12-17-2004, 03:03 AM
this is a story about how one car changed the way my dad looks at the automotive world. now that i'm home, i've come to realize how much i've missed since i've been at school. my dad is becoming more and more mired in the thick quicksand that is automotive enthusiasm, and it's awesome.
my dad has always been the responsible guy. the practical family man. the frugal father. he has an engineering degree, so he has a fair amount of mechanical skill, but he's never been "into" cars or working on them. sure, he changes his own oil, knows how a distributor works, and has his opinions about cars. Hes even taken me to a monster truck event and a few car shows. but he's never done anything remotely sporty in/with a car, and about the most exotic modification he's ever made to any car he's owned has been a different brand of oil filter. Whenever Id talk to him about sports cars, or racing, or anything that has to do with enthusiastic driving, hed look at me as if I was being typically juvenile and say something to the effect of what do you need that for?, or why would you want something that does that? He understood what I meant, but to him, a car was transportationand thats about it. To give you an idea of where he's come from, here are some of his past choices in vehicles:
70ÔÇÖs something el camino
original chevy blazer, then an '87 S10
'83 buick century t-type
'90 maxima
all cars were automatic except the orig. blazer, and all of them were slow, bland and utilitarian. no heart, drama, or character in any, except maybe the el camino, but then again any car with a mexican name meaning "the road" should get character points just for having such a crappy name.
after moving to Roanoke, VA, my dad got a good job and was making a comfortable living. since the maxima was going to be driven by me since i needed to get to high school, and my mom was driving the mini van daily, he needed a car of his own. ThatÔÇÖs when he started researching, reading and dissecting articles on every car in the sports sedan segment. sports sedans, yes! he finally decided he was tired of cars that were no fun. after working hard all his life he felt it was time to get into a car that would make him smile, and the technology was now to the point that cars like this were practical and reliable. He delved deep into various magazines late at night, and watched all the automotive journalism shows he could on tv. He even scoured the internet in his search (which at the time was a pretty brave thing for my technologically prehistoric parents).
After a year long search and many trips to local dealers for test drives, it was down to two cars...the suby legacy 2.5 GT and the audi A4 1.8T. after some price haggling and repeated test drives, the order was placed on a 1999.5 A4 1.8T 5 speed quattro sport. He actually bought a car with a sport package! At the time that was the equivalent to him coming home with a 15 inch subwoofer in the back of the van. My father would order the Super Intelligent 3 speed airbags with pine scent a million times before the sport package. This was really a turning point. i was ecstatic. i read alot about cars, so i was aware that this bavarian beaut was a fairly nimble little machine, and turbocharged! and it was actually going to be owned by my family. we'd actually own a sporty car! and it was my dad's choice to do so!
i remember the day we went to the local Precision Audi dealership and my father proudly drove his new tan A4 off the showroom floor, where it had been silently waiting for him. he was gleaming as much as the car was. he went on for days to me, my sister, and my mother about how smooth it was, and what the quattro system could do, and how the turbo worked....everything. it almost got annoying. the car was really transforming him! It was quite an adjustment for the whole family; we just werent used to this sort of talk at all. Naturally theyd heard it from me all their lives since Ive always been into cars, but my dad.that was very new.
The car led to more and more. My father soon became (and still is) fiercely loyal to Audi (so much so we ended up getting another not long after the first). He signed up with the Quattro Club, and soon we had Audi Magazine and The Quattro Quarterly littering the coffee table in the living room. He really came to love the car, washing it much more than any car weÔÇÖve ever owned, and generally treating it with a lot of affection. It gets all the best, and to this day still has dibs on any available stalls in the garage in the winter. I knew he really trusted me when he took me to a parking lot one day so I could learn stick for the first time of my life on his precious A4. He even went so far to actually boost the horsepower of the car with a chip, which he researched unendingly, to ÔÇ£merge a little easier on the way to workÔÇØ. Pshaw, thatÔÇÖs boost rot, dad! In addition to the chip was an upgraded diverter valve and a K&N filter. To this day he still likes to wind it out with my mom in the car just to see her reach for the door handle and get real quiet :lol:
Every 3 weeks or so he sneaks down to the dealership, where they know him on a first name basis, to ÔÇ£get oil filters / just see what they haveÔÇØ, which is code language for ÔÇ£lets see whatÔÇÖs there for me to test drive.ÔÇØ As soon as the newest audi models are out, heÔÇÖs there to look them over. My dad actually convinced my mom last year that it would be fun to take vacation over at Ingolstadt, Germany, where Audi does a 3 day winter driving school, some of which takes place in Austria. Unfortunately the trip never happened due to my sisterÔÇÖs wedding.....bah. When we go to car shows, he actually wants to sit in the Golf R32, and actually holds meaningful conversations with the guys standing in front of the G35 coupe. HeÔÇÖs genuinely enthusiastic about cars, including sporty ones. Sometimes I even feel like how my dad must have felt dealing with my car obsession for the last few years.
