I’ve always been a car guy, but unfortunately haven’t always thought to take photos of my cars. I don’t have any pictures of the little Honda Trail 70 motorcycle that I rode all over Glenrose Texas when I was 8, or of the bigger Suzuki 90 that I graduated to when I was 12. And I really wish I’d taken a few pictures of my first car, a Datsun Bluebird sedan, which I bought for $25 when I was 15. I had to rebuild the transmission which was a great lesson for a kid to learn.

While I was in college and working part-time in a machine shop I bought a beat-up, non-running car, this Datsun Roadster. I built it an engine with the help of my brother and dropped it in, painted and finished it myself, and drove it for several years. Wish I had some photos of the process, and a better picture of the end result!

The University of Texas at Arlington fielded two teams for the national Mini Baja design-build engineering competition in 1982. That’s me third from the right, on the 3-person team.

Our team captured first place in the national competition that year, which was held at Texas Tech in Lubbock. The girl on our team at the far right is Lisa, my future, current, and forever wife, so you can see that joining the team had far-reaching consequences!

Here are some photos from our 1982 competition. You can see the desert terrain in Lubbock, lots of dust, sand, and rocks. Mini Baja college team competitions are still held yearly.

After being part of the Mini Baja Engineering Team competition in 1982 I jumped at the chance to join the Society of Automotive Engineers Competition Team at the University of Texas at Arlington for the 1984 competition, which was held at our school that year.

Like the Mini Baja, this was a design, build, and race competition, and, need I say it, our team won first!

I even got the wheels off the ground in a few of the turns! Here are a couple of race pictures and a few close-ups of the car: