"Son, what's your favorite car?," was what my father asked me a long time ago. Not that I've done much to hide the fact I'm not too much of a gear-head, but I'm a little surprised that someone really asks me a question like this. Even though I’m not that in to cars, I’m quite logical in thinking, so the first thing I thought was, “What kind of car?”
"Whatever kind of car", he replied. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to shift topics, so I sticked with it. I asked him for a night before I answer…
Still, more questions kept popping in my head. Should I pick the one I find the most beautiful, or the one I'd most likely drive in the future? Do I have to consider maintenance and insurance costs? Is this to be my only car or can I ignore practicality? There are too many questions to answer — too many cars to pick from — to just say "favorite car"...I needed some guidelines.
As it happened, that night I met up with some of my gear-head buddies to watch in-car videos from this year's racing season. Over a couple of drinks, I popped the question to them with, of course, enough qualifiers to get a proper answer.
Specifically, the question to everyone was this:
You can have any two cars, no strings attached. One street car, one race car. These aren't daily drivers and you don't have to pay for maintenance, upkeep, insurance, garaging--anything. What two cars would they be?
The answers were interesting....
People's picks were, in great part, a reflection of themselves, or perhaps the way they looked at life.
I picked the 1963 Ferrari GTO (like the red one shown here) as my "street" car. It was the best one I saw that night so at least, I had the answer, but technically at least, it's a street car. See? Look at the photo...it has license plates!My favorite race car would be a 1970-ish Porsche 917 (like the photo at the top of this entry). But both of these were closely followed by secondary lists of half-a-dozen runner-ups in each category.
The other guys' picks included F1 cars, the Corvette Z06, 911 Cup Cars...a mixture of old (like mine) and totally new, different by person. I lusted over the vintage cars. One of my my gear-head buddies, wanted a new race car he could race in non-vintage events. For a conversation-starter, it was pretty good.
So the question is, what are your two picks?
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