Shifting gears

A vast majority of car enthusiasts have taken on a major project at least once in their lives, ranging from building a car with a specific purpose in mind (track, show, drag, drift etc.), to restoring an old car, usually something with special ties to their respective personal pasts, or a crazy swap, like converting a FWD car to AWD (popular on Mitsubishi Galants and Lancers in particular), or a monster engine swap, which nowadays usually involves stuffing Yankee V8 iron into a Japanese or German car for a real sleeper.

It’s all fun and good up to a certain point, and the process can be a most educational and enlightening experience. More importantly, it can lead you to meet more friends, like-minded people who are only too willing to help you find those rare parts, a wiring harness diagram or present a unique solution and novel to an engineering problem involved in modding your car. This is the other side of the car culture, which people outside our hobby/passion/calling fail to see. And it is quite difficult indeed for other people, particularly to our family, non-car-owning friends and significant others. They just see the time, effort and money, plus riding in a car that can potentially leave you and your occupants stranded in some dark lonely place, raining. But for us enthusiasts, that’s a risk we all take, whether we care to admit it or not.

Some of these projects and endeavors are life-changing: we learn about ourselves, our limits and, funny enough, our resourcefulness and patience. I feel this is the ultimate value in going through difficult and challenging projects, be it cars or other passions or our professional lives, even in relationships. Of course, cynics will argue that you could have spent all that time, effort, energy and resources on something more fruitful, but passion has this habit of choosing us instead of us choosing it. Many times our passions, in this case a love for anything with four wheels, are passed down from one generation to another. We were born surrounded by this environment, and we naturally take it, like fish to water.

Unfortunately, there comes a time in our lives when we need to focus on more pressing and urgent matters: our family life, our professional careers, perhaps a move to a foreign land for better opportunities, all of which having to put our love for cars, tuning and taking on projects on the back-burner for the meantime so that we can devote more of our time to them.

Now I find myself in this situation. The need to work harder, the need to focus, and of course the need to save, spend less and be wiser on the things I put myself into. Cars are the biggest part of my life outside of faith and family. Most of my friends are car enthusiasts, people in the business of selling cars or car parts, mechanics, tuners and other similar people. My world has grown much since I got into cars, as will most enthusiasts agree. But thanks to new challenges, I have found the courage to admit to myself that I will need to put my love for cars on the sidelines. For now at least.

That doesn’t mean I’ll stop driving cars with the same passion as before, nor stop liking cars, reading and writing about them. It only means that basically, I have to stop spending on cars, making them go faster, look better (in my eyes at least), save up and focus more on work. I ain’t getting any younger, and while I’d like to believe that time is still on my side, I have to start spending that most precious commodity wisely.

But I will not forget, or turn my back on all the wonderful people in the world of cars. Not now, not ever. But I will come back to cars the way I am now (or should I say was before): finding ways to make it go faster, corner better, stop sooner etc. In the meantime, let’s start driving some cars!