The Ordinary Auto Shop That Repairs the Most Extraordinary Cars
“I work on a lot of stuff that other people don’t want to work on,” Michael Spyropoulos tells me. We’re in his shop, Pit Stop Foreign Car Service, and you can’t be fooled by the location. It’s on a nondescript side street in Yonkers, but this is a go-to garage for elite automotive dealers in and around New York City, themselves among the top retailers in the world. When a place like the Cultivated Collector needs something fixed, it goes to Pit Stop.
Everywhere you look in the shop, there’s something incredible. The only big-block Intermeccanica ever built glows green on a lift, and a Jaguar E-Type sits below, its twin-cam inline-six power plant gleaming under the lights. There are rows of British and German sports sedans poking out from behind spare engines and components, and there’s an English wheel and every other tool you need to work on any kind of car.
At Pit Stop Foreign Car Service, in Yonkers, N.Y., a Jaguar E-Type sits below the only big-block Intermeccanica ever built.
Raphael Orlove
Sandwiched between two Porsches is a Ferrari Testarossa—pristine inside and out—wearing black paint with a red interior. A mechanic’s two legs are sticking out the open door, his head down by the pedals. The car lives in the city, Spyropoulos explains, and it’s getting full electric power steering for easier urban driving. “It’s bespoke for the car,” he says of the conversion, which takes a trained hand to install. “When I was on the West Coast, I did about a half dozen.”
Spyropoulos grew up working on cars with his father, Demetrios, who opened this shop back in 1983. But it was his dad who encouraged him to venture out for some new perspective. Michael went to McPherson College in Kansas, which runs the only four-year bachelor’s-degree program for automotive restoration in the country. There, he traded his dad’s Triumphs and BMWs for Pierce Arrows and a Patent Motorwagen on loan from Mercedes-Benz.
After graduating, Michael spent nine years working at Fast Cars, Ltd. in Redondo Beach, Calif., doing full restorations and sending class-winning cars to the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. In terms of classic cars, he was getting thrown into the deep end. In a recent video, he recalls that on his second day on the job there were two Ferrari F50s, two F40s, an Enzo, a 250 SWB, and a 275 GTB all in for service. Now, “I don’t get afraid of a lot of those rare, high-dollar cars,” Spyropoulos says.
He returned to Pit Stop four or five years ago, and the cars that he’s worked on in this humble garage are staggering. A couple of examples of the Lamborghini Countach passed through here the other day. Before them, there was a Ford RS200 road-legal Group B rally car, a Gandini-designed DeTomaso Guara, a Mosler, and a couple Venturis—the French sports car of the 1990s that faced off against Porsche GT2s and McLaren F1s. Spyropoulos says that he doesn’t know anyone who has worked on more individual Jaguar XJR-15s than he has. I try to square that with the 1960s-era Mustang I see in front of me, or the late-model Honda Accord that’s in and out as part of a routine checkup. Despite the fact that Spyropoulos often works on multimillion-dollar cars, this is still a neighborhood shop.
Michael Spyropoulos (right) currently runs the shop founded by his father, Demetrios (left), in 1983.
Raphael Orlove
Spyropoulos calls himself the “black sheep” of his class at McPherson. Many of his classmates dropped out as they realized how difficult this business of repairing such expensive, eccentric, and obscure cars can be. Of those who graduated, many of them are doing steady, often brand-specific work at high-end dealers, or maintaining private collections. There aren’t many people as educated as he is, doing the kind of varied repair work that he does. “Quick service jobs? Maybe 20 to 30 a month,” Spyropoulos estimates, making this a very high-volume operation for the grade of car it can handle.
Michael continues to uphold the honest character his father set for this place. His dad is retired, though we do see him zipping around behind us through the whole interview. He and his son go back and forth over the right way to do this or that. It’s sweet to see the two of them working together. There’s only one other mechanic in the shop, Tom. He and I stop for a bit just to watch Michael and his dad take apart a front corner of a 1990s Mercedes SL. (Tom has since left the shop, having moved out of state. Pit Stop is hiring and welcomes would-be applicants to swing by 79 Palisade Ave.)
Michael is 36 years old and part of a sea change in the classic car world. With Baby Boomers aging out of their time behind the wheel, a new generation is getting in on car collecting. They’re dragging what once were blue-chip classics out of storage and back into use. They’re cars, after all, not just investment vehicles, and they’re meant to be driven. Indeed, though Spyropoulos has worked on the most desirable cars on the planet, he himself drives a 1990s BMW. It’s an E36-generation M3 that he built from the ground up in California, swapping to a later S54 engine. He even did the paint work himself, and there are finally enough chips and dings in it for him not to baby the car anymore.
Pit Stop is something rarer than the Ferraris it services. It’s an ordinary garage that’s equipped to work on extraordinary cars. “This guy lives in Williamsburg,” Spyropoulos says, gesturing to an air-cooled Porsche, the kind that has appreciated far beyond the reach of the average enthusiast over the past few years. “He lost his clutch on the way here.” These are classics, but there are people still treating them like daily drivers. For these kinds of owners, there are few places left like Pit Stop.
Click here for more photos of the Pit Stop Foreign Car Service repair shop.
Raphael Orlove