Nowadays its not weird to see car magazines totally covering the once bare coffee table. My dad actually got an earful the other week for buying the December editions of 4 different car magainzines! Lunch is a rush on Sundays in order to catch Car and Driver TV on TNN. In fact the car shows on Speed Channel are actually taped sometimes when my dad canÔÇÖt be home some nights. The family cars went from being all automatic to dominated by manuals, and it looks like that ratio will continue to improve. He still hasnÔÇÖt really been interested in racing, but IÔÇÖm hoping an autocross and an HPDE isnÔÇÖt too far off in the future.
Its amazing how a single vehicle in a lifetime of car ownership has changed one persons view on car enthusiasm. I have a feeling I had some influence on him, but ultimately his choice of automobile opened his eyes to a new facet of driving enjoyment that will continue for many years. It sure is refreshing to talk to my dad about cars and meet eye to eye with him on so many subjects. I still give him grief about how bad I know he secretly wants an S4, but he keeps looking away and mumbling something about how its not practical, and I dont need something that fast.Which is his usual response around my mother. I have a feeling, though, that this is only the beginning.
Disclaimer ÔÇô I know audiÔÇÖs arenÔÇÖt the greatest cars ever, and that there are plenty of other cars that cost less that are better in however many ways. But thatÔÇÖs not my point here.
my dad has always been the responsible guy. the practical family man. the frugal father. he has an engineering degree, so he has a fair amount of mechanical skill, but he's never been "into" cars or working on them. sure, he changes his own oil, knows how a distributor works, and has his opinions about cars. Hes even taken me to a monster truck event and a few car shows. but he's never done anything remotely sporty in/with a car, and about the most exotic modification he's ever made to any car he's owned has been a different brand of oil filter. Whenever Id talk to him about sports cars, or racing, or anything that has to do with enthusiastic driving, hed look at me as if I was being typically juvenile and say something to the effect of what do you need that for?, or why would you want something that does that? He understood what I meant, but to him, a car was transportationand thats about it. To give you an idea of where he's come from, here are some of his past choices in vehicles:
70ÔÇÖs something el camino
original chevy blazer, then an '87 S10
'83 buick century t-type
'90 maxima
all cars were automatic except the orig. blazer, and all of them were slow, bland and utilitarian. no heart, drama, or character in any, except maybe the el camino, but then again any car with a mexican name meaning "the road" should get character points just for having such a crappy name.
after moving to Roanoke, VA, my dad got a good job and was making a comfortable living. since the maxima was going to be driven by me since i needed to get to high school, and my mom was driving the mini van daily, he needed a car of his own. ThatÔÇÖs when he started researching, reading and dissecting articles on every car in the sports sedan segment. sports sedans, yes! he finally decided he was tired of cars that were no fun. after working hard all his life he felt it was time to get into a car that would make him smile, and the technology was now to the point that cars like this were practical and reliable. He delved deep into various magazines late at night, and watched all the automotive journalism shows he could on tv. He even scoured the internet in his search (which at the time was a pretty brave thing for my technologically prehistoric parents).
