Oops, I just bought another car

Those of you who read my previous post about the Mazda Miata I bought just this summer will certainly be a little baffled by the title of this post. But it is what it is. I bought a car, and it is amazing.


Allow me to rewind a bit to provide some context. The first car I ever drove was a 1990 Mazda 626, passed down from my folks. This was a car that I could barely get to 100 mph going down a hill, but it was a car during high school and I was most grateful. The first new car I ever drove was a 2001 Audi A3, a company car during my time in Berlin at McKinsey. It was beautiful, had a lovely Bose system, and could handle 125 mph with a 1.6 L engine (with sufficiently long stretch of Autobahn).

Then for a long while, I didn't own a car because I didn't need one. Lived in Washington, D.C. (very manageable city with good public transportation), Evanston, IL (grad school), Beijing (exchange program), and then SF. None of these places either required a car, or were car owner friendly.

It wasn't until 2008, on a whim, when I bought my first car. A black, 2001 Mazda Miata LS, from a fellow Googler at the time. I knew when I got into the car that it was made for me. After researching the heck out of it, I determined that it was in fact the consensus car that produced the most grins per dollar, and that's exactly what I wanted. To give it a visual kick, I even went out of my way to get orange OZ wheels shipped from Italy, and put some Continental ExtremeContact DWS performance tires on them.

I drove that car for 4 glorious years, up and down the California coast and everywhere else I could take it. Pretty much drove with the top down all the time, unless it was pouring rain or near freezing. And I sold it, in order to get a 1999 Mazda Miata, Anniversary Edition. Now you're thinking to yourself, that doesn't make sense. Why sell a car you love for an older version of the same car?

Because I was enamored with the idea of turbocharging it. The last (good) CARB legal turbocharge kit was for '99 Miatas and older. It's made by Begi Engineering, looks like this, and would've changed the dynamic of the car entirely (on the order of a 70% increase in horsepower). But the reality of this change is that it would've cost roughly $7k to do completely (about what I paid for the car itself). And I would be lucky if someone wanted to give me $1k extra for a turbocharged Miata. It would've been a damn fun ride, but it didn't make financial sense.

So I found myself continuing to look at other cars. I kept going searching for Honda S2000s and Lotus Elises, cars that shared the same purity of driving spirit, but with more punch than the Miata. Came across an incredibly alluring candidate end of July. It was a 2003 Honda S2000 with about 95k miles, and almost $20k invested in the car. But I couldn't bring myself to buy another car so soon. The ad disappeared in a week. Before that happened, I had saved the ad in Evernote and would look at it longingly every once in a while.

A little less than a month later, as I was perusing cars once again, and lo and behold, I saw what appeared to be the same car being sold for the same price from a different location. Strange. Turns out, the buyer of the car got serious about a home purchase, and needed to sell off toys to collect money. So he was putting the S2000 up for sale. This all happened while I was away in Vancouver on a business trip. Upon returning to the Bay Area, I immediately called the seller and asked when would be a good time to inspect the car. He suggested right now if I was interested. So I made my way there directly from the airport, and saw this.

I didn't waste any time. After test driving the car, and inspecting it, I knew this is what I was looking for and immediately went to an ATM, drafted a crude bill of sale, and put down a cash deposit. If you haven't driven this car, the only way I can describe it is "video game car." The throw is so short and snicks so perfectly that you can only shake your head in amazement when shifting. The engine is actually an AP2 engine, which means Honda engineers stroked the AP1 engine, added 160 cc of displacement, dropped the max rev limit from 9k to 8k, and increased hp and torque by about 6-10% in the 1k - 8k rpm range. But all that aside, it basically feels like you hit the rocket boost button whenever you get above 6k rpm. The VTEC engine sings a siren song that enchants you to do everything you can to flog the living daylights out of the car.

So yes, I bought another car. And yes, I'll need to sell my Miata, despite having put in great brake rotors and pads, as well as a '01 header upgrade. And I had good memories of it, even though I didn't keep it long. But Yellow Fever calls, and I must answer.