said, because they're animals.
And then walked away.
Which is true.
So the Apia is the predecessor of the full via.
Obviously.
Obviously.
And it's a Berlina.
So it's a B pillarless car.
So in both of the doors, the rear doors are suicide.
The front are normal.
So when it opens up, it's just like no B post.
Porte alarmado.
See basic closet doors.
So and it's the successor to the Ardea, which I also used to have.
How does it work?
Ardea.
Ardea.
Ardea.
And I also have a 1969 Moretti Cinquecento Sport.
He knows what that is.
Quite sporting.
Quite sporting.
It says by the name.
It's a custom-bodied Fiat Cinquecento.
It's two-cylinder, air-cooled, really cool.
Is it actually really handsome?
Yeah.
Is there sport in there?
Oh yeah.
It's very sporty compared to a standard Cinquecento.
Okay.
Plus this one actually has a cheater motor in it.
It's got a motor from a Fiat.
It's a big block.
It's from a Fiat 126.
Ah, yes.
Instead of the standard 32-horsepower, it puts out 46, which is quite the rock.
The market improvement.
Yeah.
The big block.
Exactly.
And then the new GLC.
That's here.
Over there, the everyday car is a Lancia Epsilon.
Oh.
Yeah.
So I told you he's got a thing for it.
So the Epsilon is this funny-looking thing, the hatchback thing that was made in the 90s.
I've got a new one.
You have the new one.
A 2012.
Not the new, new one.
Right.
A 2012.
So a hatchback.
It's a five-door.
A five-door.
Nothing to do with any of the Daimler Chrysler.
It's all before the...
No, no.
This is a...
The Epsilon was launched during the Daimler Chrysler era.
But yeah.
It's a Fiat Chrysler product.
Although I've got two Fiat Chrysler products because the SZ is also a Fiat Chrysler product.
How?
How he says.
Chrysler had what to do with Alfa Romeo?
Oh, no.
Sorry.
I take that back.
I take that back.
I take it completely back.
Oh, no.
I know the thing.
It's a very funny story, but I can't tell you now because we're being recorded.
But the...
No, that's a funny story about badges that go on cars that are exported to Belgium.
But that's another story.
But so I've got the...
Epsilon is the everyday car.
Then there's the Alfa.
And then there's a 1935 Fiat 508 C Balila Bertone Berlina,
which is a car designed by Marreroveli de Mement.
It's a limited production.
They made, I think, 10 of them.
There are three that still exist being restored right now in Bétergo.
It's also another...
It's a good one.
What did it...
What were you driving when I saw you at Villadesta?
You were in something with a V8.
And I remember what the hell it was.
It was idling.
And I was trying to figure out whether it was a flat plane or a cross plane.
What was that?
Oh, the ATS.
That's what it was.
Oh, 2500.
Yes, ATS.
Actually, this is...
Hmm.
It's an ATS 2500 GTS.
One of the two lightweight cars, which may have been actually the car,
one of the two cars that did the Cargo Florida on 64.
Oh.
It's fabulous.
And actually, this brings me back to another great topic,
which I hope we have a little bit of time for,
which is documentation.
That's one of the cars that the Adrain acquired from Nick Begavitch,
Nick Begavitch Collection.
Nick Begavitch was this amazing fellow.
He was an electronics engineer and physicist from Fullerton, California.
And he worked for many years for Lytton Industries.
Actually, he's the president of Lytton Industries.
And who else did he work for?
I can't remember.
He was basically the person who devised most of the guidance systems
on all the missiles that kept us all safe through the 1950s and 60s.
And so obviously, as a consequence, his work found him frequently making trips to Europe.
He was a big car enthusiast.
And so he loved cars.
He didn't really drive much.
For most of his life, he lived about three miles from his office.
So he would buy these cars and then sort of not drive them.
But he loved them for their engineering solutions.
And so when he sold only two cars during his lifetime,
one he was so annoyed about when he sold,
it was a Ferrari 240 that Phil Hill had driven in the Carrera Pan Americana.
And the person he sold it to restored it, won a class at Pebble Beach
and did not restore it to the Phil Hill Carrera Pan Americana style,
just did it as a really shiny, lovely Ferrari.
