Ok, so some people have tribute pages to their favorite band or TV show. Some show off their families or pet poodle. This page is a testament to the fact that I have always had a fascination with cars.

My first car was this fine 1971 Honda 600 sedan. (That would be the one on the right for those of you who are automotively challenged.)

A 2 cylinder, 600cc engine (just 0.6 liters!) produces a tire-scorching 36 hp at 6000 RPM. Torque is somewhere in the same ballpark. The one redeeming feature? This is basically a street legal go-cart so it's lots of fun! The Accord on the left is exactly 30 years newer. Honda has come a long way in the last 30 years.

After tiring of using a car with 36hp as my daily driver, I drove a variety of 80 's vintage Hondas. I was working in an auto repair shop at the time and had access to low-cost, relatively easy to fix "bargain breakdowns" that were no longer wanted by their owners.

In 1994 I was preparing to go to school in Flint, Michigan. Having grown up in sunny San Diego, and fearing the prospect of driving in snow, I immediately went in search of a 4x4 truck. Alas, the insurance rates on a 4x4 were too high for this teenage driver, so I had to find something else. After much research, I decided that I wanted a 1979 Subaru 4wd wagon. Why a '79 Subaru you ask? Ah, well, '79 was the last year for the cool 70's body style, and the first year for electronic ignition. A happy 1-year-only combination of features. After 2 months of searching I found a dirty but very original car, which I bought for $600. With a coat of paint and some polishing it turned out like this:

I saved a ton of money on insurance because everyone knows that 4 wheel drive on a station wagon is just a "safety feature", right?
Yeah right. The first thing I did with the car is see how far off-road I could take it.

Here I am getting a little 3-wheel action in the hills near my parent's house. Over the many years I have owned this car I heave taken it every place that it was never designed to go.

I drove that little Subaru back and forth between Michigan and California 4 times a year for 2 years and it never let me down. However, I was earning decent money working at my new co-op employer, Eos Corporation, and wanted something newer. Coincidentally, Subaru came out with their Outback wagon about the same time. I bought one of the first ones to arrive in California.

Here I am testing out the no-wheel-drive feature during a Kettering TSD road rally in Michigan. (TSD = Time-Speed-Distance, with a big emphasis on the 'Speed' part in this case.)

The Outback was great and ran like a top, but if you look at the history of vehicles I have driven, I went from 36 to 78 to 132 hp. After 2 years at 132 hp, it was time for the next step. Extrapolating the power curve, it was time for about 265 hp. It was an easy choice after I fell for one of those early Infiniti TV ads that everyone hated. Remember the ones with the jazz music in the background and the uppity guy in the gray suit telling you the virtues of Infiniti products? I immediately put the Outback up for sale and went in search of an Infiniti Q45.

Here I am, polishing my new pride & joy. It was a helluva car to be driving at the age of 21. But I didn't buy it for the way it looks. I bought it for what was under the hood...

This photo is not doctored in any way. The driver of this vehicle (who could that be?) was somewhere in the vicinity of Wyoming. It took all morning but finally the road was clear all the way to the horizon. Wide open throttle got the car to just brush against the speed limiter before settling back to about 150 mph (the speedometer is a bit optimistic, I think). Suffice to say the engine was a real gem. Smooth, incredibly powerful and surprisingly fuel efficient, considering that I ran it hard enough to burn through a set of (very expensive) tires in 12,000 miles. I think the highlight of my ownership was getting to race - and beat - an Impala SS at the street drags in Flint.
I put over 50,000 miles on the Infiniti over the next 3 years, and enjoyed it immensely. But the "Q" was beginning to show it's age - shocks going, radio broken, and an occasional odd behavior from the transmission. Plus I was getting very tired of making $400 monthly payments on a car that was approaching 10 years old.

Time to look for something new - and I knew what I wanted.

With my next car I interrupted my climb up the horsepower ladder to go for another Subaru. This time it was a 1998 Subaru Impreza 2.5 RS. Like the outback, I bought it almost as soon as it came on the market. Having seen WRC races on TV, the 2.5 RS had immense appeal. I could just imagine myself like Colin McRae, flying down gravel roads, doing 4 wheel power slides and catching 4 feet of air over hills.

Looks fast doesn't it? It's not.

Don't get me wrong, the RS was a great car, but the reality was that this was NOT a performance car. Handling dynamics were awesome, the AWD perfect, but the engine just didn't have the muscle to back up the looks. In the end this proved to be the fatal flaw of this car (which has since been corrected with the introduction of the WRX model). That, and it only had two doors, which was just plain annoying. After two years I gave the car to my wife to drive; I had tired of it and moved on to my next vehicle. When we bought our house in 2001, the car was sold to make room in the budget for our house payment.

Meanwhile, I decided to fulfill a dream that I had been thinking about since Junior High. Even back then I was very much into cars. I had seen the most beautiful car ever while waiting for the school bus one cold morning. I didn't know it at the time, but the car was a series 2 Jaguar XJ12. White, with tinted windows, blacked out chrome and lowered 2" over a nice set of BBS wheels. It was gorgeous!

Fast forward 11 years: It's time for me to get one for myself. Of all the cars I had owned up to that point, the Infiniti was by far my favorite. Something about having a high performance engine in a luxury sedan is just very appealing to me. Why suffer with a cramped interior, poor visibility and high insurance, when you can have the same performance in a 4 door sedan? I figured that a Jaguar would not only satisfy my desire for a luxury sedan, but the V12 engine would provide better performance than the 2.5 RS. I spent 4 months looking for a suitable XJ12. It was a surprisingly difficult task to find one that I liked. The primary problem was the choice of colors. In the late 70's Jaguar primarily offered colors such as mustard yellow, puke green, metallic gold, etc. Apparently it didn't occur to them to paint their cars British racing green, or maybe black? This meant that there were only two good colors available: White, or Midnight blue. After 4 months of looking I was starting to get discouraged, but then I got my lucky break: A very nice 1977 XJ12, midnight blue, with fresh cylinder heads and no rust. I snatched it up for $4500 and drove it home. Little did I know at the time what I was in for!

To be continued...

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