If you’ve been watching any automotive YouTubers over the past couple of years you won’t have failed to notice a couple of trends. One is that the guys buying and fixing wrecked performance cars are getting far more of our time than the those just buying them then moving them on. That might have worked in 2015, but not today. And the other trend is that those guys doing the rebuilds are getting more and more ambitious when choosing their projects, and then going to crazy lengths to get them finished.
None more so than Brit Matt Armstrong, whose YouTube subscriber count is deservedly going through the roof thanks to the way he and his crew take something that looks fit to be made into tuna cans and bring it back to life in record time.
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But more than that, he does it in such entertaining fashion that it makes each of us watching desperately wish we were there with them at 3AM trying to undo that nightmare bolt on the back of the engine block with only a slurp of Yfood (one his regular sponsors) to keep us going. Even those sponsored sections don’t feel like a chore.
Having started out doing minor repairs to fairly ordinary performance cars for the camera in a parking lot, more recently Matt brought fellow YouTuber Adam LZ’s crashed 911 GT3 back to life with frequent collaborator, Tavarish, then resurrected a crashed McLaren 720S by replacing the entire tub with a spare one when the original was too far gone to be repaired. And what’s all the more incredible is that the guy has no formal training, but he dives in anyway, learning as he goes, whether it’s rebuilding a Lamborghini V12 or welding together the back end of BMW M3 that’s tried to demolish a house.
But the channel’s latest build really raises the bar, and our eyebrows, for one reason. And it’s that it looks like it might involve Matt buying a perfectly good used Rolls-Royce Wraith for £100k ($127,000) and cannibalizing it to provide the parts he needs to complete another Wraith. Many of us have bought parts cars before, but this takes the concept to a whole new level.
The clever bit is that the team could buy the donor car on finance to keep the outlay small, then pay off the outstanding finance in full in a few months time when the main car is completed, hopefully selling for a small fortune.
But what car could be so special that it warrants potentially chopping up a perfectly good 10-year-old Rolls-Royce? Try a Mansory-modified Wraith Black Badge which Armstrong bought from a salvage yard for $184,000 ($232k) with barely more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) on the clock after its original owner, English Premier League footballer Marcus Rashford, smashed it into another car when leaving the Manchester United training ground.
That’s a heap of money for a wrecked car, even a rare one, but what made it particularly appealing is that it hadn’t been declared a write-off by the insurance company for reasons that are unclear.
The 2023 coupe, which originally cost the Manchester United player around £700,000 ($883k) when new, suffered extensive damage to the underside, including the suspension and fuel tank, and the passenger side bodywork, and Matt thinks parts from a pre-facelift Wraith could help get the modified post-facelift example mobile again, and still turn a profit when he flips the thing down the line.
What will really push the budget, though, are all the unique Mansory carbon bodywork bits that were trashed in the accident and won’t come with a stock Wraith parts car, but which Armstrong feels obligated to replace to retain the value of the finished Mansory coupe.
The team has resurrected enough supercars to know that parts for them can be eye-wateringly expensive. But the Mansory pieces are on a different planet. Like £4,400 ($5,550) for the door sill kickplate and £2,600 ($3,280) for the carbon embellishments mounted in the fender above each front wheel. And how on earth are they going to match the paintwork? At least the engine runs, though for a while in the first video it looks like that might also one toast.
It’s all a million times more fun than watching Shmee choose the trim colors on his new Ferrari – and the fact that Shmee (whose subscriber count Armstrong is close to equaling, and whose videos get a fraction of the views) has since bought an old Porsche 914 to fix up, it looks like he knows it, too. But the builds have got so serious I can’t help but wonder how Matt is going to keep topping them.
Are we going to see James Dean’s mangled 550 put back on the street a couple of years from now, King Charles’ gold pumpkin carriage fitted with a Veilside kit after being sent to Copart following a fender-bender outside Buckingham Palace, or Matt and his dad flying to the moon to fix up the Lunar Rover NASA left behind and drive it home? Or will the whole YouTube resto trend fade away and be replaced by something else? I hope not, because right now there’s no car content I look forward to more.