And the other, after years, literally of coaxing,
he sold his Alfa, his Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato to David Sidorek.
I was the only person I ever bought a car from him that he actually wanted to sell.
And so then right before he passed away, he made a donation.
He and his wife made a donation, actually the second wife,
made a donation to Cal State Fullerton to help fund a gravitational wave center.
And it was 14 cars they donated to the university in December of 2020, I guess it was.
No, December 2019.
December 2019, he passed away at the beginning of March 2020.
So the cars went to the university.
They told Jay about it, thinking, well, maybe Jay will come in and buy them.
Jay told us about it in Newport.
So I flew out, looked at the cars, said, yeah, we should do this.
And bought the collection.
And all of the cars, with one exception, had not moved since 1987.
They had been sitting in his garage, but he loved to change oil.
So he changed the oil all the time.
And he would have students from the university come over and he would talk about his cars in the garage with them.
The only, the car that had been moved the most recently was his 904, which he bought new at the factory,
drove around Germany, drove on the Nürburgring and then had shipped home in the TWA plane.
And he kept, as an engineer, he kept everything.
So in the paperwork that came with these cars was the customs declaration form for the flight back,
watch, band, some perfume, a Porsche 904.
That was hysterical.
But it was absolutely astonishing.
And one of the things that he said, and it was absolutely wonderful,
we did an exhibition at the museum of all of his cars, actually not all of them,
because two of the cars had not yet been recommissioned,
because two of the cars when the collection was sold were in the middle of restoration, two Pagossos.
Not one, but two.
One of which was one of the competition cars that qualified for the 1952 Monaco Grand Prix for sports cars.
Absolutely amazing thing.
And a touring-bodied example as well.
But in an interview, he had been quoted as saying that most museums do a lousy job of showing cars,
they just put them on a floor, on a pedestal and display them like furniture.
You have no idea why you're looking at them or why they should be there.
I thought, wow, that's a challenge.
And so the exhibition was entitled Engineering plus Design equals Passion, the Nic Begumich collection.
He loved mid-engine and rear-engine cars especially.
That's the ATS.
The ATS, Maserati Bora, Pantera, Biora, 904, just absolutely astonishing things.
And then 904, again because of his mania about changing oil,
904 actually had been out as display at Pebble Beach in 2004.
But because he changed the oil and he's sort of always keeping to what they should do,
he was putting bean oil in.
Bean oil did not like the impeller for the oil pump.
So that was the only thing that actually had to be replaced.
Everything else, it was absolutely amazing.
They tore the engine down.
The car had 2,900 kilometers on it.
I think now it's got 3,200 kilometers on it.
And it was like a brand new car.
It won post-war preservation at Pebble because, of course, it had to.
I mean, it was a perfect new car.
What is bean oil?
Caster bean oil.
Oh.
Yes.
Okay.
Which is great for race cars when you're totally draining the oil and filling it up again.
But it's organic.
So it just ate the magnesium.
It was astonishing.
Again, one of those things that those cars were wonderful as objects of study.
But ultimately, a lot of people looked at him and said,
gosh, it's so sad that he had all these spectacular cars that he never drove.
And I remember, and I'll tell this story now, knowing that no one,
I know we'll hear this story.
We can stop recording now.
But the 904, it was recommissioned by the folks at the Speed Sport Tuning.
And it was absolutely amazing.
So I went up to Danbury to see the car before we took delivery of it after it had been recommissioned.
And took it out for a drive around.
I don't know if you've ever been to Danbury.
It's in Western Connecticut.
It's nice.
It's some really interesting roads.
Yes, Danbury Mall.
You know.
I was probably there as a kid.
Exactly.
So drove around this wonderful country roads.
It was really great.
The handling was amazing.
The sound was fantastic.
And so as advice, we take it out onto Insta-84 so you can open it up a little bit.
Okay, great.
Wow, it's amazing.
Oh my God, this car is so smooth.
Oh my God, I'm going 130 miles per hour.
I should probably slow down.
So I did.
And to your point about respecting your car, I've driven that car four times.
Each time I drive it, each time I have driven it, I think more and more about what could happen
if something happened to this car because it is now transcended being a car.
It is now an historical object that cannot be used as a car.
And it's something that, again, I think in examining what the characteristics of a car are,
we can then decide what it is.
