JAY WARD: MEGA ENTHUSIAST

STORY | MICHAEL TEO VAN RUNKLE

PHOTOGRAPHY | VIJAY SANKER

Anyone active in West Coast car culture knows, or at least has heard of, Jay Ward. A frequent judge at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance and occasional car reviewer for Automotive Addicts, an occasional contributor for Hagerty, Magneto, and Linkage magazines, as well as on Instagram posting as @dadsdailydriver, Ward rose to public prominence after working at Pixar on the Cars film franchise. But serving as creative consultant and creative director for one of the most beloved automotive movie series of all time didn’t happen by chance. A little luck factored into the story, sure, but as he tells it, the theme has always been cars.

Ward grew up in Modesto, California, after moving west from Kansas City, Missouri, with his mother while in grade school. By chance, he wound up in the same small Central Valley town where George Lucas went to high school and drew inspiration for the iconic movie American Graffit

“Modesto is a sleepy town 85 miles from the Bay Area,” Ward laughs now, “Most of my buddies worked on cars, built cars, and cruised cars ‘cause there’s little else to do.” But even before moving to Modesto, Ward recalls visiting his dad’s shop, Ward Automotive, outside of Kansas City where he watched all manner of custom and classic cars being fixed up for sale. Detailing cars, dad always found good stuff crammed into and underneath seats, so the younger Ward began amassing a collection of die-cast cars and plastic airplanes.

Ward hoped to attend art school after graduating from high school but a single mother’s budget left him scrounging for cash, so he wound up joining the Navy Reserves to help pay for courses at California College of Arts and Crafts in nearby Oakland. By chance, his roommate Jerome Ranft’s older brother, Joe Ranft, had already made a name as a story artist working on Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and helping create a movie in the works at that time called Toy Story.

At the time, Joe’s next project was Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Jerome, an aspiring sculptor, joined the production, as well. As a nod to his friend and roommate, Jerome actually put the name Jay Ward on a tombstone on the The Nightmare Before Christmas film set—and Ward still keeps the prop on his shelf to this day.

After the Tim Burton flame fizzled out, Jerome bounced around jobs before landing a role at an upstart digital animation studio in the East Bay called Pixar, working on a new project titled A Bug’s Life. “I went to go visit him in 1997 while he was working on A Bug’s Life,” Ward remembers. “I was outta school by then and I was like, ‘Wow, this place is shabby, but really cool.’ You could just feel the energy. And this is before Pixar was a household name.”

Pixar had landed a major commercial success with Toy Story under the leadership of one Steven Paul Jobs, who spun the company off from Lucasfilm in 1986 and would serve as CEO through to 2006. Meanwhile, Ward hinted to his buddy that if any positions materialized, he’d happily leave a gig managing the parts department at Dudley Perkins Harley-Davidson in San Francisco.

When a production assistant role eventually opened up in the Monsters, Inc. art department, Ward took the leap of faith. Then, while working his way up to a management role, a fellow production teammate shared some early concepts for a new feature focusing on animated cars. Already known as the preeminent automotive connoisseur at the company, any chance Ward wanted to join up?

At this point, Ward’s personal automotive predilections focused mainly on American classics, and his collection over the years reads like a rundown of the GOATs. He remembers a 1956 Ford F100 with flames and whitewalls, a 1949 Lincoln Cosmopolitan coupe chopped and hardtopped with a DeSoto grille, a ‘39 Mercury taildragger, a ‘29 Model A Roadster stuffed with a Cadillac 331ci V8, and a ‘57 Pontiac Safari Wagon as highlights. No wonder the Pixar production staff saw him as an excellent asset to help develop a story about talking cars.

Of course, that simple concept would spawn a series of films that possibly represent Ward’s greatest contribution to car culture, as he helped to pick the specific models to match character and plot, while compiling early reference images for the development team. At this point, on the technical side rather than art directing as he had originally hoped, Ward learned that producer Darla K. Anderson wanted him to earn the kind of insight that comes from having worked on both sides of film development.

