Spike Feresten has done almost all there is to do in American comedy. He wrote for David Letterman’s Late Night and Late Show in the 1990s, penned an episode of The Simpsons, and while he was writing for Seinfeld, put together the classic episode featuring the Soup Nazi. He also had his own late-night talk show, cleverly titled Talkshow with Spike Feresten, for three seasons on Fox. But it’s the Massachusetts native’s love for cars that will be on display in his latest project.
Feresten’s new series Car Matchmaker runs on Esquire Network, the new cable network for men put together by NBCUniversal and C/D’s brother title Esquire. The show is a cross between comedy, road tests, and automotive adventure series mixed in Feresten’s advice for the forlorn, if not quite hapless, car buyer. The show runs on Tuesdays at 9:00 p.m. ET—so make plans. Our sophisticated, multiplatform, synergistic corporate marketing is counting on you. Here’s a quick look at the show:
But before we dive back into that, let’s explore that point where American car culture and comedy collide and find out the truth about how Jerry Seinfeld came to own Steve McQueen’s Porsche 917. Then how McQueen is responsible for the speed bumps on the street where Feresten lives. And finally how McQueen and Jerry Seinfeld inspired Feresten’s new series.
Car and Driver: What is it with comedians and cars? So many of them—Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, David Letterman—seem to be into cars.
Spike Feresten: And it goes on long before those guys. Johnny Carson was big into Corvettes, I believe. I bet if we kept going back to Groucho Marx that we’d find that most guys are car guys. Comedians or not. They just tend to have a louder bullhorn than everyone else.
You don’t think there’s necessarily a connection between the mentality of a car guy and the mentality of a comedian?
That’s a really good question. Having worked with a couple of those guys—Dave and Jerry—you know, you’re busy all the time. And cars are the perfect hobby to fill short pieces of time. Like getting the latest Car and Driver or Autoweek. I remember that Dave would always be flipping through the classifieds. It seems like it doesn’t take a lot of your time. For me, when I’m working, I love the distraction of looking at cars. That’s where this entire show is born from; that cars are a perfect distraction from work, but not so distracting that you can’t get your work done.
This [happened] back before he had his IndyCar team: I was working for Dave—I was a writer on the show—and I came across this charity event, I don’t remember what the cause was, but it was a go-kart race. I suggested that we enter a go-kart on behalf of The Late Show. He jumped at the idea. He thought that would be great.
So the Wednesday before the race there’s a knock at my office door and it’s Dave. That just does not happen. Dave, while he socializes with the writers, does not stop by in the middle of a show day just to shoot the shit. And he says, “What you doin’ here?” “Working on Top Tens,” I replied. He came back with, “Don’t you think you ought to be down working on that go-kart engine? Let me be clear, I don’t want to come in fifth place in that race on Saturday. So you need to make sure you do everything to ensure that we have an edge.” So for the next three days I’m out in the world tweaking the Briggs & Stratton lawn-mower engine and getting racing gas to try and get us an edge to win the race. And on Saturday—his day off—Dave is calling [producer] Rob Burnett who is also co-driving with me every half-hour for updates on how we’re doing. He was seriously involved in every aspect of how we were doing in the race. It made total sense after that moment that he bought a racing team.
I’m proud that I was his first race driver—the first Worldwide Pants race driver. We launched his career in racing.
How’d you guys do?
We won—until they checked the engine. They saw it was a different kind of spark plug, that the speed governor had been taken off, and the gas was bright purple. We weren’t disqualified because they realized we’d be talking about it on the air. We were bumped down to fifth place. Cheating is a gray area. We thought of it as doing everything to win.
What was your first car?
I grew up in a blue-collar, middle-class Massachusetts family and, like a lot of people, I didn’t really have a choice what my first car would be. So my dad showed up one day with a Ford Torino 500 that he had purchased for about $480 and he said, “Here’s your car.” It was blue with a black interior, and I was happy to have a car with wheels that rolled. It didn’t matter what the car looked like.
From there my obsession was American muscle cars. You know Mustangs and the like. Then my mind was blown by the first Honda Accord that came to town. A car with a five-speed manual transmission was a revelation to a teenager.
But it wasn’t until I brushed up against Letterman and his collection and drove his cars that I even began to understand what Porsches are and why they’re great. Until that point, it was still American cars like Corvettes in my mind.
So what do you drive now?
Here’s what I have right now. A 1971 Land Rover Series IIA that I got as an impulse buy on eBay for $6900. Hands down, it’s one of my favorite cars I’ve ever owned. I have a ’58 Porsche 356A Speedster and a 1968 911L lightweight Trans-Am factory race car that was once raced by Dickie Smothers, so it has a comedy provenance. My main driver is a 2007 911 GT3 RS that I drive pretty much every day unless I need to pick up more than one kid.
I just picked up a 1972 Ferrari 365 GTC/4. I used to have a Dino and [while] Daytona prices have gone through the roof, people have largely ignored these cars. I drove one and fell in love with it. And that’s my obsession right now—I was working on the amp gauge this morning. It’s such a beautiful, fun, smelly, gassy, Italian beast. Like a big plate of spaghetti and a sloshing goblet of Chablis. And it’s the first V-12 Ferrari I’ve owned.
Has Jerry Seinfeld ever let you drive his 917?
I’ve driven it, so . . . yes. I’ve driven his 917 and his 908/3 and it really is an amazing thing to have Jerry Seinfeld as a friend and that collection of cars. It’s right down the street from me at Santa Monica Airport. You wake up and you’re at Laguna Seca driving a 908/3 and you’re like, “How did this happen?”
And the 917, I helped him find it.
That’s the 917 that Solar Productions—Steve McQueen’s company—owned and used while filming Le Mans.
Yes. And it was on La Cienega in Hollywood and I called him up and said, “You’re not going to believe what’s on La Cienega in a showroom window. Steve McQueen’s 917 from Solar Productions.”
A few weeks later he was in town and the two of us went to look at it. And we just stared at this car for hours. Two hours just walking around it and looking at it. It was such a thing of beauty and we were so taken by it. And this predated the Steve McQueen hysteria. Except that in my little group of friends, we were already hysterical about Steve McQueen.
So Jerry looked at the car and it was a lot of money back then and he didn’t want to buy it. And I told him he had to. There was no other guy in the world who could own this car and feel okay about it. “You’re that kind of collector,” I said. And he’s been thanking me ever since.
And that’s why this show started. It was stuff like that. Very often people don’t want to take your advice, but I’ve had a little luck at convincing people what to buy.
So that’s the basis of your show on the Esquire Network—it’s you picking out three cars for a friend and helping them choose the right one.
Before we pitched this show I had sold 20 or 30 cars to friends, families, and famous friends, and my wife was like, “You really ought to be getting paid for this, because it’s consuming a lot of your time.”
If you can take someone out of their comfort zone and show them, “Here’s the car you want and here are two more you should consider,” you can see them opening their eyes and understand what’s going on. This show often speaks to people who don’t know anything about cars.
Are these all new cars or a mix of new and older cars?
Most of the time we’re dealing with budgets that are about $40,000 or less, and it’s new cars that people are after. But I’d say on more than half the episodes I mix in a vintage car. We had a Buick Grand National in just because I was a big fan of that car and what it stood for. Plus I wanted to drive it and I had never driven one.
Did you have anyone come in who had an unlimited budget?
No. We’re looking for that guy.
And you’ll have some showbiz-type friends on?
Yeah, I had Will Forte on and Seth Meyers and Jerry Seinfeld all in one episode. My brother Wally was in that episode. And he is the cue card guy for Saturday Night Live and Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. And I thought it would be fun to have them in that episode because they knew Wally. The show isn’t just cars, it’s comedy and cars. I’m being funny the whole time.
Are there any cars you’ve owned that have disappointed you?
I bought a car I had been chasing out in Malibu, a 1973 911S. It was a silver-over-black car, formerly owned by Otis Chandler. I bought it and couldn’t stand the way it drove. It was a lot heavier than the 911T that I had owned. It was a lot slower than the RS I owned at the time. There was something going on with it so that it just didn’t quite feel as good as a 911T or RS.
Are there any cars that impressed you while making the show?
The F-type. This season the two cars that just blew my mind were the F-type and the new Porsche 911 Turbo S. Those two were just such big wins and functioned so beautifully.
The F-type because of the sound—it’s just like an angry electric trumpet. It sounds like gunfire when you let off. I’ve never had such an experience where I’ve loved a “sound car” more than a “speed car.” This is a car you can have fun in making sounds up to 40 mph and never breaking any speed limits.
And the Turbo S is an expensive car but it’s worth every penny. You can blast it through canyons on a Sunday and then I took my kids to school in it on a Monday morning. That Sunday/Monday transition was just seamless.
Do you have any particular car movies that you love?
Well, Le Mans is the big one. But more than that, it was all those TV shows from the Seventies. Like CHiPs and Emergency! Anything, you know, that showcased that PCH and Malibu driving lifestyle. It really spoke to me when I was living in this small Massachusetts town where it was cold and cloudy most of the time.
And here’s a strange coincidence; I live two doors down from where James Garner and Steve McQueen lived.
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We interviewed Garner and he said that McQueen and he used to race their Minis up and down that street.
Well there are speed bumps there and I asked someone the other day, “Where did these speed bumps come from?” And they said, “These are the Steve McQueen speed bumps.” Garner and McQueen would race up and down the street and the families started getting upset about it. So they dropped them in.
Is there anything else we should know about your show?
I like to do things the dealerships won’t do. You go into a dealership and you feel scared that you’re being taken advantage of. You come on my show or you watch my show and you’re going to have fun and you’re going to learn about these cars and you’re going to experience them—without any pressure whatsoever.
Watch Spike Feresten’s new show, Car Matchmaker, on Tuesday nights on the Esquire Network at 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. CT. Head here to find the Esquire Network on your provider.
John Pearley Huffman has been writing about cars since 1990 and is getting okay at it. Besides Car and Driver, his work has appeared in the New York Times and more than 100 automotive publications and websites. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara, he still lives near that campus with his wife and two children. He owns a pair of Toyota Tundras and two Siberian huskies. He used to have a Nova and a Camaro.
