|| A little history about the car ||

At the beginning of 2004, it was time for another Supra to join the family. Dad was itching to buy a sports car and after thinking about it long and hard, he finally settled on a Toyota Supra twin turbo. I was looking for a clean Supra also, but just wasn't finding anything that was clean enough or at a decent price. We looked for months, trying to find something worth buying, and the cars we found were either heavily modified and riced all to hell, or they were in super mint condition (and the owner wanted close to what it sold for new).

One day, my buddy Joe calls me up and says "Hey, I found a really nice mint condition twin turbo on www.SupraForums.com, and it only has a few mods plus a lot of extras. The price looks decent too, and I emailed you a link to the ad." So I get home and check out the ad. The car is every bit as clean as Joe says it is, it's green, less than 50,000 miles and has what Supra owner's consider to be "basic performance upgrades", which means it puts down a lot more power than a stock twin turbo does.

I showed the photos to my Dad and told him all about the car, I wasn't interested in it for myself because it had an automatic transmission. The ad had one phone number and an email address - both of which were in ... Atlanta, Georgia. Dad told me to go ahead and contact the guy and see if we could make a deal on the car. We decided that for the asking price, considering all the extra stuff it came with - it was a fair deal and he was pretty excited about it. The fact that it was in Atlanta was kind of unfortunate but this car just seemed to be 'the' right car.

So here I am, armed with the owner's phone number and his email address - and it's a Sunday. The car had just been listed a few hours beforehand and I knew that if I didn't find a way to reach him, I'd be outta luck - the car was going to sell quickly. I tried calling the number and got a voicemail box, so I left a message. The email address I noticed was for a business - so I decided to nose around the business website & see if I could find another way to reach the owner of the Supra directly. As it turned out, there were a few different phone numbers on the website, so I called the numbers one by one.

As it turns out, the 3rd number I tried - someone answered and it was Rich (the owner of the Supra). I apologized for calling him on a Sunday, but explained why I wanted to talk to him on the phone. We agreed on a price and I got off the phone, bought airline tickets through Expedia and called Rich back with the arrival information. Two days later I flew from Fresno to Los Angeles, and from Los Angeles to Atlanta, Georgia - Rich and his son met me at the airport and drove me to their home to see the car. I was blown away at how nice he and his family was. Southern Hospitality is definitely a very real thing!

After driving the Supra and being impressed with the car, Rich and his wife had me stay for dinner - steak, baked potatoes, veggies .... and then he drove me to my Hotel in Atlanta for the night. The next day we did the paperwork on the car, put on the new bra I picked up at the dealer, and I hopped on the interstate to start heading west. My trip back to California took 4 days, since I was only driving like 12 hours per day but I got to see lots of interesting things along the way. I stopped in Taladega, Alabama and took the Speedway Tour & saw the Museum ... then stayed the night in Clinton, Mississippi. The next day I drove from Mississippi to Dallas/Ft. Worth and visited fellow Supra owner & friend, Phil Dupler and saw his amazing Supra collection and famed garage building where he does all his work. Needless to say I was impressed - his attention to detail is just impeccable. I continued on after a 3 hour visit to a town just short of El Paso, where I stayed the night. Lots of driving that day and I was completely exhausted.

The next day I was up early and back on the road, this time turning north with my goal of reaching Albuquerque, New Mexico and my friend Leslie Grover's house by night fall - damn what a drive. Crossing New Mexico was just .... unbelievable - the state, while not being very big is so full of "nothing" it's just a desert and miles and miles of road with nothing to see. So I decided to take a little detour and visit Roswell, New Mexico and see all the alien stuff / museum etc. After a short visit, I quickly decided that I wouldn't enjoy living there - gassed up the car and continued driving toward Albuquerque. I arrived just before dark, had a beer with Leslie and off to dinner we went to his favorite restaurant - "Sadies". For years, Leslie has been telling me about this dish called "Carne Adovado" so of course I had to try it. Les was right ... it was great, however it was also HOTTER THAN THE DEEPEST REACHES OF HELL! I drank another beer and I lost track of the countless glasses of water I consumed to put the fire out. That food was wonderful but it turned my stomach into a churning, burning cauldron of fire that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Leslie just laughed at me and called me a wuss.

My departure the following day was a little delayed because of some work Les and his house guest Andy (from New Zealand) were doing on Leslies Supra. I was on the road again around 12 noon or so with a goal of getting as far into California as I could. The drive went smooth with no problems at all and some time around 11:30pm, I finally gave up for the night & got a motel someplace outside of Barstow.

The final leg home the following day was highlighted by some guy in a Lexus GS-400 and his buddy wanting to race on the freeway. The entire drive home I was sooo good, keeping just slightly above the speed limit and enjoying the protection of the Valentine One radar detector the Supra came with. Well, these guys kept pulling along side, and then backing off so I decided "the hell with it". It was a straight stretch of Interstate 15 out in the middle of the desert and no cars were in sight ... this was just too tempting. I set the boost controller on the high setting (18psi) and accelerated up to 100mph which the Lexus in turn matched immediately. So I floored it and the Supra just launched - and kept accelerating like it wasn't going to stop. I looked in the mirror and I was pulling away hard from the Lexus, to the point where it was just a little dot in my mirror.

Satisfied that I'd gone fast enough, I glanced down at the speedometer and received the biggest shock I've experienced in a car - I was decellerating down from 175 mph! The needle was slowly making its way to 170 .... 160 .... 150 .... and my hands began sweating, my forearms were starting to shake. I was fine until I realized just how fast I was really going - the shock of being aware sent the biggest rush of adrenaline through my body. And in that instant I developed a whole new level of respect for the Supra. This car was DAMN fast and I apparently had a lot to learn about it. The guys in the Lexus finally caught back up to me (rolled their window down) and said "We knew you were going to kill us bad, we just wanted to see it happen" and gave me thumbs up.

The rest of the trip was smooth sailing - I called Dad and told him about the little freeway race - which surprisingly he didn't get on my case about it at all. Instead he asked "So how did it feel? Was it smooth and stable? Was there a lot of noise inside the car at that speed?" - I wondered to myself when the scolding would begin, and suprisingly, it never came. A few minutes later, I called my friend Chris Wick and shared the story with him too. He in turn posted what I'd told him on our CelicaSupra.com forum "Stephen destroyed a Lexus GS-400 by aircraft carrier lengths this afternoon...." - that quote still makes me laugh.

Fast forward to a couple months later - Dad decided he didn't want the Supra, because it was too difficult for him to get in and out of. An accident he was involved in where a guy t-boned his Explorer had done damage to muscles in his legs and it was very difficult and painful to get in and out of the Supra. So....back to the drawing board he went - finally settling on a clean, mint condition Jaguar XK-8 Convertible. I elected to take over the payments on the Supra - and while doesn't have the 6 speed transmission that I wanted, the car was too nice to pass up. It's still a fun car to drive, brings a smile to my face and I never once have regretted the decision to keep it.

If you're interested, photos from the trip home with the car can be found here.

Thanks for reading!