Cars hit theaters in 2006, eventually racking up $461 million in box office sales against a budget of $120 million. The characters Lightning McQueen, Tow Mater, Sally Carrera, and Doc Hudson delighted children and adults alike, in a fantastical world where anthropomorphized cars live out a small-town racing dream. Silver-screen stars Owen Wilson, Bonnie Hunt, Larry the Cable Guy, Richard Petty, and Paul Newman voiced the main characters and following the first film’s breakout success, Pixar cranked out two sequels over the following decade. Which explains how Ward wound up contributing to Cars-related projects at Disney resorts and global experiences.

He still owns the ‘57 Pontiac to this day, finned and chromed out on whitewalls, with the classic proportions of a two-door wagon that, some might say, border on cartoonish. Meanwhile, his personal car story continued, as well. And the emotional connection viewers felt with Lightning McQueen and Sally Carrera pales in comparison to the heart-wrenching tale of how he acquired his own G-body Porsche 911. After buying a house with his wife in Orinda (“the crappiest house in a nice neighborhood”) Ward began keeping tabs on the house across the street.

“It looked like nobody lived there,” he says. “The lights were never on, it had not been remodeled since 1978. One day, this old lady finally came outta the house, shuffled across the street and got her mail, shuffled back. And I told my wife, ‘Oh my gosh, somebody lives there!’ There was a bicycle that had vines growing through it, a moldy basketball hoop. It was like something out of a horror movie.”

Ward eventually learned his neighbor’s tragic backstory. In 1980, the old lady’s husband, a doctor who helped invent the artificial knee, crashed a Cessna while flying with their two sons up to a ski cabin in Truckee. “She lost her husband and both her boys and one of her son’s best friends,” says Ward, “In 1980, her world kind of ended. But she stayed in the house, the boys’ rooms she left as they were from 1980. The basketball hoop was the boys’ basketball hoop.”

Ward and his wife befriended the widow, who enjoyed spending time with his two children, who were about the same age as the boys she had lost. Eventually, she mentioned that she had noticed how Ward kept bringing all kinds of cars home. New cars, old cars, why does he always have different cars? “You know, I have my husband’s old car in the garage and I’ve let it sit for a long time,” Ward remembers her saying. “Would you help me get it running?”

The car in question ended up being a 1976 Porsche 911, still painted in its original Minerva Blue Metallic over a black interior. Ward worked on and off for two years on the true garage find, fixing the fuel system and brakes, decalcifying the 2.7-liter magnesium flat-six. Once he fired up the engine, though, it started dumping oil— clearly needing a reseal after so many years of sitting.

“It’s a ‘76,” Ward explains. “So it had an air pump and thermal reactors and all that garbage on… Keep in mind, the ‘74 to ‘77 911s had not taken off in value. They were the last ones to rise, frowned upon, nobody wanted to smog 911s.”

The 911 was an honest car with no rust, damage, or modifications. But facing the prospect of a more serious mechanic’s bill for the engine reseal, and unable to drive the car herself, the widow mentioned to Ward that she was thinking about selling it.

“I said, ‘Would you give me a chance to buy it?’ And she said yes, so we agreed on a price. And then I spent all this money, of course, to finish fixing up the car.

As usual, “fixing up the car” eventually included sourcing Euro-spec bumper tips, H4 headlamps, clear side markers, and dropping the chassis down to the European ride height. By the time Ward finished the mechanical restoration and light modifications, however, his neighbor had suffered a stroke and moved into a nursing home. But he visited her with the car and took her to a car show, where the plaque read her husband’s name.

“She loved that,” Ward remembers with a smile. “We still see her all the time, too.” For those wondering, the specific shade that Porsche calls Minerva Blue Metallic is not the color of Sally Carrera in the Cars films. But the character Sally Carrera would lead to another Porsche project that Ward recalls fondly.

“Back when we did the film cars, we built life-size cars,” he explains. “We built a lifesize McQueen, a life-size Mater, and a lifesize Sally for the 2006 premier.”

The life-size Sally was based on a 996-generation 911, that was shortened seven inches and featured extended A-pillar and a unique fascia to help the production vehicle more closely resemble the character herself. That version of Sally ran and drove while touring the world promoting the film, but eventually ended up in a warehouse in Los Angeles falling into disrepair. With nowhere at Pixar to store the car, Ward helped coordinate moving Sally to Stuttgart, where the factory performed a nutsand-bolts restoration before inducting the car into the Porsche Museum in 2014.

