It’s the question that is often presented to car guys from people who are attempting to understand this affliction we have for the automobile. “So is there a moment when you became a car guy?” It’s often a difficult question to answer. For people who don’t understand cars, I think they look for that one miraculous point in your life when everything changed because of some monumental automotive event. I see car people often unable to answer that question with a single cinematic moment when their life took an internal combustion turn for the better.

That’s the way it is for me. Recently I was talking with my friend Steve Strope, owner of Pure Vision. Steve has built some amazing machines in his career as a professional car builder and I love talking with him because his passion for the sport is very close to the surface. You don’t have to pull it out of him – it comes naturally. For him, there were several but one stood out – it was a local guy who had a ’69 B-body Mopar with a 440 and a four-speed. Steve was only 11 years old, but he somehow conned the guy into giving him a ride. The event was life changing. Many other passions would come along like playing the bass guitar, an infatuation with wrist watches, and BMX bicycles but the overriding factor that makes him get up in the morning has to do with the style and presence of a high performance automobile.

For me, it’s a little different. My mother used to tell the story that she and my father knew I was destined to be a car guy when I was two years old. They found me firmly attached to a steel pedal car and I would not leave until my dad bought it. I then proceeded to “drive” it all the way home sitting in my car placed in the back seat of my dad’s Buick. I was the first born, so my parents were still rookies. My younger siblings had no chance – but I also like to believe they didn’t share the same passion.

My next pivotal moment came when I was 10 years old and walking home from school. We lived at that time in Southern California and when I rounded the corner – there it was. I didn’t even know what it was or even what sexy meant. But there it was – the embodiment of something visceral that spoke to me and said – “That’s the coolest machine on the planet. It looks like dad just bought it – and you get to ride in it!” I ran the rest of the way to the house and was awestruck with the sight of a 327, four-speed ’64 Corvette Stingray sitting in my driveway.

I was more than a bit crestfallen to learn that it wasn’t the new Smith family transportation. A friend of the family had just mustered out of the U.S. Coast Guard and bought this brand new Corvette as his graduation present. I must not have been able to talk my way into a ride because I don’t remember that happening until a few years later. We moved from California back to Iowa and this friend gave my brother and I a ride in the car after an outing at the lake.

About that same time, dad bought a ’64 Riviera and took three generations of Smith boys – his dad, my brother, and I for a ride one night. My grandfather was a tough old guy who had been an engineer for the Chicago & Northwestern Railway nearly all his life so he had lived with the definition of torque from his days with both steam and diesel locomotives. I don’t know for sure, but more than likely my dad’s car was the base model Riv with the 425c.i. engine that made 425 ft-lb of torque and 340 hp. Those Rivieras were heavy, but they still could move. That was the first time in my life I was pinned to the seat from a hard acceleration run. From that point on, I knew I had to have a car that would do that at the drop of the throttle. By the time I was 17 I had owned both a 389 GTO and a 36 Chevelle.

So those are my car guy stories. Every car person has one. It’s a passion and it’s why we spend all of our precious resources of time and money chasing that elusive and ever-changing vision. We can’t really tell you why we do it – only that it is some kind of DNA-infused moral imperative. It’s why I get up every morning and find an excuse to play at my internal combustion infatuation.