Inbound Motorsports Imports the Most Interesting Cars on Earth
Inbound Motorsports brings in some of the most desirable and rare vehicles into the country, regularly topping six figures when brought to auction, but it charges a remarkably nominal fee for the service. Tip to tail on a car coming in from Japan might only run a buyer $1,500.
“If I’m buying stuff from auction in Japan at [large-scale auto auction house] USS Tokyo or whatever where it’s just run-of-the-mill basic business, it’s about 1,500 bucks,” founder Rami Fetyani tells me from inside Inbound’s modest New Jersey workshop, tucked away on a side street in West New York.
That $1,500 covers everything: getting the car, bringing it here, and doing all the paperwork, both for importing the vehicle and getting it registered for use on the street. Less conscientious importers, Fetyani explains, will often bring the car to the port and leave the owner to figure it out from there. They almost seem surprised that the customer might want to drive their car after buying it.
For Fetyani, this service is a small lift in a business where word of mouth is the best advertising. “For me, it’s sort of no difference in my day-to-day,” says Fetyani. “It’s an added few emails to actually do. So it benefits a buyer because obviously they can get something here inexpensively. They’d be responsible for all the other costs upfront. But I’m looking at the auctions every single day.”
It’s this online obsession that started Inbound Motorsports. Fetyani was working a day job in accounting in midtown Manhattan while eyeballing online auctions in Japan at night. First, he bought one car for himself, then a few more to sell, and things snowballed from there. Since 2016, Inbound Motorsports has grown into such a well-established business that Fetyani happily downsized its inventory. When I last visited Inbound a year and a half ago, I went to its overflow warehouse not far away in Lyndhurst. There must have been 60 cars there. Now Inbound only keeps a handful around at a time. “It’s much easier for me to not have to manage this much overhead,” Fetyani explains, “and just do 5, 10, 15 transactions a month where I’m selling cars directly.”
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Inbound sources its cars from all over the world, but they are not always imports. Fetyani might find a car in Europe and sell it to a European client. In the shop, Fetyani points out two pristine ’90s BMWs that popped up on eBay in nearby Pennsylvania. They may end up sold to another American, in the unlikely event Fetyani decides to sell.
Inbound also regularly lists cars on the online auction house Bring a Trailer, which shows visitors all auctions that are about to close. This funnel directs eyeballs to vehicles that nobody would think to search for. And Bring a Trailer only charges $99 per listing. There’s a lot of built-in marketing with each sale. “I don’t think you could have run this kind of business without them,” Fetyani says of Bring a Trailer. In a way, Bring a Trailer helps Inbound maintain its eclectic taste.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Stepping into Inbound’s workshop, it’s not packed to the gills with Skylines or Japanese Kei trucks as one might expect. My eye is drawn to an obscure and adorable Toyota Blizzard, a personal fascination of Fetyani’s, though there are as many Renault 5 Turbos as anything else. Through a good deal of internet sleuthing, Fetyani was able to find Neil, a Renault 5 Turbo specialist Inbound currently employs nearly full-time to go over these idiosyncratic French cars.
This is a diversified business, one that Fetyani hopes will keep him afloat amid President Donald Trump’s tariffs. That’s far from the only drastic shift in the market here, where individual states are free to virtually ban all kei trucks and JDM vehicles.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Nothing is more out-of-left-field than the Koenig-Specials Porsche 930 Turbo sitting beside us, being watched over by Steven Kovalovsky, the other half of Inbound Motorsports.
As Kovalovsky puts it, he’s the “motorsports” and Fetyani is the “inbound.” Fetyani finds and imports cars. Kovalovsky makes sure they are ready for sale. In the case of the Koenig 930, that’s an interesting job.
Fetyani found the car in Japan, where it had been well-used and well-maintained. Nothing drastic needed attending to. Fixing the original fiberglass widebody was a job for the expert hands at Suprlife Studios, a small custom shop a few towns over. Any mechanical work had to be done by Kovalovsky, and he wasn’t getting any help from the Porsche establishment. Though this is a historic car, an icon of 1980s tuner excess that pushed the limits of turbo technology on the street at the time, there are still purists who would rather see it returned to stock condition. “My buddy told me ‘Take off the widebody and we can talk,’” Kovalovsky laughs.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Outrageously wide and powerful, the Koenig is a relic of a pre-digital turbo era. The car is a mishmash of parts from various manufacturers. Koenig used whatever worked, from wherever it could find it. Kovalovsky points to a gizmo recessed deep in the engine bay that looks like a mechanical fuel pump. It’s not from Porsche. It’s a Mercedes part, designed to smooth out the pulses sent through fuel lines from the car’s high-power mechanical fuel injection. It might make five or six hundred horsepower, as much as a very fast modern machine, but this Koenig is remarkably analog. It’s the very end of one automotive era, scratching its way into the next.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Broad Arrow Auctions at Florida’s high-profile Amelia Island Concours guided it for between $170- and $190,000, and it sold for $134,400. It can be hard to price cars that are so rare.
There is some comedy in a business that buys cars sight unseen, cars that are sure to have small and unexpected problems, cars that are rare and unusual and difficult to repair by nature, and brings them to a market where they were never sold new, where there are not going to be parts for them. And it brings over different cars every time so that it can never build up a storehouse of spares. Every car brings a new set of challenges. Many people would see these as problems. For Fetyani and Kovalovsky, each one is an opportunity. Why complain? Tackling the tricky stuff is their whole business.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Inbound Motorsports
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Inbound Motorsports
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Inbound Motorsports
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Inbound Motorsports
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Inbound Motorsports
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Inbound Motorsports
