1995 Pontiac Firebird Formula
Chris's 1995 Pontiac Firebird Formula
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My second car, but my first new car. White with a grey cloth interior, deep tinted windows and T-tops. What a great ride this was. Maybe a little too much car for an eighteen year old, but I had tons of fun with it.
I went to college in San Antonio, too far for the old Jeep. I would have had to stop for gas twice and my parents didn't think it would make it that far. Who was I to argue too hard. Besides, they wanted to give the Jeep to my younger brother a couple months after I left for school.
After a long search, we finally found this car on a lot in San Antonio. I was lucky enough to convince my parents that I wouldn't do anything stupid with a car with a big V8. I ended up spinning the car twice while I owned it, but never did any damage. So I was right, and so were they.
This was my first taste of performance cars. It was fast. If I remember
right, 0-60 was around 5.7 seconds. It would definitely throw you back
in your seat when you hammered the gas. It cornered pretty well too.
After five years and over a hundred thousand miles, Casey took me out to an autocross. So I finally got to drive my car in a competitive environment. It was a blast. The car was pretty fast and handled well enough for me. I even earned myself a second place trophy in one event! Granted, that was for the beginner class, but a trophy is a trophy. After that, I also took the car to a high speed road course. This was even more fun. Instead of seeing speeds of 45, I got up to 130! Wahoo!! The car again handled really well. I impressed the driving instructor with my control of the automatic transmission. I was getting it to downshift at just the right points. Tons of fun.
After six years of driving the car, it was finally starting to show its age a little. It was time for an upgrade. This car definitely influenced what I wanted to drive after that.