Out of BS staff, two have their backgrounds laced with drag racing and I’m not one of them. Not that I didn’t drag race, but my heart has been in corner carving. Blame it on watching rally racing and touring car racing as a kid, blame it on some sketchy as hell ride-alongs in vehicles never designed to corner that hooked me. But if I’m going to enjoy speed, I want some extra fun to go along with it besides just matting the throttle and hoping for the best. I could always find a windy road, but I truly grasped the art of apexing and linking turns together when I started borrowing a relative’s Mitsubishi 3000GT to go hit the windy section of Colorado Highway 24 between Manitou Springs and Woodland Park. I’ll be blunt with you, readers: I drove that car like an absolute asshole. And I’m completely unapologetic in that regard, because that was the “needle in the vein” moment for me. I had grip, I had brakes, I had boost, and I had a ball. I needed more, much more.
It was strange that I fell for the 3000GT, as well. I had derided anything imported as a joke up to that point, but dammit, that car was no joke. The amount of lateral grip it had as it dove into a sweeper was, at the time, something to behold. If I had tried half of those moves in the 1987 Monte Carlo SS I was driving, I would’ve been a statistic. It was all so…natural. Borderline telepathic. Maybe I’m diving into hyperbole, but the first time I went into the hills, I came back a changed man. To this day, a 3000GT VR4 is a bucket-list car for the same reason I had back then: I need to drive one hard again. I need to remember just how good it truly was.
