My dad is how I knew the SCCA existed. 1974 Opel Manta Rallye that he did stage/TSD rallies with, and after he rolled it on a weekend rally mom made him buy the 197something Datsun 710 for a family car. It gave him the go-ahead to strip the interior, cage it, 4 Cibie Big Oscars on the front, computers, racing seats and harnesses...
Too bad he was ...not in my life much when it would have counted. Would have been fun.
My dad, for sure. He also never missed a chance to tell me about the time he sold his lead sled '51 Kaiser when our tuition was due.
My parents have always been car people. Dad worked on stock cars in late 60's early 70's, then raced off road buggies til late 70's. When I turned 20, he got the bug again and we both off road raced. Always owned a cool car. 68 cutlass s, 74 vista cruiser wagon with 454 to name a couple. They are 71 now and own two Mini Cooper s convertibles with stick and a BMW X5.
My dad was really big into cars when he was younger. He always tells me stories about his 1966 Olds Cutlass. It was a 4-door, but it had a Hurst-shifted Muncie with a 330 H.O., and he modded it a bit. It was a sleeper!
Later on, he had other interesting stuff, like a 1969 Pontiac Lemans Sport, a 1970 Olds 98 convertible, a 1984 Ford Escort GT Turbo, and some cool trucks. My mom and him picked up a 2014 Infiniti Q60 AWD (basically a G37X coupe) after someone totalled their 1996 Maxima, and he loves the thing.
Somewhere along the way, he got into Harleys. He bought a 2003 FLHTC 100th Anniversary when they were new, and he barely rides it now. He's 67, and ever since the Maxima got destroyed (he was driving and someone blew a stop sign full speed in a Wrangler) he's had health issues. I've suggested that he ditch the Harley he never rides and get a cool old muscle car again. He's constantly looking at them online, and I've been egging him on to do a fly-and-drive with me.
My dad was also into cars. Air cooled VWs in the early '60's...then a '67 Mustang, a string of Z's...and now BMWs since the '80's. Took me to the runoffs in '73 for the first time, and the Can-Am the same year.
Nope. Infact my step dad was completely out in left field on just about everything automotive:
When I put an edelbrock intake on my 350: "that high pressure intake is going to blow out the bottom end in that old truck"
When I installed a new head unit, amp, and subs: "pulling all that electricity through your electrical system is going to cause a fire. You think your headlights can handle all that extra juice your alternator is putting out?"
And do on 
Suffice to say my affliction was completely self inflicted.
It started with 3-wheelers and hodaka motorcycles (outdated even in my day, but I could afford 'em) Gasoline in the tank was freedom to me and there were no shortage of trails in my area. I'd mow lawns during the week and I'd ride all weekend. Fix it if it broke, and run it till it broke again.
When I got older it naturally progressed into cars for the same reason: a tank of gas was complete freedom. At any given time I could point the nose south and keep it there till I was miles away from everything 
The odd and obscure always held my attention because they were what I could afford. I kept at it and got pretty good at fixing $500 RX-7s and keeping old toyota trucks alive.
Eventually I found you guys. 
My Dad was clueless about cars. Mom liked big engine Buicks and I got to drive a lot of fun cars as I grew up: Buick Wildcat, Skylark GS, boat tail Riviera. I think that my sports car obsession came when my two cousins came back from Vietnam era duty overseas driving Porsches. I became a mechanic when I started club racing and realized that I could do as well as any "race" mechanic I had met to date on my maintenance work.
iceracer wrote: The dirt track may have been at Whites Beach Speedway. Near Balston Lake. Amec held events there for awhile. I think bob did run there.
That sounds right. Greg Rickes sent me the two Corvette pictures with explanations five or six years back and I've lost the email with the details.
My dad was. A little.
I was conceived on the annual trip to Bakersfield to show the West Coast how they run Altereds in Illinois.
Both my parents were. Mom and dad were into Corvettes, so just about every weekend in the spring, summer and fall were filled with drag racing, auto crossing and concours events. Dad was notorious for his late night tuning sessions, but the neighbors never seemed to mind. I kid my dad about it, but I've always thought it kinda stange that as soon as I turned 16, it became time to restore Mom's 64. Dad denies it of course.
My dad has always been into Corvairs, but he had a 72 Oldsmobile Cutlass S that was his DD when I was little. He's had police interceptors since then and he currently has 3 Corvairs, which are all together in this pic:
Dad was into cars, passed away when I was 12.
He had a Sprite, then a 68 Mustang, and another sprite at a point long before I was born. When I as around he happened upon and purchased back the 68 mustang and restored it. He was never really into racing. He worked in Nuclear and passed away from cancer that was deemed job related.
