This is Part 3 of my interview with the cast of Sorted, a YouTube series featuring influencers Matt Farah, Rob Ferretti, and Emelia Hartford, plus professional driver Tanner Foust. Sorted focuses on automotive tuning and modification, pitting some of the gnarliest builds in America against each other while testing streetability and track performance.
In Part 1, we discussed how the crew chose all the wild cars that made it onto the show—and some of the ones that didn't even survive long enough with Farah, Ferretti, and Hartford to progress into the hands of Foust. In Part 2, the cast covered what it takes to win at tuning and modding, with a focus on how to solidify the goals for a build before dumping truckloads of money into upgrades.
For Part 3, I want to focus on what Farah, Ferretti, Hartford, and Foust all took away from their collective role as judge, jury, and executioner on Sorted as they brought a group of strangers' cars together and killed them for clicks.
Emelia Hartford Will Still Twin-Turbo Anything
Emelia Hartford may have felt the most at home among the radical project cars on Sorted, having amassed a ton of experience with tuning and modding herself while building the fastest C8 Chevy Corvette on the planet. Perhaps that familiarity explains how little her attitude changed over the course of filming Sorted: she's still a big proponent of following the heart (in her case, that means twin-turbocharging just about everything in sight), but admonished the uninitiated to educate themselves before beginning a project.
"I am a firm believer that you can have a modified car that is also reliable," Hartford argued. "You guys see me blow cars but you also don’t see me talk about my reliable ones because I have a channel where I build them, push them, and see where the limiting factor is. Now, when you’re talking about modifying cars, you’re talking about what is the weakest link. My daily up until a couple weeks ago—not cus I blew it—was my twin-turbo C8. But that’s only been dropped because my limiting factor on that was clutches.""
"Didn’t it catch on fire?" queried Farah, jokingly, "Not even a month ago?
"One fire extinguisher wasn’t enough," Ferretti joined in.
"The only reason it caught on fire," Hartford explained, "Was that it’s a daily that I was taking to the racetrack and an oil line sheared... Someone has to be the guinea pig and figure out what’s going to break so we can build around that."
"So what you’re saying," Ferretti quipped, "Is if you want to daily a twin-turbo C8, you also need a rental car or a bus pass."
Since our chat, Hartford's success with the twin-turbo C8 build has been well documented and perhaps the biggest single indication that she's still deadset on more is the fact that she just bought a wrecked Lamborghini Super Trofeo. The countdown to bolting on snails begins...
Matt Farah Loves His Keen Project Porsche 911 Safari Build
Farah's advice to would-be wrenchers was to spend as much money as possible at the outset—hoping to start with a beefier, more reliable foundation—and build from there. He specifically pointed to the V10 engines powering the Viper and Audi R8, plus the Porsche Turbo's flat-six, as the strongest performers that appeared on Sorted. And it's true that turning up an already potent powerplant just a little seems to have proven more reliable than doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling the output of smaller engines.
Farah's own life fits into that mold and he doesn't consider himself much of a mechanic, even though he almost strictly owns 30-year-old cars including a Ferrari 328 GTS, his wife's JDM Mitsubishi Delica, and his "daily driver" safari-style Porsche 911—though he did just announce the addition of a Mustang Mach-E to the family.
"I drive press cars most of the time," Farah explained, "So it’s not like I personally have to spend every day in a 30-year-old car... I like projects where I hand someone the vehicle and they hand me it back when it’s done."
That famous safari Porsche came from the Keen Project and specifically, it's a 1987 911 with a mildly hot-rodded 3.2-liter flat-six that he had built for durability with upgraded head studs, pistons, and rods from a Turbo. But it's not particularly powerful compared to the absurd levels seen on Sorted.
“It has been built specifically so that I can beat the living daylight out of it for 100,000-plus miles," Farah claimed, while also revealing, "All of that work is for an engine that makes maybe 260 horsepower.”
"For him [Foust], driving racecars ruins you for street cars," Farah went on. "For me, I drive every new supercar that comes out and if I had to financially keep up with that—if my personal car-buying habits had to keep up with every new thing I drove—I’d be living in a box."
Tanner Foust Came Away Impressed By The Enthusiast Community
Foust's taste for street cars may have largely been ruined by driving racecars for a living—when he's not commuting in his prop plane or advertising the latest and greatest from Volkswagen AG—but he came away from serving as "the grim reaper" for the cars on Sorted with a restored respect for the modding crowd.
