I was born a car guy

I can point to different worsening stages.

But it for sure seems "born that way".

Toy cars were a hit from one I first got my hands on them.
Although trucks even more so, yet I've never owned a truck.

Books had an influence from before I could read, I'd love to flip through pictures and see a boattail Deusenberg.

I did not grow up in a car oriented family so books with the fun cars were few and far between.

I got converted to Ferrari pre age 10 via some thrift store finds.
A book of Ferrari's from their beginnings all the way up to the F40.
That book turned me into a Ferrari fanatic and that lasted a long time.
Somewhere sometime Red Bull took over as my favourite F1 team and the Ferrari fanaticism has faded.

Another point would be getting a microsoft sidewinder force feed back wheel and NFS 5.(Porsche Unleashed.)
That kicked off interest in Porsches, and I drove a 944 in a constructon site parking lot at the age of fourteen on account of seeing it and trying to find out who owned it to ask about it.

That of course resulted in my first car being a Porsche 944.
As a young person, there is more time than money.
That resulted in learning to work on it myself.
Insurance was brutal, and stopped my racing RC cars entirely.

I blame my Corvette on NFS III Hot Pursuit.
That gam also shares blame for my Jaguar as the XK8 was the slowest car in the game and thus the most challenging.(The Corvette was slowest in class.)
To race my older brothers, I had to choose the handycap car or else it wasn't fair. So the Jag and 'Vette got a lot of drive time from me.

I have a neighbor with a Lotus Espirit V8, a JDM Honda NSX, and two kids with NO interest in cars.

Hurts to see.

I also had Matchbox cars, back when they were made in England. But I think what sealed the deal was when my older brother took me to a car show when I was 15. That hooked me into keeping our car clean.

And then he took me to an autocross event (we didn't call it autocross back then, I forget what it was, but it was in a mall parking lot). Then we went to drag racing events.

Pretty young. My dad always loved cars, motorcycles, and airplanes and we usually had one of the above being brought back from the dead in our garage. He grew up dirt poor and would find some rusted heap out in a field and pay the farmer $25 to haul it away. Over time he got pretty good at getting them running and would drag race his latest rat rod.

We always watched the Indy 500 on TV and some days he would hear about a team doing testing out at Riverside Raceway. We would jump in the car and drive out, park in the dirt and just walk into the hot pits to find Dan Gurney, Wally Dallenbach, or some other top driver from the 60s prepping for a major race. This is the stuff that got my juices flowing and motorsport became a game I wanted to play.

Gymkana?

I've always been a car guy ever since I was a kid when I saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Herbie movies. I had an uncle who built model cars. He was a teenager when I was a kid, and he always had cool cars. I guess the first car I thought was cool was when I was 3. Mom had a 1966 Buick Wildcat convertible that was red with a red interior and white top, and I always thought that car was the coolest because the top went down and people thought it was a flashy cool car and for some reason I realized that was pretty neat. By the way, that Wildcat was probably the influence behind my first car, a 1976 TR6, red, and of course, the top went down.

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Been interested in how stuff worked pretty much forever. First thing I did when I got a new toy as a kid was to try and take it apart.

One of my earliest memories is of my dad out in the driveway under the hood of his Chevy. Once in a while, he'd sit me on his lap and let me steer while he worked the pedals. Probably never went over 3MPH, but to me, it was the coolest thing ever.

Later on, what really sparked my interest in cars was watching old hot rod movies on TV...bigger toys that I can take apart!

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I never missed an episode of Straightaway, and I'd always watch Route 66 just to see the Corvette. For me, it was the star of the show...

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My first car was a '62 VW Beetle with rust holes big enough to stick your head thru...paid $75 for it. My first real car project was rebuilding that VW's engine with parts out of a J.C. Whitney catalog. Drove it out to CA from the east coast and the rest is history. Better cars followed, but I still have a couple of old VWs that I tinker around with.

Pretty much always been a car guy since I was a kid. My brother, who was 14 yrs older than me was a big hot rodder when I was little. He was always out in our garage working on his car. First one I remember was his 55 Chevy gasser. I was probably around 6 at the time. I was always out there with him. He had stacks of Car Craft, Popular Hotrodding and Hot Rod, many which I still have to this day. He' was always buying me hot wheels, matchbox cars etc.... . Back then, ( Late 60's early 70's... ) most toys for boys were auto and truck related, So naturally I just started gravitating towards cars more and more. Bought my first car a 72 Plymouth Scamp when i was 15 for $275. Had a 318, few months later dropped a 340 in it which i got for $125. That Started my Mopar obsession. And it just snowballed from there.

My main auto interests have always been hot rods and old trucks. But Im a grearhead in general. I like anything that has a motor and moves.

