When did you get the car bug?

1953 I was 5 

  My dad wanted to talk to me about my Mother running off.   So he put me on his lap and let me steer his new Chevy convertible around the block  as he told me and asked how I felt.  
   "Driving" was such a turn on I kept telling him I was fine and didn't care.  ( I really didn't. She was a lousy mother) 

Later when she tried to return. I was wary of her and this time when she left I got my MGTD 

When I bought my first sports car (MGA) when I was 18....it is sitting in the carport today!

I think it was around the time I was 16 or 17 and I put two 12" subs (through a home receiver and inverter) in the back of my 1990 toyota corolla. after that it was a slippery slope when i sold it to buy a 240sx and I ended up doing all sorts of random things to it. 

In utero. 

It really took off for me around 1984 when my dad bought an E30 318i coupe. I remember really loving that car. 

I got it pretty late in life, unfortunately. Growing up in NYC, I was one of the only teenagers that had a driver's license, and even then I waited until 19 to get mine. I bought my first crappy Hyundai when I was 21, and I didn't really start doing car enthusiast stuff til about 22-23. First time on the track was shortly after I turned 29.

I mostly got the car bug from reading Jalopnik at work in my 20's... my parents were not car enthusiasts and exclusively owned Camrys in shades of gray and beige. Fast forward about 10 years and I've owned dozens of old BMW's, a C5 Corvette, an SN95 Mustang, a few Range Rovers, a Mercedes S500, a Porsche 944S, and probably a few more I've forgotten about. I also run a vintage BMW repair shop so my life really is about cars now.

Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) said:

In utero. 

Probably same here. Mom was known as the "go to" person to drive someone's new hot car on the drag strip.  Dad had a Falcon when he met mom.  His first image of her was her rear sticking out from under her brother's Sprite tuning the carbs.  He traded in the Falcon for a brand new 1963 Sprite to impress her.  FWIW, he was an airplane mechanic for the Air Force, so already mechanical.  When I was about to arrive, mom was shuttled to the airport in their Mini across the bridge in Bermuda during a hurricane.

Funny enough, was having a beer with my newly turned 21 year old son last night and we were talking about people's past and how it defines their image.  (One of those "fix all the world problems over beers" kind of discussion).  I asked him if he thought he'd be a car guy if he hadn't raced karts.  He laughed and said of course he would, it was in his DNA.  :)

But, to be more specific, I really got bit around the age of 12, as many boys of that age do.  Just what I looked at, little British sports cars, was different than my friends, Mustangs, Camaros, etc.

-Rob

I was 3 years old watching WRC on Wide World of Sports when a Lancia Stratos came sliding through the woods on screen. I had my face pressed against the console TV telling dad "I want to do THAT!" He just laughed & said "You have to wait another 13-years before you can drive!" I was absolutely crushed. 

Hearing "Dead Man's Curve" on the transistor radio while watching cars speed by on Sunset Blvd from the top of a hill. We lived not far from said curve.

At the age of 4.  I'm 67 now.  My parents took me to the local short track for a weekly show at night.  Old coupes and sedans.  The noise and colors of the cars stayed with me. I do not remember a time when I was not interested in cars.

When I was 13, I got sick and spent a week in bed.  My older brother gave me a magazine to read while I was sick.   

I read the TR8 and Renault R5T1 article OVER and OVER.   I was hooked. 

I still have the issue.....40+ years later.   

I got a degree in Mechanical Engineering and have worked for one of the Big Three for 30+ years.

I still find myself looking on marketplace for an intact TR7 coupe to build into a Buffum-tribute TR8 rallycross car....

At the age of 5; my older brother and my older cousin said they want to be race car drivers...................I've been doomed ever since.