And there are lots of cars that deserve to be used because they are not these reference objects.
Miles Collier loves to talk about the fact that, you know, again, going back to Bugatti's,
so many Bugatti Type 35s, you know, have maybe six parts that they actually came out of Mulsain with
because they've been used so often.
But there's one, the one that's in the museum at Monaco.
It won the Monaco Grand Prix, was driven from the Grand Prix course and put in the museum.
You can't ever use that car again, ever.
Because, you know, to use it would be to use up everything that really ends it.
If I'm taking the opposite view, Notre Dame was burnt down a couple of years ago.
So therefore you can drive a car that was restored.
Okay, there you go.
You don't have an emotional attachment to that car.
Well, we have no emotional attachment to Notre Dame, God knows.
Watching the ceiling melt the leather.
That was painful.
No, it's terrifying.
I mean, you don't get, you don't typically get emotionally attached to cars, right?
I try not to own any cars that I think are irreplaceable.
I think that's actually what it is.
Or maybe I can't afford to own anything I think is irreplaceable.
Irreplaceable or unrepeatable?
Both, I guess.
The hardest part for me to sell a car is if I know there's some aspect of its documentation that would be difficult to repeat.
Or the configuration.
Now, let me ask you this question, since I get to interview you in your own show.
You sell cars.
So one of the things that I've been involved in the antiques and art world for a long time.
And one of the things that is frequently said that you should not sell that which you collect.
Because then becomes too difficult.
Either you get emotionally involved in your stock, which you don't want to do because you buy it to sell to someone else.
So have you ever had opportunities to buy cars that you think much like my Delta Integraale?
That I can't buy that because I won't want to sell it.
Yeah, I mean, I think the key is not being able to afford most of the cars we sell.
And then it's not a risk.
But if I could afford to keep a lot of these cars, it would be problematic.
Because oftentimes I will come across stuff, you know, and that's where the really extraordinary documentation.
You know, like we sold a 300 SL once that the guy was a Boeing engineer and he did a European delivery trip.
And he had receipts from the hotel stays on a European delivery trip.
And if I could have afforded to buy that car, I absolutely would have bought it, but I couldn't afford a 300 SL.
So thankfully I didn't have to buy it.
But yeah, absolutely.
Like it's like don't get high on your own supply.
Right, exactly.
But you're a young man.
So I mean, see me, I just leverage my entire life.
I do regret one.
I have very few regrets.
No.
Sorry.
I have very few regrets in my life.
But one which I do have is I've always wanted.
I love Bugatti Type 57.
And the one I've always loved more than any is the Gallibier sedan.
And for a very long time, they were absolutely dirt.
Yes, they were free.
And so I made the mistake of telling my friend of mine is one of the leading Bugatti restores that I would love to have one of these cars one day.
I said, oh, okay.
A few months later, I got this phone call.
Donald, you said you wanted a Gallibier.
Yeah, I heard about one which I think would be really interesting, really.
A 1939.
It's a very late car with hydraulic brakes.
Exactly.
One family ownership in France from New.
And they wanted, I think they wanted 400,000 euros for it.
I said, well, that's a lot of money.
However, again, find the other single family.
And it was also black with the red interior.
It's like, oh, fabulous.
And so I turned to Frank and I said, this is opportunity.
Frank said, first of all, I think the car is ugly.
And second, it's like, you're not emptying a retirement account to buy a car like that that no one's going to give you a nickel for afterwards.
Like, okay, fine.
But I think that all things considered that if there were on the planet today a million dollar Gallibier, that would be it.
Yeah, but those cars are coming to us rather than going away in terms of values.
You never know what looks around the corner.
You're also not retired yet.
So you have more time to put money in a retirement account.
You're still working.
True that.
I've totally forgotten about that.
You don't need that retirement account clearly.
You're never going to retire.
Exactly, exactly retirement.
What a concept.
Who?
Especially since I keep on taking on other responsibilities.
So it's a terrific thing.
I mean, I'm very excited about this thing.
It's something that the folks a few have been talking to me about for a couple of years.
And with this whole idea of collaboration, sort of the simplification,
working collaboratively, working to understand that it's not about judging people's cars,
because that's not what the enjoyment of historic objects should be about.