Years later, Porsche’s VP of Marketing, Angus Fitton, called Ward with a proposal. At the beginning of COVID, the factory had auctioned off the final 991-generation 911, a Speedster, to raise funds for charities fighting the pandemic. After that effort raised a million dollars—half a million from the final bid, which Porsche matched—Fitton figured another fitting project would be to build a new 911 based on Sally Carrera and then auction it off in support of Girls Inc. and the UN Refugee Agency.

Ward worked directly with Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur’s Sonderwunsch team and pulled in Bob Pauley, who had designed Lightning McQueen, Sally Carrera, and Buzz Lightyear. The duo helped spec a one-of-one 992-gen 911 with a unique Sally Blue Metallic paint-to-sample exterior over 996-inspired Turbo Twist wheels, plus Houndstooth Pepita and chalk-colored leather on the interior—and a few Cars-specific details including logos on the valve stem caps and a sketch of Sally on the dash. Ward and Pauley then accompanied the so-called Sally Special to Monterey Car Week in 2022, where RM Sotheby’s auctioned off the build.

“Porsche brought Bonnie Hunt, the voice of Sally, to come and do the little opening speech at the RM auction for it,” he recalls. “I was hoping it would bring between $700,000 and $900,000. Like, okay, that’s my hope… It went to a million dollars within 17 seconds. And then it went to two million. And then it went to three million.” The winning bid for the Sally Special reached $3.6 million—the highest total ever for a new Porsche.

“The room just exploded, people were like freaking out,” Ward says. “It was just the love of Sally Carrera and Porsche coming together at the right time in this perfect car.”

In addition to auctioning off one-of-one Porsches, Ward has become a familiar face at Monterey Car Week by now, where he has served as a judge at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance for many years. That prestigious honor once again traces back to a fortuitous encounter, after the owner of preeminent collectible car dealer Fantasy Junction—which just happens to be directly across the street from Pixar—introduced Ward to Bill Warner, who hoped to get a tour of the film studio. “Bill Warner’s this nice guy from Jacksonville, Florida,” Ward says, “He asked, ‘What’s your favorite car?’ And I said, ‘Do you want my top 50 American or my top 50? There’s a list.’” A week later, Ward got a call from Warner’s assistant confirming that he would be judging the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance that year. The next year, he stepped up to judge at Pebble. Ward went international in 2023, serving as a concours judge for the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este on the shores of Lake Como in Cernobbio, Italy. He still owns the Minerva Blue ‘76 911, and dailies a 997.2 911S in the Bay Area, but he’s thinking of adding a car via a European road trip. “My nerdy fantasy for 2024 is to buy a classic car while I am over there and drive it around before returning to judge at Villa d’Este, then ship the car back to California.”

“I’m such a nerd about this stuff that I started making my list of what cars I want to buy,” Ward chuckles. “My hope for this year was I could fly over to Europe, buy a vintage car, drive it around for the week before Villa d’Este, and then ship it back to California.”

Ward’s fixation for motoring isn’t limited to American and European classics—which the 997.2 911 will almost certainly become one day. He’s also recently finished restoring a motor scooter, too. But not just any motor scooter, of course, one with a story.

“Ernst Heinkel was one of Hitler’s mechanical masterminds throughout the war, and he built the first jet aircraft,” Ward says. “After the war, the U.S. sent most of Hitler’s cronies to the Nuremberg trials. But not Ernst Heinkel. He made the Heinkel Tourist, which was the most overbuilt, over-the-top scooter. It was so well built, it was the Rolls-Royce of scooters. There’s only about 300 in the U.S., I got one from San Francisco that was derelict and fixed it up with my son.”

The fact that Ward finds the time to restore vintage post-war scooters—while working internationally on Mundo Pixar projects in Brazil, Madrid, and Mexico City—should come as no surprise to anyone who has met him. A judge’s cap on, smiling wide while inspecting the world’s greatest Concours cars, or telling the story of Sally Carrera, just another example of what passion and hard work, with just a little luck thrown in for good measure, can produce. In this case, a car story.