Reply to "My journey"

After building my hotrod Subaru BRZ (a new RWD joint venture between toyota and Subaru)it took so long, and we had so many issues, and I found I was married to my new "tuner" guy, so any adjustments, and tuning, required making an appointment, dropping the car off, usually the finding of something that required the car sit at the shop for a week or more, it was kind of anticlimactic when it was finally finished. It was a beast, on the test drive when I was selling the car, I raced a 2004? Corvette at a stoplight and just smoked his ass. The buyer (a very nice chinese fellow) immediately afterwards said "I will buy car" lol. It was a very cool car, lowered, fast, totally finished and dialed in. I found though that the tuner crowd, and the weekly "cruise" (100-200 cars that meet at a big parking lot every Friday night) was just not for me. Most of them were kids (20-30 years old), most with not much money, lots of lowered cars by cutting the coils, leaving them bouncing and ruined, but "cool", and NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING sounds worse than those coffee can mufflers on an unmodified, automatic, Honda or Nissan. You know what I'm talking about, loud, brappy, and when they "get on it" it takes 15 seconds between shifts, all the while making the most God awful exhaust sounds. There were some nice cars, there was the drift crowd, the lifted, giant tired 4x4 crowd, but I just found that all that just wasn't for me, plus, I'm old now, and most all that went down after my bedtime LOL.

My neighbor, Chuck, owns a sweet blue GT4 clone, big riveted on flares, roll cage, badass car.

One day, I though we had a Hell's Angels pack of bikes pull into the cul de sac, the house was shaking, I knew something was up.

I went outside to find that Chuck had hosted one of the Pantera club meetings/drives at his house, so I was looking at maybe 20 totally badass Panteras parked all along the street just down from my house.

I remember telling Chuck, "I'm saving, and one day I'm going to get one of these cars". I met many of the owners, and the whole crowd of Pantera people were totally cool, offered any help I might have needed when the time came to buying, and they all just struck me as a group of people I wanted to be a part of. This was maybe 4 or 5 years ago. I'd long forgotten, and had been busy building this little rice rocket, when I had my epiphany the other week about what I was really doing car-wise, so now, things happened more quickly than I had expected. I expected the search and journey to find "THE car" for me to be longer, and harder, and I had expected to actually travel around and look at lots of cars.
Financially though, I was still limited to the lower range of available cars. I had one race car in SoCal I was planning on looking at with intentions of putting back to street use (which would have been cool as well. I liked the idea of a totally unreasonable, fire breathing, gutted, roll caged, barely legal, gnarly street car) which would have been cool, but was priced much lower.

After meeting Roger, and taking the test drive in his car, I realized I wanted a nice, completed, fun car to own and enjoy and drive, so I spent more than I had factored to spend, but I know I got a great deal, and I got my new dream car, and I know that the people I meet through owning this car are going to all be people that I'll enjoy knowing, and I'm looking forward to going to some club meetings, and meeting other Pantera owners in my area for lunches or to go for drives, or just to hang out.

I think I've found my new "place" in life, at least in part. I know the people I've met so far are much more "my kind of people", so here, now, it begins.

I took my 3rd drive today, the car is awesome, I got 3 or 4 "thumbs-up" at stoplights, got sideways a little a couple times just because I could, I'm a happy camper.

Thanks everyone for the warm welcome, I look forward to participating here on this forum, and to meeting new friends, this is a big turning point in my life.

I'll probably even get healthier and lose some weight because I'm going to be eating nothing but Top Ramen and vegetables for the next year! LOL Just kidding, I'm actually back to work now, but it took a while to recover from the open heart surgery, so all is well.