End of a long love affair

Drove our TR-6 for the last time Saturday, taking her from our home in Arlington over to her new owner's home in Alexandria.

The exhaust gave out a sweet sound as we drove along the George Washington Parkway. Drivers, as they always do, paused to give the French Blue two-seat British roadster a second look when passing.

My first car was a 1957 Ford - a white two-door hardtop with a black interior. She had a 312 cubic-inch V-8 and a three-speed manual tranny when I bought her for $500 from Roberts Ford in Floyd, Virginia, but an uncle who was a mechanic helped me shoehorn a 1962 Ford 406 cubic-inch V-8 under the hood and mated it to a 1958 Lincoln Police Special three-speed overdrive transmission.

The transmission had an electric switch that allowed the driver to switch into overdrive into any gear so it was, in reality, a six-speed. We beefed up the suspension as well. The car would fly. It outran more than one Virginia State Trooper on the roads of Southwestern, Virginia.

Drove the car throughout my high school years. Lost my virginity in it.

Replaced the '57 with a Mustang fastback - my first new car and a black beauty with a 289 high-performance V-8 and four-on-the-floor. It later would be replaced by a Shelby GT-500, a Carroll Shelby-modified Mustang with a 427 under the hood. Fast car. Too fast. Missed a turn one night and totaled it against a rock wall.

But I loved that car. Drove it on the road and raced it on Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) tracks around the country.  Replaced it with an MG-Midget, a later-model Sprite with a different name badge, and raced it as well.

In 1976, I dumped the Midget for a brand-new, Pimento-red TR-6. Compared with the Midget, the 6 was a large car, with a 2.5 liter inline-six and tall 185-15SR tires (with tubes, not tubeless). Didn't race it but drove it everywhere: To Florida twice for vacation, to the West Coast once. Drove it in the snow, in rain. Put 70,000 miles on it in three years. It never left me on the side of the road.

My wife and I had our first date in that car. After we got married, we wanted a house. She had a Mustang and I sold the TR just before we moved East but she made me promise that one day, when we could afford it, we would own another one.

I put over 200,000 miles on the 911 before taking it off the road as a daily driver and replacing it in 2000 with a Jeep Wrangler. Amy shook her head in amazement.

"Most people start out with something like a Jeep," she laughed. "Then they get a fancy red sports car. Leave it up to you to do things backwards."

Yet the Wrangler turned out to be so much fun the 911 gathered dust in the garage. I sold it a year later. Amy, after a bout with Epstein-Barr syndrome, said the TR was too much to drive, so her new daily driver became a new, bright red, Jeep Liberty. The cycle was complete.

British sports car go downhill fast if you don't drive them on a regular basis. We drove the TR three times in two years, too little to keep the seals from drying out and the rubber from rotting. We decided late in the year to sell her and, true to form, the first time we fired her up, both carbs spewed fuel from dried out O-rings in the floats. We replaced the O-rings, got the engine running as best we could and spent a week negotiating with the final buyer, closing the deal on Saturday.

I pulled the TR-6 out of the driveway, followed him to Alexandria, handed over the keys, returned to the empty garage space and cleaned, for the last time, the oil and fluid drippings that said a British sports car was once parked here.