Yeah, it’s a cliché title for a final column, but I’ve never been very original on that front. Anyway, it gets straight to the point. It’s been four years since the first Fumes, almost to the day and, like Michael Schumacher, I’m wrapping things up. Unlike Michael, I’m not leaving with millions in the bank.

But this isn’t a sad good-bye. It’s a happy one. I’m happy to be leaving. Actually, I’m the last one around. The other URC guys have long left Queens for the island of Fiji, where they run the business out of a thatched hut that smells like wild goslings—next to one owned by Tony Robbins. That’s why they always look so haggard when you see them at SEMA and drift events; they’re flying red-eye from Fiji, with all that camera equipment.

Anyway, when I first started Fumes, I didn’t think I had that much to say… not twice a month, at least. As it turned out—it didn’t matter. I’ve always been able to ramble with the best of them. And yet I’ve left out one of my favorite stories. It’s the one I tell people when they ask how I got into this business.

And so my final story is the introduction to my career. There’s a five-word version and a slightly longer version. I’m giving you both…

My dad had two Triumphs.

He wasn’t a gearhead. You couldn’t even call him a car nut, though he’s owned some classics. His first car was a ’57 Chevy Bel-Air, which he bought before he had a license. He was fresh off the boat. When I was a boy, he enjoyed telling us kids how he used to park the Chevy on the lawn because he didn’t know any better.

After two years, my dad traded in the Bel-Air for a Biscayne and then traded that for something else I can’t quite remember. He got married in the mountains of Virginia, where he bought a Triumph TR3, which became the absolute car of my dreams and started my love of British sports cars, which continues to this day.

But I only saw the TR3 in photographs. Everything I would come to know about it came through stories from my parents—how my mom had it painted red and how she sewed the upholstery and the carpeting herself; the sound that it made. I just thought it was strange that here was this Chinese couple living in the rural South with a British car.

My parents sold the TR3 before they moved to Boston and long before I was born, and the Triumph that I grew up with was a TR4A. It was red. It had a black top and a rip in the plastic rear window, which my dad patched up with clear parcel tape, the kind you couldn’t rip with your bare hands. I can remember how the strip was angled on the plastic window, which had been scratched opaque.

Don’t ask me what the TR4A sounded like or what the wooden dash looked like or what the steering wheel felt like in my hands. I don’t remember. All my memories come from my view in the back seat. With two kids, my dad managed to hold onto the little roadster. Baby seats? Toddler seats? Childproof locks? Forget it—this was the 1970s. I remember doing jumping jacks on our way to the Liberty Tree Mall and leaning my head against the cold metal and falling asleep on the way home.

I was probably seven or eight when a guy showed up at the front door with a toolbox. He was clean-cut, a college student. He examined the hood and fired up the car. Everything was fine. The car drove great. The gears were good. The back window was still ripped, but that was an easy fix. But then the guy lifted up the carpet and looked straight through to the driveway.

My dad’s been robbed in two car deals in his life. Remember how I said he traded in the ’57 Chevy? Well, that was the first time—he traded the Bel-Air for the Biscayne straight up. How could’ve a Chinese immigrant known he was losing out on a classic? Anyway, that was the first time he got robbed.

When he took $800 from the young guy for the TR4A was the second. And that’s how I got into car writing. Catch you on the flip side.

Richard Chang is a columnist at AutoWeek and Racer magazines.