Awesome 914 Richard! I love those cars and have a lot of seat time from the 1970s in a 1973 914 2.0!
Ok, starting with first car driven, my older sister taught me how to drive/let me drive when I was 13 back in 1972. Car was a 1969 VW Bug, blue, like this one:
Second car I ever drove, same year, 1972 was my Dad's 1968 Firebird 350 H.O. with a 4 speed Hurst shifter. My sister was confused about how to do a burnout, so I convinced her to let me try, and I succeeded on my first attempt -- already having 5 years of reading HotRod, Car and Driver and Road and Track magazines were helpful. Car looked just like this one:
Just a month or so later, she was attempting to do a burnout in front of a friend's house late one night with my coaching (apparently my first instructor assignment), and she massively over-revved the engine while the whole time I'm yelling SHIFT, SHIFT, SHIFT! Ah, for the days when there was no such thing as a rev limiter... My dad actually repaired it himself, which shouldn't have been surprising given his mechanical engineering background, but it wasn't like him to work on his cars at that point. Fortunately, it was just a broken rocker arm and an easy repair. He asked me if I knew what happened, and I told him the truth.
First car I ever owned was years later, a 1976 Mercury Capri II (imported from Germany version Capri of the 70s) with a V6 and 4MT. Here's a pic of it after I had owned it a few years, probably 1979:
That car I had Tom Wyatt of Turbo Tom's in Atlanta help me build a nice engine with a radical Isky cam, higher comp pistons, Offenhauser dual plane manifold with a 4bbl Holley, headers, etc. Eventually, that engine saw its demise in 1980 at guess where? Old Rocky Mount Airport during a THSCC autocross. I way, way over-revved (no rev limiter coming into play here again) it in one 1st gear section since it would just pull like crazy at high revs, and it cracked a piston.
The next car I owned was the dark blue 1972 BMW Bavaria in the background of the pic above. My dad was trying to trade it in sometime in 1980, and the best offer he could get for it was $1200. He sold it to me for $1000. I owned it for the next 14 years.
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This would have been somewhere around 1985 (+/-).
The car was replaced by a 1974 914 2.0L. I drove that second car through college and for about a year or so after that once married. In that car I had replaced the stock muffler with Porsche megaphones which had zero baffles in them. It probably actually didn't make the car faster, but it "sounded" faster. In town I became the master at throttle management to keep it somewhat quiet. But otherwise it was LOUD. I lived a few miles from work and that involved getting on the interstate and driving to the next exit and then getting off. My wife said in the mornings she could hear me drive all the way to work including getting off the interstate! I moved to NC after about a year of marriage and left the car in WV, but poorly stored and it was eventually eaten by rust. The third 914 is the one I have now which is a 1972. I will eventually get the 72 on the road.