‘Lost Car Rescue’ is a new TV show about finding abandoned cars in Canada’s backcountry
For many Canadians, the northern parts of the Prairie provinces and British Columbia are a vast and mysterious land of forest, marshes and snow. For Matt Sager it’s a place filled with classic and antique cars just waiting to be rediscovered.
On “Lost Car Rescue,” now airing on History Canada, Sager and his team look for classic and antique cars and trucks in some of the most remote regions of the country. But instead of driving around and hoping for the best, they’ve taken a different approach to spotting these hidden gems. They take to the air.
Behind the yoke of his 1948 Stinson airplane, Sager and fellow pilot Jessica James come in low over fields, forests and marshes, looking for a glint of chrome or the patina of rusted sheet metal that marks a lost car in need of rescue.
“The vantage point of a bird’s eye view was something that no one really had done before,” said Sager. “It was a bit of a labour of passion just to fly, then the cars just started presenting themselves.
“We probably see a hundred cars before we see one that really catches our eye, or is really rare, or rare to the automotive world,” said Sager. “But there are thousands of cars out there. It’s really hard to believe for anybody who doesn’t see it.”
Bodywork expert Dave Mischuk, who also appears on the series, said that while the land they are searching may be sparsely populated today, that wasn’t always the case.
“In Saskatchewan, for example,” he said, “at one point there was a farmer (and a family) on every quarter (160 acres) of land.”
While many of those farms were later bought up or closed down, “that’s where you find the cars,” Mischuk said. “We had a rich resource of families living in the areas that we hunt now.”
For many, storing an old car on the property — with the rest of the retired farm fleet — made more sense than transporting it to the nearest scrapyard, which could be hundreds of kilometres away.
“We’re hunting lineage or family,” Sager said. “We’re going after those families because it’s the families that left the cars behind. So, it’s where people lived that we’re actually hunting for.”
A west coaster, Sager said he’s had “that bug to unearth relics” since he was around 10 years old, while Mischuk did autobody work in Saskatchewan for 42 years.
“My mom claims that I was born with a toy car in my hand,” Mischuk said.
The two started working together six years ago, after Sager found Mischuk while he was looking for vehicles to restore.
“I was out hunting cars. I had two days off from work,” Sager said. “We were hours and hours on a country road driving to one of these remote towns that we had researched. We ended up sleeping on the side of the road. We woke up in the morning and the sun’s just cresting. We’re driving by Dave’s place, and it was like a satellite dish shining.
“It was actually a car that Dave has up on a hill, and the chrome on the car was just shining in the morning sun and it was so cool,” he said. “We ended up hitting it off. First go and it was one of those things where you knew that it was going to be something more.”
Spotting cars
What do you do when you spot a vehicle from your plane? The perk of light aircraft is that you can just land and have a look. Driveway? Field? No problem for Sager and James. But it’s not always that simple.
“I always approach it with the utmost amount of respect. You don’t want to scare animals and you don’t want to go too low,” Sager said.
“There’s a way of approaching being over someone’s farm or dwelling, and I’ve never had a bad scenario. It’s always been met with sheer wonder of what just happened,” he said. “‘Why is there a plane landing on my driveway?’ ‘Oh, that was you buzzing the farm?’ Sometimes people will joke about shooting at us or something. (The joking) is not uncommon. But it’s always been met with people (who) just love that we’re out there doing something that we’re passionate about.”
Sager said the people they meet in northern British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Alberta are usually old souls who are generous, as well as family and community oriented.
“So, if you’re approaching them with that respect, they welcome you to the family almost instantly,” he said.
Mischuk said car spotting and rescue season starts early in the year, with spring being the best time to go as there are no leaves on the trees and the view of the ground from the air is wide open.
While some vehicles may be in a backyard or even a barn, others need to be extracted from decades of neglect. That’s where the rest of the “Lost Car Rescue” team, including crane operator Lee Brandt and and Sager’s brother, Steve, a mechanic, come into the picture. They also use a number of custom tools and vehicles to deal with the unique geography. “My brothers and I rebuild them all. There’s a passion there for saving anything,” said Sager.
“People are just getting a window into our lives. So, I’m excited for everybody to watch it, I think,” he said. “And, yeah, I think people will hopefully get inspired by what they see.”
“Lost Car Rescue” airs Thursdays at 9:00 p.m. ET on History Canada. It’s also available to stream live or on-demand on StackTV or the Global TV app.
Keyword: Forgotten and found