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I was listening to BT earlier today, the few songs that I have off his Movement in Still Life album, specifically “Smartbomb,” and it reminded me very much of days in Florida. I was only there for six months, and they were lonely days, by and large, the only bright spot being the church I attended. But even it was a 45-minute drive north to Jacksonville, which put a damper on any attempts to become involved in the college and grad social scene, not that I really had any idea how to go about doing that anyway, being a very recent graduate and accustomed to the ready-made and close-at-hand social entities present in college. The distance did give me ample time to reflect on my situation there, to pray, and on a more prosaic level, to enjoy the recent acquisition of my car at that time, the white Supra.

The song today reminded me very much of the experience of driving it, since, as cheesy as it sounds, I had hand-picked songs to play in the car as I drove it back from Atlanta, where I purchased it, and the bulk of the songs I played in it thereafter were BT compositions. I remember just going for drives along the oceanfront highway, A1A, late in the evening, smelling the salt spray with the top removed and feeling the heater against my feet. It was a large sports car, technically with four seats, the overwhelming emphasis being on the front ones, positioning itself as a kind of “personal luxury car,” and as such the interior design and overall focus of the car made it feel very companion-like.

I miss that car. I put a lot of thought into its purchase, more than any other car I’ve acquired, and I remember going through lists of must-haves and pros and cons before settling on a Supra. All my other cars “just happened” in comparison. My record with extensive car modification isn’t stellar: the engine mishaps with the RX-7, the transmission woes of the Taurus, but the Supra truly is “the one that got away,” as it were. To this day, when I think about the engine I swapped into it, the 1JZ, I can think of a single thing I’d change about it. Even the most brilliant cars have qualities I would change: RX-7’s recirculating-ball steering and live axle, parts of the Z’s interior and its engine’s non-crossflow head, and even the Supra itself was far too heavy, not to mention the steering’s relative softness, but the engine, the 1JZ… Absolute perfection.

There’s nothing like an inline-6, that inline-6. It splits the difference perfectly between the annoying but fast-revving blatt of a 4-cylinder and the more ponderous dissonance of a V8. The engine is harmonically balanced so with a fully counterweighted crankshaft the power delivery is absolutely smooth. And the sound, the sound, especially from the 1JZ–like a muffled Formula 1 engine, but more substantial even than that. I wouldn’t alter a thing: not the coil-on-plug ignition, not the intake piping, not the displacement, not the twin-turbo setup, not even the appearance of the engine in the bay. Flawless.

Don’t mind me; I’m just getting verbose about a car that came and went, and while I dearly love the project Z-car that’s sitting at parents’ house waiting for me to come work on it, right now I feel that if I had to choose one car to be content with, it would be the Supra I owned, with the engine I swapped, running. I was so close, and what happened happened as it should have, but some days I remember fondly.