Online car culture these days ranges from backyard builders to amateur reviewers and professional journalists who happen to be amateur filmmakers. Clicking into the realm of automotive YouTube quickly reveals just how much streaming video now dominates the industry—but just ask Brooks Weisblat of DragTimes about the stigma some automakers (looking at you, McLaren) still hold towards content creators to see how slowly the world truly changes sometimes.
Still, there's no doubt online culture has profoundly changed the world of car culture, as fans can share wonderful, variegated stories from around the world with only a few clicks at the keyboard. There's truly something for everyone—and there's clearly money in it, judging from the blend of paid sponsorships, ad revenue, and stat-based SEO reach.
Enter the more recent efforts to publish high-quality, high-production value through expensive shows like those available from Hagerty, Petrolicious, and more, where influencers blur the lines between journalism, marketing, and entertainment. Case in point comes in the form of the "YouTube superteam" show Sorted, produced with funding from the car search aggregate site AutoTempest and hosted by online automotive celebs Rob Ferretti, Matt Farah, and Emelia Hartford, as well as professional driver Tanner Foust.
Following the release of Sorted's debut season, I spoke with the cast at Farah's Westside Collector Car Storage facility about how the show got off the ground and how they landed upon all the crazy cars that feature in every episode.
Rob Ferretti Watches Matt Farah's Show, Everyone
In the first episode, Ferretti reveals that the idea for Sorted originally formed in his head, so I had to begin our chat by asking how he originally came up with the concept.
“Matt Farah used to do these One Takes," Ferretti recalled. "And I would talk to him behind the scenes. 'What, you just go out and drive ten cars a day?' And he’d say 'Yeah, in theory.' These people are bringing it for someone else to review and these people are bringing him something held together by duct tape.”
Farah himself confirmed that kind of mindset's prevalence among tuners and modders—which explains why so much of his YouTube content these days has transitioned towards new factory products and away from the custom enthusiast community with which he made his name.
"I felt guilty because I was judging their personal choices," Farah explained, "Where if I drive the new GT3, here’s a company that wants you to buy this—should you? When I would drive people’s cars on camera, the car would be fine but they’d know I was coming to drive it so they’d put it on the dyno and want to give it six extra horsepower. So now it’s got six extra horsepower but the air conditioning isn’t working and it’s 100 degrees outside. Great, I can really feel the six extra horsepower when I’m sweating through my shirt, thanks!”
From that weird trunk rattle to a finicky seatbelt or a tape deck that doesn't work, everyone gets a little bit accustomed to the quirks and foibles of their own cars. And that kind of acclimatization only appears to happen all the more among the tuning and modding crowd.
"There are things you do to your car that you just drive around and it’s normal to you," Ferretti admitted. "But when you give it to somebody or multiple people who know cars, you say it’s perfect but it’s usually not."
"I’ve been guilty of that," Hartford confirmed. "Like, it’s tomorrow, my car’s too slow, I’m gonna do heads and cams!"
To which Farah shot back: “You ruin all your cars. Every single one of them.”
But that spirit of full-on, all-out power at any cost is exactly what made Hartford such a perfect choice to join Ferretti and Farah on their show. And she steadily contends that her apparently wholehearted efforts to destroy a C8 Corvette serves as a testing bed, blazing the path forward for future engineers and other modders looking for performance gains. That's right, it's for science.
Tanner Foust Serves As Test Driver AKA "Agent Of Death"
Sorted wouldn't have been complete without the final addition of rally driver, pro drifter, aircraft pilot, and Hollywood stuntman Tanner Foust, however. Foust's role on the show provided plenty of hilarious one-liners and a backbone for the insanity because he served as a sort of controlled experiment—even if that experiment tended to result in breakdown after breakdown. And somehow, plenty of the cars didn't even make it to Foust without breaking down beforehand.
"The reason we have Tanner on the track," Ferretti revealed, "Is A: he’s a better driver than all of us combined. But also B: it’s a constant. You now have one guy—having him drive everything whether he’s putting down the absolute fastest time or not, he’s the constant. He’s only in this car for two-and-a-half minutes—he’s never been in this car before—and he’s putting down these awesome lap times. We wouldn’t be able to do that. And you’d have so much internet fighting over who was the better driver. Nobody’s going to say I’m a better driver than him."
For his part, Foust sounds to have had some trepidation about the prospect of leaving behind the team and factory support he's accustomed to receiving.
“Right away, I felt like I was going to be the agent of death," he said. "It was going to be people who were gonna modify their cars a little too much. And was this show supposed to be like a reality check? If so, I’m like the grim reaper that’s going to come in and just destroy their dream car in fire and flames on the track. Luckily, it wasn’t quite like that— they usually destroyed their own cars before I got to!"
Choosing The Cars For The Show
In hindsight, the fact that anyone would allow Farah, Ferretti, and Hartford to shakedown their car—and then hand it off to the likes of Foust for some hardcore track time—sounds borderline unbelievable. But Ferretti insists everyone knew what they were getting into.