I started out being into mustangs and getting all the magazines. Happened on GRM about the same time I got the Carroll Smith books in highschool. Started looking at mechanical engineering and started pursuing that in college. Did FSAE. Started Autocrossing. Changed schools and shifted to Materials Science Engineering, interning in Nanotech Research. Graduated.
Can't really say where I work, but I work solidly in the automotive realm in an engineering role doing some fascinating stuff.
October will be 12 years autocrossing for me. Still have the car I started in (97 Cobra ESP -> STP/CAMC), have a Miata (STS), restoring a Bugeye Sprite, hopefully starting a DM Locost later this year.
Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in my dad's lap steering his nailhead powered 30 Model A 5 window street rod down the road in the late 70's when i was maybe 3 years old.. he built the car in high school in the mid 60's, and i recently learned that it had a 389 tri power and Muncie 4 speed out of a wrecked GTO when those were late models.. He also had a brand new 69 Z/28 that he got after getting out of the army, but he had GM buy it back after he blew up 4 engines under warranty..
He did some dirt track roundy round racing with my grandpa's shop as his sponsor, but my mom put a stop to that nonsense after they got married so i never witnessed that. But we did spend almost every summer weekend at a local dirt track as spectators..
So, yeah, i had a gearhead influencing me as a small child.. he died in 84 when was only 9 years old, but i've heard stories about his crazy years in this small town, and i caught his gearhead bug..
Yes, my grandfather, uncles, dad and older brother were all car nuts and all have stories. I'm probably more hard core than any of them because they all seem to have relaxed a bit but I turn 48 on Monday and and still think obsessively about cars and race cars.
My mom is the gearhead in my family. She learned how to drive on a farm tractor and had a early 60's Corvair. My dad had good taste in cars. My parents almost bought a Dodge Shadow Turbo new but decided against it and went with an 87 Golf GT.
Growing up there were only plain cars in the family. My dad is a die-hard DIYer and liked cars but never persued the hobby when I was a kid. He had a '81 Corvette for a short time after I got out of Highschool and bought a '67 Chevelle a few years ago. Maybe he was just taking a 20 year break while I was a kid. He bought a Healy Bug-eye new while stationed in Europe, and had a '70 RS 4-speed Camaro before I was born.
My dad was poor, but loved a good euro sports car. As a craftsman, he appreciated keeping something troublesome, abused, and complicated in working order. He had a Fiat 500 Abarth (in which he did do quite a few SCCA events in), Austin Healy, and a few other odds and ends I don't remember. He also really enjoyed Ducati, BMW and Moto Guzzi motorcycles.
By the time I was around, he had transitioned to utility vehicles like old trucks and Jeeps. He hated yearly inspections because he felt that it removed good vehicles from the road, but the CJ7 we had together had holes in the floor and once had a rusty throttle cable almost pop the motor. My father taught me not to be scared of getting your hands dirty.
On the flip side, my step-father taught me that sometimes it pays to let other people handle your maintenance. As a guy who once sold Saabs, Volvos and Porsches, my step-dad knew which cars made money and which cars didn't. Even today he has very defined ideals about what makes a "sports car" and doesn't settle for anything with four doors. To him, no matter how much power a vehicle has, it doesn't make it a sports car. Wagons can't be sporty, even the CTS-V Wagon. "It's a family car with a big motor," he says. Not that he doesn't appreciate them, he just would never spend his money on one.
That makes me the intersection of two car cultures: 1) where you buy what you can afford and fix the rest 2) where you save your pennies to buy what you really want, whether its practical or not.
So Grassroots Motorsports became my calling.
In reply to Japspec:
I"m a little late to the party on this one...
Dad was always in to cars. He was constantly buying fixer uppers and tinkering with them when he was young (much to my grandmother's dismay, who didn't like having junkers in the driveway). Mom is an artist but always loved cars. Apparently both of their first cars were Corvairs and they bonded over their mutual dislike of them.
We grew up on a farm. Dad was always buying cars cheap, fixing them and reselling for a little extra money. (The '56 Beauville wagon was my favorite) My brother and I hung out with dad in the garage while mom was canning vegetables.
Road trips consisted of my dad pointing out old cars and asking us to name the year and model. Now, thanks to cell phones, I take pictures of ones I see and ask him the same thing.
As we got older, my brother got more of my dad's love of tinkering and I got more of mom's artistic ability. My brother is working on a '50 mercury right now and he just finished overhauling dad's old "farm" truck. I'm doing a series of paintings of classic cars.
So I paint portraits of cars and my brother paints actual cars.
We both got a mix of mom and dad's talents and interests, just in different ways.
Dad was a car guy but was disabled from the time I was born so he never had any projects. He liked to drive fast though. I've heard from my much older siblings that he had some cool cars when they were kids.
Mom hated my car addiction. She bitched and moaned about every dime I spent on them. I married a woman just like her.
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