He Fixes Multi-Million-Dollar Ferraris for a Living. The Car He Actually Drives Is a $10,000 BMW He Found Parked on a Street.
Ethan Moore talked his way into a job at a Bay Area classic-restoration shop at 16 by naming cars off the lot. His own daily driver is a track-built 1995 E36 M3 he bought because of its color.
Ethan Moore's day job is working on cars worth millions of dollars. He got it the way people rarely do anymore: by wandering into a shop with no résumé and no connections, and correctly identifying the vintage machinery parked inside. Moore started in the trade at 16 with no prior experience, working through high school at Canepa Motorsport, the well-known Santa Cruz restoration and collector-car house. He was later hired on by Rafi Najarian, who runs a Bay Area shop specializing in classic European sports cars, after Moore walked in off the street and named the cars on sight — a Ferrari 250 California Spider, a Fiat 8V Supersonic, a Maserati A6G among them.
None of that is the car Moore actually drives. Parked outside a friend's shop in San Francisco, he spotted a track-built 1995 BMW E36 M3 — roll cage installed, not built for straight-line speed — and the color alone was enough to make him track down the owner and buy it. It's the car he takes out on back roads and mountain roads most weekends, for reasons that have nothing to do with outright pace.
"This car is just absolutely glued to the road," Moore says. "It does what I want it to do, and that's something that's very hard to find in a lot of cars." He's described the E36's cornering feel as the closest thing he's found to the sensation of racing BMX as a kid — not a straight-line rush, but the load building through a corner and the car answering exactly the way he expects it to. "It's just such a solid car," he says, "and it hauls ass through the corners."
Moore's story ran as "The Keeper" on Petrolicious, the car-culture outlet that profiles owners and their machines on film rather than spec sheets — a fitting format for a mechanic whose day job is surrounded by nine-figure metal, and whose own car is a decades-old M3 he bought because he liked how it looked sitting on a curb.
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