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I think I was born this way. I remember being a 4 year old kid and lining up my matchbox, Hotwheels and SST's in the hallway outside of my bedroom and conducting imaginary races that then went throughout the house. I also remember being super excited that my Dad let me spend my birthday money on a CARtoons magazine when I was probably 6. My father was a "car guy" his entire life too. We rebuilt and resprayed a 1/2 dozen car during my grade school and HS years in our home garage. A 240z, Vega, Firebird, Sunbird, Fiat X19, FJ40 Landcruiser, Olds Cutlass, etc.

Building car models when I was ?10?
edit:
this was in the 60's with cars like Hemi Under Glass, The Beer Wagon...

I'm honestly surprised none of y'all said you became car c guys to get girls. No, I don't say that to be flippant. I just honestly figured that was most guys motivation.

Most of us were hooked on cars while we still thought girls were not worth our time. Somewhere in the family archives is a pic of me, maybe age 2 , standing beside a MG TC.
I was about 10 when I was gobsmacked by my first Porsche, a 356.
I had been married a number of years and had started a family before our yard was graced by a 924S and an Audi 4000 Quattro sedan.

Best
Les

I've been a car guy since about the mid-50's when we moved out to CA. Dad had a '32 Ford Model B that he'd put a Merc flathead V-8 in but Mom wouldn't let him bring it to CA on account of it had mechanical brakes. He was a mechanical engineer that always worked on our cars instead of taking them somewhere to be fixed. He could do it better than any shop ever could. He had my brother and me rebuilding engines at an early age before we could drive. He got us our first go kart. We put the rod thru the side of the engine and he knew of one of the only shops that had a heliarc machine at the time to get it fixed. Growing up in Santa Monica, it was a no brainer that Formula One would be a large influence since Phil Hill lived there. His dad was a former post master for SM.
Building model cars we were sniffing glue before it became a 'thing' to get high on. We always had to have our windows open when doing it in our room no matter how cold it was outside.
I couldn't wait to get to high school since they had an AUTO shop class!
Yeah, it was a piece of cake but it was nice that Mr J. (RIP) appreciated having a guy who knew some stuff and wanted to learn more and wasn't a screw-up like a lot of the guys were back in the day.

Well, when I first became a car guy/car kid, cars were cool and girls had cooties!!! [emoji38]
Of course, that thinking went out the window a few years later, although cars were still cool. I can honestly say that the girls loved the TR6, that's for sure, which was nice.

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I remember going to Woolworths with my mom, and getting the Snake and Mongoose kits.

$3.50 or so back then.. lol

.

I must've been 5 yo when I got one of these for my birthday. It's my first real memory of car lust, but, I can think of other very specific examples of looking at a picture or a toy of a racing car or a sports car and being held captive.

Bottom line, I don't really remember NOT being a car guy.

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My very small, Great Plains hometown had some wonderful late 60's and early 70's cars that belonged to various gearheads. Camaros, Chevelles, AMX, Maverick, AAR Cuda... . Then two cousins each bought '68 Camaros. At that point, my interest in WWII aircraft started to shift.

My old man wore a suit and went to work at some company where he did computer programming, circa 1980. I never viewed him as a "car guy", but I knew he had a garage full of tools, and a rotating selection of crappy late 70's cars that we could afford. I learned about cars next to him as he desperately tried to keep them alive.

I didn't know then that back in the day, he was an old fashioned greaser in Chicago, dragging for pink slips and such. Stealing parts from dumpsters at places like Strange, building Frankenstein cars, dragging on North Ave. I've hung out at cars shows with him in more modern times, and come across more than one person who remembered my dad and the '62 Nova that he had at one point.
I more seriously got into turning wrenches when I got into rock crawling, because that teaches you REAL QUICK how to fix your broken crap while stuck in a ditch in the middle of nowhere. I've swapped clutches in trucks while lying on my back in the sand, I've helped weld differentials using batteries in the middle of the night in the desert, I've stuck random pieces of metal into the fuse slots just to get a truck back to camp. I've also helped get someone home who's leg was crushed between two trucks (Baja truck style speed, someone to stabilize him in the back seat, and lots and lots of whiskey...) and someone who's hand was destroyed because they were holding onto the Jeep halo crossmember when the truck rolled...

In 1962 I was 15 years old. Out of curiosity I pulled the cylinder head off my mom's 1960 Rambler American one Saturday because I heard it would run better if I cleaned the carbon off the combustion chambers and installed new plugs. So I did. And it did.

Manny, Moe, & Jack set me straight about surfacing the head (what's that?), getting a head gasket (because I didn't know what that was) and using a torque wrench (they loaned me theirs).

Mom wasn't happy on Saturday afternoon, but I had it running Sunday night. She later sold me the car for college for $75.

The rest, as they say, is history.