After a year long search and many trips to local dealers for test drives, it was down to two cars...the suby legacy 2.5 GT and the audi A4 1.8T. after some price haggling and repeated test drives, the order was placed on a 1999.5 A4 1.8T 5 speed quattro sport. He actually bought a car with a sport package! At the time that was the equivalent to him coming home with a 15 inch subwoofer in the back of the van. My father would order the Super Intelligent 3 speed airbags with pine scent a million times before the sport package. This was really a turning point. i was ecstatic. i read alot about cars, so i was aware that this bavarian beaut was a fairly nimble little machine, and turbocharged! and it was actually going to be owned by my family. we'd actually own a sporty car! and it was my dad's choice to do so!
i remember the day we went to the local Precision Audi dealership and my father proudly drove his new tan A4 off the showroom floor, where it had been silently waiting for him. he was gleaming as much as the car was. he went on for days to me, my sister, and my mother about how smooth it was, and what the quattro system could do, and how the turbo worked....everything. it almost got annoying. the car was really transforming him! It was quite an adjustment for the whole family; we just werent used to this sort of talk at all. Naturally theyd heard it from me all their lives since Ive always been into cars, but my dad.that was very new.
The car led to more and more. My father soon became (and still is) fiercely loyal to Audi (so much so we ended up getting another not long after the first). He signed up with the Quattro Club, and soon we had Audi Magazine and The Quattro Quarterly littering the coffee table in the living room. He really came to love the car, washing it much more than any car weÔÇÖve ever owned, and generally treating it with a lot of affection. It gets all the best, and to this day still has dibs on any available stalls in the garage in the winter. I knew he really trusted me when he took me to a parking lot one day so I could learn stick for the first time of my life on his precious A4. He even went so far to actually boost the horsepower of the car with a chip, which he researched unendingly, to ÔÇ£merge a little easier on the way to workÔÇØ. Pshaw, thatÔÇÖs boost rot, dad! In addition to the chip was an upgraded diverter valve and a K&N filter. To this day he still likes to wind it out with my mom in the car just to see her reach for the door handle and get real quiet :lol:
Every 3 weeks or so he sneaks down to the dealership, where they know him on a first name basis, to ÔÇ£get oil filters / just see what they haveÔÇØ, which is code language for ÔÇ£lets see whatÔÇÖs there for me to test drive.ÔÇØ As soon as the newest audi models are out, heÔÇÖs there to look them over. My dad actually convinced my mom last year that it would be fun to take vacation over at Ingolstadt, Germany, where Audi does a 3 day winter driving school, some of which takes place in Austria. Unfortunately the trip never happened due to my sisterÔÇÖs wedding.....bah. When we go to car shows, he actually wants to sit in the Golf R32, and actually holds meaningful conversations with the guys standing in front of the G35 coupe. HeÔÇÖs genuinely enthusiastic about cars, including sporty ones. Sometimes I even feel like how my dad must have felt dealing with my car obsession for the last few years.
Nowadays its not weird to see car magazines totally covering the once bare coffee table. My dad actually got an earful the other week for buying the December editions of 4 different car magainzines! Lunch is a rush on Sundays in order to catch Car and Driver TV on TNN. In fact the car shows on Speed Channel are actually taped sometimes when my dad canÔÇÖt be home some nights. The family cars went from being all automatic to dominated by manuals, and it looks like that ratio will continue to improve. He still hasnÔÇÖt really been interested in racing, but IÔÇÖm hoping an autocross and an HPDE isnÔÇÖt too far off in the future.
Its amazing how a single vehicle in a lifetime of car ownership has changed one persons view on car enthusiasm. I have a feeling I had some influence on him, but ultimately his choice of automobile opened his eyes to a new facet of driving enjoyment that will continue for many years. It sure is refreshing to talk to my dad about cars and meet eye to eye with him on so many subjects. I still give him grief about how bad I know he secretly wants an S4, but he keeps looking away and mumbling something about how its not practical, and I dont need something that fast.Which is his usual response around my mother. I have a feeling, though, that this is only the beginning.
Disclaimer ÔÇô I know audiÔÇÖs arenÔÇÖt the greatest cars ever, and that there are plenty of other cars that cost less that are better in however many ways. But thatÔÇÖs not my point here.
but convertable 
. Well, she drives it most of the time, during the winter she is rockin the jeep wrangler. We have my dads 1994 Dodge Ram 1500 v-6 slow mofo but it holds lots of sentimental value.