A score ago, I was that little kid, the kind you see at toy stores ogling at scale models and R/C cars, mostly because they were out of my birthday budget. I couldn’t spell ‘Lamborgini’ but I fought for it’s non-existent right of being the world’s fastest car. I borrowed and even stole some car brochures and literature at the motor shows and sat night after night, my fifteen glorious minutes, assimilating the numbers and names of car models and their specifications; little did I know that they came for free.
Thirty years into my life, few things have changed, the exhaust note of a whizzing sports car, still gets me high on guessing it’s name and I still fancy those dinky cars on sale.
Now I know, we know, the lifestyle of the motoring journalist is one to be envious of. The local dealers roll out courtesy cars of sorts to the press for a very justified duration, in a hope to up their sales and as a formality, all the same. The cars may vary from ultra-modern supercars, say the R35 GT-R to gas-guzzling and mile-munching SUVs like the Cayenne turbo S. In between, they may throw in a few seemingly boring fillers like a 1.8-litre Civic and the not-so Smart cars, but I would not be one to complain. Every drive is experience worthy. Then the vocab-unlimited writers get to critique the walnut tree wood trim, the constellation of buttons on the dash, get technical, talking suspension geometry and even discuss what famous wives of popular industry related tycoons wore on much celebrated days, such as the Good Wood Festival of Speed. Now thats putting the cherry atop the icing.
My point being, I want in….I want to be one of those accomplished automotive scribblers, whose diction can kill, build or resurrect a fan base for a particular brand, model or even a motoring era.
I live-breathe-eat cars now let me write about them.
PS I drive a 2009 VW Golf R32 in a shade of deep blue pearl; 3.2-litre V6 w/ 6-speed DSG.
