Matt Sager is perfectly cast in Lost Car Rescue, a non-scripted TV show on the History Channel that puts his expertise in several areas to good use.
Not only does the Mill Bay resident have a working knowledge of the densely-wooded areas of B.C. and Alberta explored on the show, he’s a lifelong car buff, amateur adventurer, and thriving car-recovery entrepreneur, with a team of like-minded collaborators by his side.
“That’s why we’re on TV,” Sager said. “Our group that we have is a match made in heaven. We all know each other, and we’re all pretty much experts in what we do, if you want to call us that. There’s few people who can come to the table and rival that.”
The second season of the show premieres Wednesday, and finds Sager and his team travelling by air and land in search of cars to rescue for others to restore. Each cast member on the show has an integral set of skills: Steve Sager, his brother, is the team’s mechanic and official “fixer”; Dave Mischuk is the autobody specialist who assesses the damage and cost of repair; Jessica James pilots the plane from which vehicles are spotted; and Lee Brandt operates the crane used to extract cars from sticky situations.
Sager oversees it all, with a keen eye for detail. As it turns out, he’s exceptionally good at his job. “For me, it has gone from an extreme hobby to occupying most if not all of my professional time,” he said.
When he’s not on TV rescuing cars, he works in the construction industry, for his family’s business, Richwood Contracting, whose clients include B.C. Parks. He’s also currently building a house in Cobble Hill, “which occupies all of my other time.”
Sager said he could find a car each day for the rest of his life and still wouldn’t run out of inventory-in-waiting. During a five-hour flight in search of cars, he’ll locate 75 cars an hour, of which “five or six will be very intriguing,” he said. “And that’s on a bad day.”
Any single farm can have up to 10 cars on a property. “Sometimes one farm will have 50. It’s never one car. It’s a spackling of every different type.”
He’s got a rapidly-expanding list of cars to recover. At last count, two years ago, he had just shy of 14,000 cars indexed. He figures he has 5,000 of those committed to memory, ready for instant recall. “There will be cars for the rest of my life. The problem is the cars are decaying. I won’t run out of cars — but the cars will run out of time.”
There’s enough work for Sager to make this his full-time job — he gets about 15 e-mails a day with tips on cars that have been abandoned — but the window of opportunity for finding rusty gems-in-the-making is often limited to a four-month stretch. The second season of Lost Car Rescue was filmed last year as summer approached, with the team exploring B.C., Alberta, and Ontario for inventory.
“It’s like fishing — there’s a season,” Sager said. “We have a short window of time that we can take advantage of the ability to see these vanishing cars. They hide amongst the trees, so when the leaves [are] off, around April 1, it’s go time. Then the leaves go back on, which makes it a lot harder to hunt.”
To meet the demand, Sager and his crew hunt aggressively. New episodes are focused on the Rainy River District of Northern Ontario, where the show ventured for the first time this season. Cast and crew set up a temporary home base for the purpose of the shoot, which was a huge risk operationally and financially, Sager said.
The second season also spends time in Dawson Creek, B.C., and Grande Prairie, Alberta. Sager said the northern areas of both provinces provide the best recipe for success. “It produces the best cookies, I like to say. People think it’s random, that we just fly over [an area] and go, ‘Oh, there’s a car.’ But there’s actually a lot of science behind it.”
Every second counts when the crew and its expensive equipment is on the road, so Sager does plenty of advance research. Was there once a car dealership in relation to a town? Does that town exist anymore? What was the population of the town at its peak? “When it comes to these areas, there was a ton of populations that had a lot of money but no longer exist. It’s a great honey hole to pull great stuff out from.”
Most vehicles he finds never make their back way to Vancouver Island, where Sager lives. It’s a matter of risk versus reward: Vancouver Island isn’t kind to cars needing rescue, unless they are kept undercover.
The atmosphere is unforgiving out here, according to Sager. “With that level of salt in the air, anything that is outside is [effectively] melting. If I move a vehicle from the Prairies to the Island, it literally starts to melt in front of me, from the air. There is so much salt and humidity, that perfectly preserved metal gets attacked.”
People are always surprised that vehicles with a degree of built-in value are left to rot out in the elements, Sager said. But not all is what it seems. Someone might actually love the vehicle, but they don’t have the tools or finances to restore it. That’s where Lost Car Rescue comes, well, to the rescue.
“In the places we go, they barely have the tools to survive, let alone deal with these old cars. That’s where we come in with our specialized tools. We make it look so easy, when it’s actually quite hard.”
Lost Car Rescue premieres Wednesday, April 19 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on History Channel and StackTV on Prime Video.
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