donger need food.

Nine Year Love Affair

It began nine years ago, in a dark and rarely visited corner of the oddly shaped (and then unnamed) undergraduate library at UCSD. There I sat, illuminated by the throbbing murkish green of flourescent light, and surrounded by the 60Hz hum of a worn ballast and the rumble of a roaring air conditioner. Volumes and volumes of literature towered over my tiny wooden desk as I sat uncomfortably on the naughahide pleather chair - circa 1974. The early afternoon sunlight struggled to reach this dark shadow-filled location, but I didn't care... I was in love.

There, in the bound pages of an old archived issue of Car and Driver was an article entitled: "Magnum Force: The three most powerful sports sedans in America trip our triggers." There's something about the writing behind Car & Driver during its glory years, long since gone, that inspired foolish young twentysomethings like myself to lust illogically after shiny pieces of automobile exotica.

And so the seeds were planted. I couldn't get enough information about this (then 4 year old) chunk of German steel. Thank God for the internet! How else could I have fed my desire without USENET, mailing lists, NCSA Mosaic, and Yahoo?

At the time, I was getting my first taste of the real world at my first real computer job...a C++ coder for a small company (long since defunct) out on Mira Mesa Blvd about 10 minutes away from campus. I proceeded to adorn the wall in my office with my own form of yuppie pornography (printed on our large HP Laserjet 4P):

A far-reaching $50K goal, if you will: One day, you will be mine.

As I fretted over stupid "unresolved symbol" linker errors that required hours of staring at unadorned function names in grey eXceed xTerm windows, this image

lined my Windows NT 4.0 desktop, beckoning me to push forth into the wee-hours of the morning. The screaming howl of a race-bred 24 valves and 3.6 liters is calling you...just work your ass off, and one day you'll find yourself screaming down the highway behind the wheel of The Beast, hand-built by a bunch of fanatical Germans out of the BMW Motorsport plant located in Garching.

Like a teasing prelude of things to come, I would spot one on the roads of San Diego, something that likened itself to a seismic event. I would find myself staring...drooling...rolling down the windows to hopefully catch a whiff of the thrumming of the exhaust; watching the turbine wheel covers...imagining the air being accelerated through the innovative yet controversial function-over-form design intended to reduce brake-fade at autobahn speeds.
Yes, my fascination bordered on psychotic obsession.
And yes...any sane and financially responsible person would have took his hard-earned money and put a down payment on a 2000 square foot starter house for $180K. Or Yahoo! stock at $3/share. Or AOL stock at $4.95/share.

But I was neither sane nor financially responsible.


And when an obsession takes hold, whether it's for a young twenty-something pinay of my dreams or for a shiny metal object that goes "vroom", all sense of reason and logic go out the window. But hey, things could've been a lot worse: I could have figured out how to get that girl to fall madly in love with me thirteen years ago and we could've been married with 2.5 kids at the age of 27. Stuck in suburban hell with a lawn mower, parent-teacher conferences and a Dodge Caravan in the garage.

But here I am, having the time of my life at the age of thirty-five. No obligations. No mortgage. No kids. Just a pile of stuff accumulated from years of materialistic consumerism filling the corners of my rented apartment.

And one hell of an amazing feat of German engineering sitting in the cold concrete garage below me, patiently awaiting the next moment when I'll fire her up to life with the twist of a dull plastic key. After racking up over seven thousand miles, after logging countless hours wrapped in her aging grey leather Recaro seats, I must say that the obsession has been worth the wait. Usually with things that I fascinate over, the anticipation and excitement peaks in an anticlimatic moment once I satisfy the desire. But not in this case. This thing has lived up to all the years of hype. Granted, it's not the fastest thing out there (hell, a $20K econobox Neon SRT-4 will blow my doors off) nor is it the most luxurious (what, no cupholders?!? no GPS? no automatic climate control?!?) but holy crap did they ever get it right.

There's just something unexplainable about the way the 1970s-era powerplant rumbles at idle...windows up, you can still hear it and feel it through the floorboards. Windows down, and it's this oppressive lumpy deep-voiced rumble like a diesel locomotive at a train station. And then there's that growl all throughout the rev range, that turns into a wild wail at redline as it hauls your sorry ass in a progressive surge of power that builds and builds... Words can't do it justice; the only way is to wind it up in third gear -- from 60mph to the high side of a highly illegal 110 at redline -- and you'll know exactly what I mean. With no driver aids other than ABS, destiny is in your hands. No TCS or ASC crap to get in the way of the fun...if you wrap this thing around a tree, it's your own damned fault.

Some would say that blowing money on a 14 year old depreciation-bucket of a car with 85K miles and a finicky race-bred motor is just downright stupid. I'm not going to argue that point.

But I don't care.

Everytime I slam my foot down on that floor-hinged go pedal and feel every ounce of that inline six work its magic, I forget how my life could have been and the opportunities I missed out on. Instead, I sit back and enjoy the sun overhead and that incredible motor speaking a language that only a few of us crazy car guys can truly understand.

posted by VirtualErn @ 1:34 AM

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