Must've been genetic from my grandparents on my mom's side because I mostly grew up in a motorsports-free environment with no immediate family who were into cars and I hardly ever met a gearhead until I was a teenager. But long before that I was into cars (growing up around kickin' rad '80s cars probably helped, and maybe having a Power Wheels?) and played lots of racing games and simulators, and tried to take every opportunity to drive karts that I could. My grandmother raced cars when she was younger and my grandfather hooned them, but that was all before I was born.

First time on track (other than amusement park karts) was an autocross with my AE92 when I was 19.

Very early age as a kid.  My Dad was a mechanic and I would help him pump the brakes to bleed out the air and work the engine hoist.  Learned a lot of cool new words then too. 

Imagine it was baked into me while gestating. Took my dad's Morris Minor for a spin when I was around 2 by pulling on the starter knob on the dash, jumping it out of gear and rolling the car down what might have been the only hill in Iowa. Dad was from SD and thought nothing of young people operating vehicles on country roads so he let me practice on occasions.  Ironically my mother did everything she could to dissuade me from all things mechanical fearing that it would lead to a blue collar future. Turned out even worse than she could have imagined as I ended up going into engineering.

Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) said:

In utero. 

My mom had a special order bright yellow Maverick Grabber followed by a special order bright yellow Plymouth Trail Duster. I was doomed.  They followed that with all the turbo dodges in the 80's, remember my dad getting pulled over in a turbo charger as one of my earliest memories. I helped change a transmission on an Omni maybe 9 yo and that solidified that bikes and mini bikes weren't going to be enough mechanically for me.

My mother's twin brother had an MG Y tourer, I have strong memories of dashing through the night in it around Sharbot Lake. I may have been seven . I was a convert from then on. This was likely in the mid fifties as I remember him being involved in one of the first 1000 Island Rallies.

I am with Adrian, in utero. Both of my folks had it bad.

I pulled apart my first engine, a chevy 350, at 8yo just so I could be taught the different parts ad what they did. So before then.

I started wanting to know about cars when I was pushing shopping carts for the store I worked at. I was a cashier but preferred moving around to being stuck at a register.

"That looks cool, what's that? Why does it sound like that?" was the starting point.  Most notable car I remember was a red Ferrari Dino that would show up every 3 months or so.

Mom said over my crib was a mobile of cars. On the wall next to my crib was hot wheels, NIB. Dad is a hotrodder, grandfather on mom's side used to be a 1960's street racer in Palm Dale. You might say it's genetic. 

I was probably only 2 or 3 years old.  My earliest car-related memory was when my older sister and her husband bought a Renault Dauphine; they took me for a ride to get an ice cream cone or something, and I remember being fascinated by a weird little car that was so much different than the 1953 Chevy station wagon my dad drove.

Not 100% on timing, but I do remember thinking at age 10 that my parents' purchase of a new Yugo did not meet my criteria of a "little red European sports car", which is what my mom called it.   I learned how to drive a manual transmission in that car, but didn't do much with my interest in cars until I joined a Mazda club after college and learned about autox.  I'm definitely the odd one out in my family as none of my siblings are particularly interested in cars.  My mom and brother have done 2 autoxes with me in the past, but nothing on their own. 

As my parents tell it, I was nuts about cars as soon as I could talk. From my car seat I could identify a "Memercedes" or "Fefflari". I had so many Hot Wheels cars.

I got more into Legos at some point, but at age 15 I saw a copy of Automobile magazine, and it all came back.  

The first thing I remember is looking through my dad's car books, clipping pics of car ads in the Sunday newspaper and swiping R&T out of the mailbox in grade school before my dad got home. Early, because my parents gave it to me early. My father, 1952 Grandfather Mountain in his MGTD supercharged "special". . 


 

my parents in a cross country rally. 1952. 
He moved on to Porsche 356, XK120, XK140, AC Bristol after that but the TD special he claimed was his favorite. I came along in '62 after he hung up his racing suit, but that's why I am into it. 
 

Until the very end, cars are what we talked about and bonded over. When Ed Higginbotham went to GRM he was over the moon. Yep, that's where I got it.