“We put together a website to select cars that were submitted to us," Ferretti recalled. "It’s not like we were surprising people with what we’re doing to the cars. We got a whole bunch of submissions, I think we got around 200 for each. And we were picking through and we wanted eight for each location—which, it turns out, wasn't enough because eight for each location a week prior to filming turns into three that actually show up and for some reason, what’s the first thing you do when you know you’re going to use your car? You screw around with it and change something for no reason. And then it breaks."
That's exactly the kind of tinkering that tuners and modders who want to get on Sorted should be up to in their garages. But unfortunately, it also, as Farah said, “Leaves you scrambling to find the next round of cars, which maybe you can’t vet as much as you vetted the first round of cars."
And to be entirely honest, the selection of cars probably didn't quite live up to the name of the show. In fact, the crew easily admitted that they sought more of the all-out insanity to draw views and clicks, rather than pitting a field of more pedestrian, potentially boring builds—hence the four-figure horsepower stats and six-figure receipts.
Was Sorted Really About Truly "Sorted" Cars?
"Often with these cars, it’s all about the fine-tuning," said Farah, "And often, there’s a total disconnect between what will draw an audience to an on-demand style video and what an actual 'sorted' car is."
"I don’t think anyone’s going to come in with that magical middle-ground car," Ferretti agreed, "Because those are less exciting. The middle-ground cars we had were the BMW and the GT-R. Do you even remember driving them?"
"The best modified car is one that you’re driving," Farah responded. "Not one that you’re pulling out an engine with a hole in it. If you really wanna go fast, consider the next class up of car. If you wanna get on a show, consider something that’s going to die at the hands of Tanner Foust—and we’ll film that!"
"I’m guilty of the same thing," Hartford readily admitted, referencing her own popular YouTube show, "I’ll twin turbo anything and see how it goes."
Automotive Eye Candy... Ripe For Destroying
The kind of car that stands out immediately among a batch of hundreds of online submissions—and on a YouTube show's preview clips—is entirely different than a reliable track toy or a weekend canyon carving warrior. And yet, every customized performance vehicle on the road represents, to some extent, the choices made by its owners and becomes something of a rolling piece of interior projection.
"It’s hard, too, because you’re almost judging a personality," Hartford admitted, "Or an extension of another person because they put their heart, their blood, their sweat, their tears, their soul into these cars they’ve built. It’s tough."
Farah wasn't so convinced, doubting the honesty with which plenty of people look at their cars—and, therefore, themselves.
"I think we also shouldn’t understate just how unwilling some of these people were to just openly admit that they’d built their car for highway roll racing," Farah pronounced. "Everyone’s like ‘Oh, it’s built for time attack.' But is it? Is it!? Because it seems like it was built to go 100 to 180 real fast—like, twice. Nobody would say that except the guys from Texas."
But the cars that go from 100 to 180 real fast also tend to look and sound absolutely awesome on camera, which makes them perfect for a fun show like Sorted. All the burnt rubber, blown diffs, and massive turbos produce fan favorites; not so for the staid, understated BMW coupe that alone proved capable of handling everything the cast of Sorted threw at it.
The Most Insane Car Might Not Win
In the end, the process and decisions that Ferretti et al put in place to sort through (sorry, had to) and choose the cars for Sorted may have rendered the entire concept of finding the most "sorted" car pointless. But that doesn't mean the process wasn't a ton of fun, though.
"I will say that when people ask me what’s the craziest car I’ve ever driven," revealed Hartford, who definitely drives crazy cars on the regular, "It was two of them from this show. It was the Viper ACR and the Supra with 1,300 horsepower that just spun the tires in fifth at 100-something."
Throwing a Viper, an Audi R8, a modded Porsche Turbo, and all kinds of dream Subarus, Supras, and more on YouTube definitely created some vivid memories. And just think about all the cars that didn't even make it far enough to get on camera! Vetting an entire flock of cars wasn't possible before filming—even though the filming itself was essentially a more hardcore, hands-on vetting process. Still, despite the fact that almost every single car failed to make it through the entire testing process, Tanner Foust found himself fairly impressed.
"Going into the show," he recalled, "I was thinking eight out of ten cars I’m burning to the ground."
So the truth of the matter, it turns out, is that the modest vetting and selection process that led to the lineup of cars for Sorted may—just possibly—have prevented such tragedies from being transformed into farce on YouTube. Still, the show itself proved that tuning and modding generally leads to mayhem. And despite the slightly-more-than-half-hearted attempt at controlled scientific experimentation on the show, mayhem is definitely name of the game here.
Check out Part 2 of this interview to learn which cars won over the hearts and minds of all four members of the Sorted cast, and why.
Sources: youtube.com, autotempest.com, wccs.com, and instagram.com.