{"id":493655,"date":"2014-02-01T00:17:26","date_gmt":"2014-02-01T08:17:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sportscardigest.com\/\/?p=13389"},"modified":"2024-01-10T12:09:29","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T12:09:29","slug":"of-sacred-relics-and-daily-drivers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.supercars.net\/blog\/of-sacred-relics-and-daily-drivers\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Sacred Relics and Daily Drivers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If you think about the classic car community, as a whole it is obsessed with categorizing things. It\u2019s difficult to be just a \u201cCar Guy.\u201d When we talk about people within the community, we say he\u2019s a\u00a0 \u201cFerrari Guy\u201d or he\u2019s a \u201cMuscle Car Guy\u201d or he\u2019s a \u201cConcours Guy\u201d or he\u2019s a \u201cRacer.\u201d And the categorization doesn\u2019t stop with people. We\u2019re constantly categorizing our cars, as well. Go to any historic race or rally, anywhere in the world and the field will be portioned down into ever finer groupings, \u201cSports and Grand Tourers, under-1500-cc built between 1950 & 1959,\u201d is but one example. Saunter around any concours field and again we can\u2019t help but place each and every car into tight little bins like \u201cEuropean Pre-War Classics, 1920\u20131939\u201d or \u201cRight-hand Drive Lithuanian Micro-Cars of the Maharajas.\u201d However, after years and years of being a party to this automotive phylogeny, I\u2019ve come to the educated conclusion that there really are only two categories of classic car\u2014cars you own and cars that own you. And, without hesitation, I can say that I have had many, many cars that owned me, but surprisingly few that I\u2019ve owned.<\/p>\n

My very first \u201cclassic car\u201d owned me without question. I was in graduate school when the realization struck me that I now lived in an apartment with a garage, ergo I now had a place to work on an old car. Being a student, I didn\u2019t have any money to buy a \u201cnice car,\u201d nor did I really want to. I wanted something that I could restore myself. Like most first classics, I paid way too much for a \u201cdrivable car\u201d that was in much worse condition than I could have possibly realized at the time. I worked on that first car piecemeal. Rather than going all-in and tearing it apart and fully restoring it, I did a component here and a component there. The reality was that I was afraid to take it all apart for fear that it might never run again! And because I never took it all apart to fully sort it, I was always afraid to drive any farther than a 20-mile radius of my apartment. While I loved that first car, it clearly owned me and not the other way around.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n