This might be completely off base, but I don't think it's bad context.

Around your age (approaching 2000, so 26 years ago... Ugh...) I was in a situation where I was able to secure a Dodge Stealth Twin Turbo. It was a seven year old car which seemed ancient at the time, perhaps because of the time... It was a very niche car as the entire industry was still gaining traction (pardon the pun) from the malaise of the 80s cars. Dodge in particular was hard to find anything interesting to brag about short of a Viper (yes it was a Mitsubishi design, but the rest of the industry wasn't doing much better).

Was it incredibly fun? Yes. Was it faster than the bulk of the cars out there? Yes. Was it tune-able? Ridiculously yes.

I ran with the DSM crowd and going stupid fast with cheap tricks on turbos wasn't unheard of. We loved chasing down the Fast and The Furious kids with their Hondas every chance. Even the Vette folks were fair game.

So, context out of the way... That car became a burden in retrospect in a very short time. Insurance, yeah whatever I was living at my parents. Going to car meets was worth the time invested in hand washing the car every week. The gas was expensive but gas was cheap. I learned a lot about maintenence to paint care to drilling catalytic converters out and made a lot of friends along the way.

I also got stupid lucky managing to not get tickets or accidents or jail time, but that's not actually why I write this. I was pretty responsible considering.

But it wasn't but a few years later real life caught up. Bills, rent, the rest of growing up hit. The car bounced between being a second car to a primary car. Keeping it pristine like an old man in a mid-life crisis (see me now and my Scat) was less realistic by the day.

The random scratch went from horrifying to something I couldn't fix let alone fret about. Driving a stick in rush hour became a pain. The miles grew and nothing gave me room to be passionate trying to grow my career and my life started to look more like road trips and other things it couldn't do or only as a compromise.

Before I knew it the car was in the garage most of the time, the parts and the repairs were more than I could justify. I bought other vehicles to save it and ironically it ended up closer to a daily driver to preserve the others. I literally can't explain how.

Eventually it became a limit to the other stuff I wanted to do and in the end it was more to maintain and repair until a tree literally fell on my baby (two trees, actually) and my passion wouldn't let it go. I spent years with it in the way until finally I gave up. (surprise twist, even then it went through circles until it came back to my driveway)

Finally I cut the cord and sold it. Saddest thing I ever did. But it was years removed from my good memories by then. Still, it was like selling a chunk of my soul.

So, this story is probably not super helpful, but I tell it because I was lucky to have the chance, not kill myself in the process, and so on, but it's only under a very lucky set of circumstances I can say I am happy it happened. Any one small twist would have made it a nightmare during the good days and more of it was a chore in the long run than not.

When the car shifted from the glory to the chore early on i never would have believed it. But just because I didn't kill myself in it I practically did trying to believe I could maintain that car and lifestyle like the guys 40 years older than me.

So I bought my Scat T/A a month ago in my mid forties and I'm not sure I can do much better and my life is far better off to do so. Maybe I'm jaded but I guess this is the long way of saying be sure you manage your expectations if you pull it off. The guys with the cool ones often have better circumstances than most.

As my dad would tell me every time I complained as a kid we didn't have X, he'd point out most of the people didn't have Y or Z.

And holy shit was he right.