Who watches Velocity?

What shows are worth watching? Besides Wheeler Dealers?

For me, Wheeler Dealers, Chasing Classic Cars, and What's in the Barn. The rest varies from iffy to painful, especially the one with Mario, the screaming drama llama.

I watched it once when my rallycross car was featured in about 1.5 seconds of action on some show on there. The rest of the show was generally a yawn, and it was pretty hilarious when supposedly a "reality" show ran the part they filmed at our event (with the show's star's rally car) and it was really, really lame and mostly faked.

Unfortunately, the blood sweat and tears of actually building (or buying/selling, or repairing) cars is mostly boring as hell to watch. But all the fabricated "drama" in most of these shows is even lamer to watch.

I used to watch chasing classic cars a lot. They also had some short track racing on occasionally. I did catch some coverage from some road course races as well but the commentary team was terrible. I haven't had cable in over a year so I don't know if that has improved or not.

Wheeler Dealers, Chasing Classic Cars, and Restoration Garage.

I will watch Phantom Works. The part I like best about it is when the shop owner sits down with the owners tells them the parts bill and how many hours are sunk into the project. It makes it pretty clear to to those paying attention that the 15 minutes you saw on the show was pulled from tens if not hundreds of hours worked.

The Saturday morning shows can be entertaining, but the content varies. I like Car Fix with Lou Santiago and Jared Zimmerman.

They need to get Gearz, but their program director sucks and everything on the network basically pays their way on, dooming most shows to be prepackaged garbage. Wheeler dealers is definitely the exception, and Ed China has a solid offer to leave it behind for another project.

I like Phantom Works as well. It really highlights how if you can't build it at least somewhat yourself, it's uber expensive to restore things. It also shows how much memories are worth to some people. There is the one where they did the gold barracuda that the family owned for a really long time. Turned out it was rusty as all heck under the skin. IIRC they ended up paying 80K+ to restore a 20K at best car.

I'll be the odd man out and confess I like Graveyard Carz. If you can get past the contrived, scripted bullsnot there is some really amazing restoration work going on. Taking the time to delve into who Mike Worman is I learned all about why the first couple seasons sucked so much and what he has done to try to fix it. The short version is there is a disconnect between what we true car people want to see and what the networks believe we will watch. They all feel the population wants "Storage Wars" type crap and won't buy anything else. It has taken Worman about five seasons to slowly turn his show into what he really wanted it to be.

Desert Car Kings is almost watchable mostly because I like to see stuff that would normally be junked given a second life.

All the domestically produced shows suffer from having to be made to Velocity's requirements. Wheeler Dealers is successful despite this because those shows were made for a British audience first and then recycled here until recently. The show is now so popular Velocity buys it based on its performance.

I'll turn to Wheeler Dealers, Chasing Classic Cars, and Phantom Works if I see them on.

I like Chasing Classic Cars, Phantom Works, Restoration Garage, and Wheeler Dealers, along with a few different types of car racing.

What else are you going to watch? There's not many other car shows on tv nowadays.

In reply to whenry:

Actually, there are tons of them. It just that most of the are terrible.

I see I'm not exactly alone: Graveyard Cars has evolved into my favorite show. The host clearly knows that his anger and name-calling is supposed to be funny. He's not even acting, he's trying to amuse the audience. I know because I do the same thing at work.

That, Car Fix, Wheeler Dealers and Mr, Carini are the only hosts I can stand.

You watch too much TV!

Those shows all suck.

FantomWorks, Restoration Garage, and Wheeler Dealers, are some of my favorites, I have really started to get into FantomWorks, because it shows the real cost of restoring a car properly. Instead of doing one off builds and making a profit they focus on repairing cars properly and I find it more realistic.

Wheeler Dealers is probably my favorite, because they buy cheap fix the car and sell it, something that I like to do but do not execute on the same level. I need a Edd China with his crazy hair that works for me to execute it

truth is, flamesuit on and equipped with double layered nomex, that the US production of topgear is better then all of them except wheeler dealers. Most of the shows on velocity are one step above propping up Boyd Coddington's body and doing a series Weekend at Bernie's style and hoping that nobody can tell the difference.

They're really that bad, i'd rather watch a livefeed or stream of someone searching cars for sale on craigslist using some of our favorite search terms. Or browse on here or search myself. I'm thankful that online videos have become better and that there are more channels and outlets for them to be found.

I like Wheeler Dealers, car fix, all girls garage, Gas Monkey garage and the Vegas rat rods......besides that, the chasing classic cars guy looks at cars that do not interest me in the least and go for prices that make my head hurt, US Top Gear is painful.....a lot of the shows have pre fabbed drama that annoys the crap out of me.

In reply to Fobroader:

I can't watch car fix or all girls garage. They are just commercials with paid endorsements. Unwatchable. I like the car fix guys previous shows but the current format is terrible.

What happened to 2 guys garage?

That was an ok show, too.

WD is the best one- it's not trying to sell something- other than the idea of preserving cars. But the rest are tolerable.

And what about Isle of Mann?

Not Velocity but I'll take How It's Made: Dream Cars over any of those others.

No drama. Just cool cars from beginning to end.

GTwannaB wrote: In reply to Fobroader: I can't watch car fix or all girls garage. They are just commercials with paid endorsements. Unwatchable. I like the car fix guys previous shows but the current format is terrible.

Oh absolutely, at least the all girls garage are cute and the car fix guys are entertaining. For my money, the Powerblock on Spike TV on Saturday morning is my favorite one.....even though they should have an eagle fly by screaming "'MURICA!!!!" every 15 seconds they are so obscenely patriotic.

not available on my cable package

stuart in mn wrote: The Saturday morning shows can be entertaining, but the content varies. I like Car Fix with Lou Santiago and Jared Zimmerman.

i find those two guys to be the most annoying people on any of the car shows. i just can't watch that show for more than a few minutes at a time.