It's a drug according to Jerry Seinfeld's man

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What I've Learned: Sam Cabiglio

Mechanic, 66, Monterey, California

Cabiglio, who has been rebuilding Porsches and street-racing cars since the 1960s, manages Jerry Seinfeld's vast collection of classic Porsches.

Italian cars have always been beautifully designed, beautifully sculpted, wonderful to drive, emotional — but not always reliable. It's kind of like how a really, really attractive female may be a delight, but she may also be a little bit of a pain.

You could add maybe 20 percent more power to a VW, but I needed way more power. So to the horror of my father, I removed the engine from my brand-new '64 Beetle and installed one from a Porsche 356. It was not a 100 percent bolt-in, but it was relatively easy to do if you knew what you were doing.

I'll visually massage a car with my eyes. A good car has been built with the desires of an engineer and a designer to be the best that it could be. Your eyes tell you that.

It's more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow.

Luxury and convenience and lane-departure warnings and double-backflip auto-this: All this other stuff keeps adding weight and weight and weight and complexity and cost. And ultimately causes more stuff to go wrong down the line. And everybody does it. And everybody does it because everybody thinks, If we don't do it, we're not going to be competitive.

Many of the cars that people will malign until hell freezes over, they had personality.

Open the glove-box door. Feel how it shuts. Feel how the latch engages. These are the things that convey quality.

Luxury equals isolation.

When you put a car together, and you turn the key, and it lights up, and you hear that heart beating, it's a drug. I'm a drug addict, and this is it.