You don't say, well, that's a van Gogh with an ugly frame.
But it's a fool's errand anyway,
because what you would find offensive as a modification or a condition somebody else wouldn't.
Somebody else would appreciate the cars being used and, you know, and enjoyed.
Somebody might not.
There's also this other thing, which is me being judgmental, which is great,
because as an appraiser, I get paid to be judgmental, which is fabulous,
but not wearing my fever hat, which is that there are modifications that,
for instance, all the modifications that you make with your Ferx Vagans
are all using Ferx Vagans parts.
Almost all of it, yeah.
You're not replacing the Ferx Vagans engine with a Renault.
No.
A Chevy Small Block.
So it's as if I was recently driving a bunch, I love, strangely enough,
old pickup trucks, like 1950s, 1940s, 1930s pickup trucks.
I think they're really neat.
But I don't like, it's the only place where I think a Resto mod is acceptable
because driving a old pickup truck in modern traffic is almost impossible.
But if you're going to do it, I recently drove a 1947 Ford pickup truck.
And it was fantastic.
It had been updated with a later Flathead Ford V8.
Now, a Flathead Ford V8 was available in the car in 47.
So they just sort of, let's make this a little more friendly,
give it a little more power so that you can.
This is the terminology is called OEM plus is what we would call that,
which is to say that, or when you see something that's modified to see it done
in a way that is consistent with how it would have been hot-rodded in period
versus like, oh, it's got LED modern headlights on it that are the wrong color temperature
and have obvious projectors and some modern aftermarket wheels.
Like Porsche people do this all the time because they all have the same damn car.
And so there's all these people out there who are making supplying bits
for cars that are modern.
And I hate seeing all that stuff because it is so dated of this particular era.
And I really appreciate when a car is modified,
like, oh, I could have seen someone doing this in period
because the whole purpose of buying an old car is that it should be an old car
and not some nonsense that some clown down the street came up with last week.
It is 3D printing.
It is the thing that I say often because I really believe it in my heart.
When I was a little boy, I love the idea of time machines,
little knowing that I would grow up to live in a world of time machines.
You got behind the wheel of that car, you're in 1977.
I mean, that's where it lights itself.
Exactly.
And no, but it takes you to another place, which I think is absolutely fantastic.
I've also fallen in love with veteran cars.
There's nothing you guys have got to get to veteran cars.
I would love to.
I would love to.
It's just there's an accessibility problem for me.
There's not an accessibility problem for you
because if you were to come to Newport,
probably can't do it this year,
but in May, if you're having to be free the weekend of May 16th to 17th,
the annual veteran car tour in Newport, the Audrain Motorsport Veteran Car Tour,
two groups, 1895 to 1904 and 1905 to 1918,
and do a 50 mile drive up to Bristol, Rhode Island and back.
It's absolutely fantastic.
I love it because you are responsible for every bit of motion in that machine.
There's no relaxing.
There's no tuning out.
You are there doing it and it is glorious.
Eight miles an hour petrified.
Yeah.
And that's the other thing.
I mean, I was actually a couple of weeks ago shooting a video driving a 1904 curve dash old.
And that thing going along a 15 miles per hour, you could be going 200.
Yeah.
And going back to the period hot rod thing,
I also just recently did a video with a 1911 Ford Model T Frontenac Roadster.
The Chevrolet Brothers after abandoning their company built speed parts for Model T Forts.
It's got an overhead valve head and this thing goes 65 miles per hour.
It is unbelievable.
Now it also has disc brakes on the rear wheel however because you have to.
And there's a car that was modified as a hot rod through the 1920s, 30s, 40s and into the 50s.
It's absolutely amazing.
So yeah, there is that thing.
And also the Vécule ancienne, as we said before, 30 years old.
Our beloved Shirakos are Vécule ancienne.
Every car, my newest car of the needle is a 96 Mark III Cabrio 30 years old.
There you are.
Terrifying.
And so it's another thing that people have to look at cars in a different way
because there are things that we remember seeing in the showrooms noon.
You think, well, that's not an old car.
Oh, yes, it is.
As we get older, that becomes correct.
And there are cars that are modified, heavily modified even,
that 30 years from the date of their modification, they are historic vehicles.
