A Few of the best...

I love cars, always have and I suspect I always will. I was talking to my dealer buddy the other day about this and he asked, what is the best car you've ever owned. The top of the list was a no brainer.

It's a 1999 Mercedes Benz AMG C43. One of the last AMG built cars before Mercedes took over the small AMG shop. The car was a perfect blend of performance, reliability and the fit and finish were literally perfect. We drove it 158,000 miles and both the Cakes and I wish we still had it in the garage. The C43 was a car you could drive for 10 or 12 hours on a trip and not feel tired or stiff. We had the car for almost 14 years! It always looked good and made you happy when you started it up.

I have to go way back for the next car, all the way back to 1964.

It's a 1959 Porsche 356a Convertible D. I paid $1350.00 for it, today these rare cars, fewer than 2000 built worldwide, are worth over $400,000. Of course, I had no idea what I had when I got the car, other than I knew I was madly in love with it from the first drive. I'd never had a car that handled like the Porsche. It wasn't particularly fast, it had about 90 horsepower. But it could go around corners, it went where you pointed it and once again, that German Quality. Red leather interior, wool carpeting and an AM/FM radio built by Becker. I took an SCCA driving course in the Porsche at Brainerd. I learned lessons in it I've never forgotten. The closest dealer and parts depot for Porsche was in Minneapolis. I had a front wheel bearing go out, I took the wheel off measured the bearing with a set of calipers, I went to the John Deere Distribution Center and spent an hour measuring bearings until I found one that would fit, I was back on the road that night. The clutch went out, I called a Porsche owner I'd met at Brainerd, he said, "Take it to a Volkswagen dealer and have them install a Transporter clutch, that's the clutch set up all the racers use." $135.00 later I was back on the road. I sold the car to a B52 pilot, it was his 2nd Porsche. I hope he took good care of it and I really hope it's still alive.

I went for a couple of years without a sports car and I just couldn't take it so I bought one of these little gems.

A 1970 MGB. I drove it to work, I took the family to the beach in it. It didn't have a backseat, it had a shelf and two little girls and their Cock-a-Poo fit perfectly and the trunk was big enough to hold a good-sized cooler. And of course, I soloed it in SCCA events. Even though it was English, I had little or no trouble with it. I sold it to my brother in law who drove it for years.

The MGB was gone and then 6 years later I found this one-owner gem...

A 1970 Porsche 911T. The last 911 with carburetors. I bought it from a guy who had purchased in German while he was in the Army. The 2nd night I had it, I wound it up to 5,000 RPM and noticed a glow in the side mirror, the damn thing would push a flame out of the exhaust pipe. The next day I crawled under the car and found it had a German Bursch exhaust system, basically a motorcycle muffler for each cylinder bank of the flat 6, the two mufflers merged into a collector pipe. The car was quiet until 3,000 RPM then all hell broke loose, the flame started to appear at 4500 and at 6000 it was about 5 inches long. Beautiful. Fast, comfortable, handled like a Porsche and it looks good. The girls called it "Hilda". I sold it to a young undertaker. He parked it indoors next to hearses.

I didn't have another sports car again until 2008.

I was shopping for another Porsche found an Anniversary Edition 911 I offered the dealer $49,999 for it. He turned me down. Driving back to the office I saw this C6 Corvette at a dealer. The car was 6 months old, a 2007 Z51 model with all the bells and whistles. I bought it for 41k. The car had 9,000 miles on it. (10 days later the Porsche dealer called me and said he'd sell me the 911 for my price.) The Corvette was an incredibly good car, fast, fun to drive and believe it or not it got great gas mileage. I was never under 20 in town and on the highway driving fast I was always in the high 20's or low 30mpg range. Funny story, I took The Cakes out to dinner one night in Ventura, we ordered dinner and a bottle of wine. I don't drink and drive, so I had one little glass. Like a good girl, she finished the bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and was pretty buzzed. One the way home she said, "You've never shown me what this black bitch will do." So I did. I flipped the computer into sport mode, ran the car up to 115 or so, took our home exit off 101, crossed over the freeway and took a right, I hammered the Vette and set it sideways down the street for a half a block. We parked in the garage in a cloud of rubber smoke. We got in the house and Cakes said with a smile, "Don't ever do that again with me in the car!" The next morning the garage still smelled like rubber.