"A lot of those cars, it was just basically driving the turbo," Tanner recalled. "It’s a challenge trying to figure those cars out—and I like that. There was one car that we had that was an actual weekend warrior racer, which was the BMW. That was the only one that I recommended on the show. It wasn’t crazy, like I’m going to die if I push that little pedal. It was very predictable, so that one you could get in and drive 10-10ths right away."
But as Farah and Ferretti riffed earlier in the chat, nobody else really remembered even driving the BMW, even if it did survive the challenges better than any of the other tuner cars.
"I find a big difference between a street car and a racecar," Foust continued. "I love the fact that people use street cars to hone their skills on the track but street cars, in general, don’t make good racecars—just heavy and heavy. But for me, what I’ve taken from this show is renewed passion in the enthusiast world. There’s a lot of talk about autonomous driving and electric cars and that’s really the main topic, but the enthusiast world is still super healthy. Being on a show like this has gotten me back in touch with that group, it’s really gotten me back into the passion of cars, rather than the tech on the way from manufacturers."
Rob Ferretti Believes In A Single Car For Each Specific Task
For Rob Ferretti, the evolving landscape of performance products available from the factory has forced the entire ethos of the tuning and modding industry to ratchet up a notch. Blame Dodge with the Hellcat engines or the growing spate of six and seven-figure supercars, but the baseline has leapt to a new level lately.
"When I was younger, in the early-2000s when I started to get into cars, there weren’t really fast cars," Ferretti remembered. "Six or seven-hundred horsepower cars weren’t a thing. Now you can get a 765LT from the factory and drive it across the country—with air conditioning. You don’t really have to go faster than that, in my opinion."
"The benchmark for what cars can do really changed around 2010," he explained. "Even a 1994 Supra, I mean, that’s not fast at all.
"I was really happy daily-driving my supercharged Corvette back in the day—roll bar, race seats, it was great. Now it’s gotta be comfortable. I’m a really strong proponent of a specific car for a specific task. For my daily driver, it’s gonna be something really boring like an Audi A4 or I drive a Mercedes every day that I bought for a thousand bucks."
Of course, the purpose of that Benz was quickly rendered moot when Ferretti recently took it to a shooting range and riddled it with bullet holes, graffitied it with rattlecans, and lit it on fire—but hey, now he's daily-driving an Acura NSX.
Some Cars Won't Make It Onto A Show, Though
For the purposes of getting on a show, the entire cast of Sorted admitted that the best bet would be to build the craziest, most insane monster possible, the one that hands out giggle faces left and right. And then, as Farah aptly put it, "Expect it to die at the hands of Tanner Foust."
But that kind of project, clearly divergent from the concept of a modded car that's truly "sorted," does partially dominate the Sorted discussion due to the goal of producing an exciting, marketable YouTube series.
"Would you rather watch the 1,700-horsepower Viper," Ferretti asked rhetorically, "Or the Miata racing the Civic?"
"I talk about on my show tuning out of class," Farah said. "You can tweak the last 10 or 15% to make it yours. Beyond that you’re going to sacrifice driveability. That’s the consumer advice, not, 'We’re gonna cast you on a show about modified cars.'"
At Least None Of The Cars Caught On Fire
Really, was the problem that Foust kept pushing the cars on Sorted too hard? Or were these builds just the product of maniacs pushing their dreams way past the limit of technology and driver skill?
"You get into a racecar and you’ve got a lightweight car, you’ve got strong horsepower cars—but these cars are made to last for hours," Foust said. "So they don’t puke out 1,700 horsepower and everything’s not just right on the ragged edge. It was an experience for me getting into some of these cars. It’s starting to build boost and you get on the throttle and then somewhere around 7,000 RPM, something freaks out and you’re burning tires in fourth gear. For me, the unsorted part of it was kind of the most fun."
"He’s really modest," Farah cut in. "We were doing the car-to-car tracking shots—it was the very first thing we did and I was driving the minivan camera car—and he drifted every single car not three corners into the first lap."
"He gave me a lot of anxiety when he did that," Ferretti laughed. "Like, we’re not even filming yet but he broke this one on the warmup lap! That’s not good."
From the sound of it, the vetting process leading up to a show about vetting cars could have been a bit more stringent—but as Farah, Ferretti, Hartford, and Foust laid out for me over the course of our lengthy conversation, finding the limit requires going past it at least some of the time. And the show certainly serves as a bright side to that exploratory process.
"We didn’t have any fires at all," Ferretti told me, looking on the bright side himself. "We had a fire extinguisher sponsor—H3R Performance—but no fire, which is good... Season two!"
Sources: instagram.com, youtube.com, h3rperformance.com, and sortedornot.com.