It was the morning of September 17th 1983 when SRL311-11987 rolled into
my driveway. I was 16 then and the Roadster was my first car. Found it
in a junk yard in Birmingham. It had sat there most of the summer
waiting and hoping, kind of a stray dog of the automotive world (All my
dogs had actually been stray's so maybe that was the attraction). Dad
and I decided it would be a pretty cool car and a good father/son
project as it didn't run at the time and really needed a complete
restoration. Neither of us knew much about roadsters. Dad had seen one
in the showroom when he bought his 510 wagon new in 69 but that was
about it. I guess it didn't take too long to begin to realize that
these were special cars indeed.
Now there are a lot of miles and memories tied up with that car. Let's
see, - Worry about crashing it through the back of the garage as it's
brakes didn't work well when it arrived and was unloaded onto our very
steep driveway, exuberance on the day that my Rallye catalog arrived as
I'd never seen so many roadsters in one place, having the left rear
wheel fall off at 55mph after I let someone else work on it (no, not the
same lugs as a 510), driving 18 hours from Reading PA to Birmingham with
the car packed full of everything I had in college, driving around on
campus with no passenger seat as my stereo speakers were too big to be
shipped but fit nicely where the other seat was, narrowly missing a BIG
dear on Rt 11 coming back from Potsdam NY one night with 3 of us in the
front seats, reading about steering with the throttle in car mags and
then actually experiencing it, finding out the difference between suntan
lotion and sunscreen (big difference!), my wife starting to think I was
into some of that nasty internet stuff because I spent so much time on
the computer reading posts from THIS LIST. And the list goes on and on.
These are special cars and I feel very lucky that I stumbled into
ownership of one of them. Here's to the next 20 years (I hope we don't
run out of parts)
Brian '69 2000
Tampa, FL
web.Tampabay.rr.com/oilleak
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