1985 Mercedes Benz w123 280ce Coupe

1985 Mercedes Benz w123 280ce Coupe

I’ve always liked this car. The rich people where I grew up (North Shore of Long Island) always drove w123’s (until the w124 came out). I mostly remember wagons and coupes.

This car has an interesting story. I found it on Craig’s List. Listed at $2,000 if I remember correctly. It was owned by a Mercedes enthusiast. I thought is was priced low and decided to buy it to flip it. It was a beautiful shade of metallic baby blue with a tan interior. When I went to see the car you could tell it has been re-painted. I didn’t think it mattered too much, it still looked good. It was a grey market car imported from Germany, and had some cool non-US market features like heated cloth seats and power front windows, but manual rear windows. It had an inline six cylinder gas engine. This engine was not available in the USA for the 1985 model year. Only the diesel was sold in the USA for the 1985 model year. The engine ran quite noisily, the previous owner telling me that it might need a valve job, though he said he just tried to adjust the valves himself. There was ALOT of valve chatter. It could have been the wrong oil viscosity. I added a hood pad, in hope that it would help quiet the engine down, but it didn’t help much. It also ran at a high RPM at speed (60 mph). I’m not sure if this was normal, or if the transmission was not shifting up.

The previous owner told me that he found it on a side street in Fort Worth and bought it for $1,500 (I think). He put some work into it and wanted to sell it to get a diesel. I offered $1,800 and he accepted. When i went back to his house to get the title signed, his new diesel 190 was in front of his house with an oil pan full of oil under it. He said it needed some work but he was driving it.

When i got the car I could tell, from the smell, that the car leaked. It would cost over $500 to replace the seals, so that was out of the question. But it had to stay in the garage. I kept in the hot Texas sun for a couple of days to try to dry it out, but it didn’t help much. The car didn’t really need much. I cleaned it up a bit, brought the black trim back to black, and waxed it, and cleaned the interior a bit. Some of the interior wood trim was cracked a bit. I had to refurbish that a bit. I also bought a set of CoCo mats for it.

I got classic plates for it and drove it in a Mercedes Club of America rally. It was lots of fun.

After I got the title in my hand I sold it on ebay for $3,600, exactly double what I paid. Of course I did have a few expenses such as the hood pad and I put a new distributor and rotor on it.

The thing that bugged me the most about the car is how much it looked like my dad’s 1960’s Bel Air Coupe. His car was a similar color and the roof line to trunk was also very similar. My dad’s car sat in our garage for years, in a non-working state. I hated that car. And so, this car, was just too similar to that one. And I also didn’t like how it drove on the highway. It was just in too high of an RPM. Driving it around town was fun though, but that’s all it really was, an around town car.

It is a nice pillarless coupe though.

2010 BMW 328i e90 Sedan

2010 BMW e90 Sedan

2011 BMW 328i sedan e90

I picked this one up at the BMW Welt in Munich.

So this will be about the factory pick-up as well as the car itself.

I had a mini. It was awesome. I loved it. My wife asked me to sell it because it was too small. So I sold it. I leased a VW Jetta because it was cheap (sign and drive). I like the Jetta, but it just wasn’t me.  Every month a check the new BMW, VW, and Mercedes lease deals to see if there’s anything interesting. Summer 2010 BMW had a zero down lease special with the payment about the same as my Jetta. Awesome!  The search starts.

I called all of the local BMW dealers and went to a few of them. None of them would give me the lease deal. It was very frustrating. So I decided to expand my search area. I tried south and north. I found a dealer in Oklahoma City that would honor the internet lease special. Great!

I had to keep it cheap, so I the only option I paid for was an automatic transmission (so my wife could drive it). I got lucky because they were including leather, 17” wheels, and an iPod adapter at no extra charge. I ordered a white car with brown leather and an automatic transmission. 

Now the wait was on.

I think it took three months to build it. We made our plans and flew to Munich in October 2010. Rolf picked us up at the flugehafen and drove us to the Welt. We checked in and got some food at the reception area. Then we looked around and the exhibits and signed up for a factory tour. The museum was closed that day. Then our time came. Our advisor met us and took us into a private room to demonstrate some of BMWs technology. Then he took us down the staircase as my car spun around on a turntable. It was just wonderful. He went over all of the car’s features, gave us the key and let us do a victory lap around the welt. It was, again, just wonderful. We left the Welt and headed to our hotel.