They are not original historic vehicles.
They are modified historic vehicles, but they're historic vehicles.
That's an interesting one.
Yeah.
Right.
You buy something that's in the 1970s and in 2000, it's Resto modded in 2030.
That's right.
That's an historic vehicle.
Holy shit.
That's funny.
Singers will be historical at some point.
And that's a very interesting thing too,
because the issues of attitude and copyright notwithstanding to me,
I won't speak officially for FIFA,
but I know that I can say with people, my colleagues hiding behind me,
we've had discussions about this.
What singer has done and what perhaps Porsche has worth a singer to do,
I'm not sure, is actually what we'd like to see in things like this,
because they are not Porsches.
They are singers.
So I think that's the proper thing to do.
So when you have a replica speedster that has Porsche on it
and people title it as a Porsche, it's not a Porsche with a space frame
and a Subaru engine.
The Cyberglass body is never a Porsche.
Never in its life has it been a Porsche.
Agreed.
So, you know, it's just about the proper identification of everything.
Hence the ID card.
Hence the ID card identity.
Exactly.
Amazing.
Thank you.
And you're coming all the way here to give us this hard sales pitch
about something.
You want to go to lunch?
Just before you hurl me out,
I just want to remind people again that if you want to learn more about FIVA
and the USA and Friends of FIVA USA,
to send an email to friendsoffivausa at fiva.org.
Okay.
We'll put a link in the bio also.
If we...
All right.
Hold on.
That's on Instagram.
We'll do a description, something.
A link in the description.
There will be a link in the description below.
Don't forget to smash that like and subscribe button.
A link in the...
There'll be a link in the...
A link in the Ford in the Mercury.
Mercury is in retrospective and...
And I'm glad to have also enlisted the two of you as compatriots in the effort to bring FIVA back.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm fully on board with the sort of consumption of cars and treating them as cultural artifacts.
I think that a lot of people love cars, but they don't know why.
And I think that that's exactly the reason.
And so hopefully we can all come to terms with that and sort of agree that it's something worth pursuing
and get people to not just think about the car in terms of what it allows you to do,
but also how it fits into the larger picture.
So I'm all about that stuff.
Perfection.
Cool.
Happy trails.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Come back.
I will.
Promise?
Yeah.
Damn.
Hahaha.
About this episode
Donald Osborne drops into the Carmudgeon Show for a live, profanity-laced hangout that quickly turns into a deep dive on historic-car culture. The crew trades stories about Ferraris, Italian oddballs, and why some cars are better driven than preserved. The centerpiece is Osborne’s work with FIVA—how its identity card documents originality, discourages fraud, and supports advocacy for historic-vehicle rights in the US. They also debate “resto-mod” ethics, stewardship vs. perfection, and why provenance and documentation matter as much as the cars themselves.
Original notes
On this episode - a Rhode Island man in a bowtie is found in the studio - who flew more than 3000 miles just to talk about strange Italian cars and the people that drive them.
If by that description you were thinking of anyone BUT Donald Osborne - we’d be shocked. But today, he’s here with us!
In case you’re not familiar - Donald Osborne is a renowned classic car historian, author, media personality, and professional appraiser. He’s also the Consulting Director for the Audrain Group, having been heavily involved with the Audrain Automobile Museum over the last seven years. You’ve also may have seen him as a regular contributor and co-host on Jay Leno’s Garage.
Most recently, he’s become the North American Representative for FIVA - short for Fédération Internationale des Véhicules Anciens - a worldwide organization seeking to protect the historic and cultural interest of vehicles around the world 30 years old or older. Conveniently - nearly all of Jason and Derek’s cars are this old - Jason’s second newest car being his VR6-powered 1996 Volkswagen Cabrio.
Donald, Derek, and Jason discuss what it means to be an enthusiast of historic vehicles in 2026 - and how the US celebrates classics a little differently than the rest of the world. But perhaps that could change.
They also discuss Donald’s current fleet - both in the US and Italy - including but not limited to his Mercedes-Benz SLK230 5 Speed, Alfa Romeo SZ, Lancia Appia, Fiat Panda, Moretta Cinquecento Sport, Lancia Epsilon, and many more that have come and gone…
All this and more on this episode of The Carmudgeon Show.
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