It was a Bay Area shop he had been meaning to check out. He drove over, found the door open, and stood at it, naming what he saw to himself: a Ferrari 250 California Spider, a Fiat 8V Supersonic, a Maserati A6G. His boss-to-be, Rafi Najarian, was working on a Jaguar E-Type. Rafi saw him, waved him in, and after listening to a teenager freak out over the contents of his shop, asked Ethan if he wanted a job. “Hell yeah,” he said.
It wasn’t the first time. At 16 he lived down the road from Canepa Motorsport and hung around so much that Bruce Canepa pulled him aside and told him if he was going to be there every day, he might as well work. He did, all through high school, with no experience behind him.
Rafi Najarian has been working on these cars his whole life. His family were the sole importers and distributors of Ferrari, Maserati, Jaguar, and Lamborghini in Lebanon and across the Middle East through the 1960s and ’70s. Ethan works alongside him now, on multi-million-dollar Ferraris, and helps tune and drive Fiat 8V Zagatos.
His own car is a built 1995 BMW E36 M3. The E36 M3 followed the legendary E30, and for a lot of people it has been the first real sports car, the one that gets you in the door. He spotted it parked on a San Francisco street outside a friend’s shop, track-built, with a roll cage. The color did most of the work. He tracked down the owner, asked if it was for sale, and bought it.
“This car is just absolutely glued to the road,” he 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 lives around back roads and mountain roads. The E36 goes out every weekend.
It is not the fastest thing in a straight line, and nobody, least of all Ethan, cares. What he keeps coming back to is the way it carves. “It’s just such a solid car, and it hauls ass through the corners,” he says. He raced BMX as a kid, and the cornering brings the same feeling back. He hasn’t found it in any other car.
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