We spent most of our vacation in Rome, with one day in Munich and one day in Saltzburg. It was a great trip and well worth it. A real dream come true. I even got to go over 100mph on the Autobahn.

Prior to owning this new BMW i had owned an e46. The e46 was fantastic, it really was. The e90, while a great car, can not live up to an e46. It felt so much heavier then the e46. Like 300 pounds heavier. And I think the automatic transmission sucked some of the life out of the car as well (my e46 was a manual). But the e90 does have a fantastic suspension and handled really well. It was almost a sports car and I drove it like one. 

The engine did not seem as smooth as the one in my e46. The engines in my e46 and z3 felt like turbines, the e90’s engine was a little rough.

2005 c6 Corvette

c6 corvette

2005 c6 corvette

This is a hard one to write about. It is such a great car, many people would think i’m crazy to have sold it. And I think i was. 

Back in 2005 i was ready for another sports car. I was convinced I was going to get a Porsche, a Boxster in fact. Used. There was no doubt in my mind. I test drove a few boxsters and they were ok, not much power but fun and they made a nice noise. I knew Porsches were expensive to fix and at that point in my life i wasn’t ready to fix it myself or pay someone else to fix it.

Now the corvette. Through work i get a discount on chevys, so i called all of the local chevy dealerships and asked if they would accept my employee discount. They all said no of course, but the last one I called said that they would give me a discount, not as much as the employee discount, but close enough. So I drove over there. Being a chevy dealership, they wouldn’t let me test drive or even touch the car, I was after all only in my 30’s and for sure, I wouldn’t be able to handle the power. But they did let me order one. 6-speed, red, tan leather, Z51. Pretty sweet. $43k. I waited. And I waited. I read the forums and how much people were enjoying there new corvettes. Then came a post, “Just saw a new red corvette arrive at classic chevrolt”. I posted, “It’s mine!”.

the next i got the call and the car was mine.

Now if I’m a Porsche guy, through and though, why did i buy the corvette? well for two reasons at the time. It had an awesome power to weight ratio and a 3 year warranty. Now that i’m older and wiser, power to weight isn’t as important, but it’s the experience of driving your dream.

My ride home was in stop and go traffic. and then I spent the next few weeks passing the break-in period. I did an oil change after the break-in period and the oil was black. 

Now I was ready to experience that awesome power-to-weight for my self. I let it rip. It sounded great and of course threw me back into my seat.

I had to track it. 

I signed up for a PCA track day. It was great. I was about to catch up to the 996 Turbos on the straight. Very impressive. I loved my car.

Were there things I didn’t like? Sure, there always are. The thing that bothered me the most was the Chevy Tahoe steering wheel the car car with. But that was easily fixed. The 2006 car had a new three spoke wheel. I bought one of those and I was happy.

The car did squeak from that day i got it. But that didn’t bother me. In fact it had more squeaks then my 1999 911 does. And I had a few problems with it. Everyone once in a while the battery would die. I finally figured out that sometimes I wasn’t closing the driver’s door all the way and the alarm system was draining the battery. The other problem I had was the radio. I think I had three radios put in the car and they all didn’t work right. Something to do with the RDS system is i remember correctly. Software problem that was never fixed.

I had my one and only street race in the Corvette. A Lotus Esprit Turbo. I won of course. It was fun. First time i hit the rev limiter. I went the fastest I’ve been in a car too. 125. Felt like i was going 60. 

It was a great car and I prefer it to the new c7. To me it was like driving a GT1 car at LeMans. I loved seeing the tops of the fenders through the windshield. And the sound was just wonderful, as was the thrust.

Is my 1999 911 better? Of Course it is. But I’m a biased Porsche guy. Is the 911 slower? Yes. But it has a certain quality about it. It’s being at 4,000 rpm, with the wonderful sound behind you. It doesn;t have the thrust of the corvette, but it has alot of personality that the corvette was missing. It’s not that the corvette isn’t an awesome car, it is, it’s just that the Porsche is better.