Joel Kivett’s Aviator Gray Audi TT Coupe
Discussed in his living room and garage in Denver, Colorado
Joel Kivett has always been a car guy, if you start the clock at three years old. That was when the first car memory burrowed into Joel’s burgeoning brain. And he remembers it clear as day.
“When I was born, my dad drove a 914 Porsche that he bought while he was in college. It had those flip-up headlights. The garage was below our kitchen—a ramped driveway going up to the street—and he’d back out of the garage and flip the headlights up and blink them as he drove off for work each morning. It was his salutation to us for the day. Then my sister came along and he sold it for a Volkswagen Microbus. I was heartbroken.”
The only thing worse I’ve found, than heartache, is not knowing. The what if? And knowing Joel for as long as I’ve known him, and seeing cars—very nice cars—come and go in and out of his life, I can’t help but think it isn’t the heartbreak that haunts him, it’s the ‘what if?’ he spent his time contemplating prior to hitting “make an offer” on an Aviator Gray, 1.8L 250 Horsepower hard top Audi TT. His wife and daughter were asleep down the hall. His online banking site open in the adjacent browser tab.
This is the story of healing a bit of heartbreak and halting what had become a very persistent and powerful ‘what if?’
Joel Kivett’s Aviator Gray Audi TT coupe
Calendar years have passed since Joel’s father drove the Porsche away for the last time, but as it is with obsessions, the only time he registered is before you had it and after it was yours. Joel waited three decades for his it, a hard top, rare-in-color Aviator Gray 2001 Audi TT coupe with a 1.8 L 225 horsepower engine. To be accurate, that specific car entered his consciousness in his twenties. His long-awaited answer to the gap left open by the disappearance of the first car he loved. A manifestation he’d been constructing in his subconscious I’d argue, finally finding its rightful symbol.
I meet Joel at his house on a chilly November morning. He pours me a few conversational fingers of Laws Whiskey, distilled in Denver and our shared city. We have some small talk and then walk out to his detached garage. The TT commands attention almost immediately, pulling attention away from any number of Joel’s higher-end bikes and even a spit-polished-clean Volkswagen GTI, his daily driver, which sits enviously beside. I’m taken by the comparison. Why, among other expensive pleasures, does this TT stand out? Sure, one can’t help but stare at the TT’s seamless lozenge-like shape and bright indigo interior. Its cured leather smell. The way his 1.8L, 225 horsepower engine is felt first in your haunches, before your ears have a chance to register the sound. How it feels to realize your body is a connected part of a low-slung sport-bucket seat.
“The interior is the reward,” Joel says matter of factly. He revs up the engine and selects PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories for the Sea, as our soundtrack. He has five other CDs in the changer, each period-relevant to when the car was produced. “It has this soothing effect. It kind of forces you to feel a certain way.” He’s talking about the car, not PJ Harvey.
I’ve ridden in the TT numerous times, and can attest to its almost hermetically-sealed calm. Hard corners and sharp accelerations the only reminders you’ve not morphed fully into an unbroken curvy sphere—the closest comparison, I think, is the spaceship from Flight of the Navigator. The soothing effect Joel wistfully cites makes sense in the context of heartbreak and what if. Like a lost dog who found his way home, finally nestled next to you on the couch. Soothing is not wanting anymore, not wondering. Soothing is having everyone home.
Purpose built.
We take a drive, because what else would you do with such a car. Joel knows each turn and stop sign and stretch of road. He takes advantage of the exact intersection at which he can let the TT go from the confines of suburbia and toward the foothills. The seat’s specific supportiveness is appreciated almost immediately. Joel’s honed his driving skills, effortlessly stoking the most from the car—everything he’d driven prior preparing him for this car. He smiles, frequently, when driving, something foreign to me unless I’m listening to a funny podcast. I want this feeling. This unfamiliar joy delivered via driving. The necessity for car seats that cradle rib cages because the car was purpose-built to perform, the streets just substitutes for tracks or long European touring roads. Finish lines, trophies, Champagne showers. Corners as forms to dance with.
We enter a four-lane highway and as Joel continues to accelerate, I ask him what he most loves about the car. He’s wearing driving gloves.
“To see an automotive execution that’s purely Bauhaus,” he trails off a bit staring through the windshield and over his left shoulder as we pass another car. Just a car. “It's a very complete design in a way that a lot of cars can't be in today's world.”
I nod as if I understand.
“Normally, manufacturers create a show car for their big car shows and intentionally make it over the top in every way, just to drive people nuts. A branding exercise.” I nod again. “Maybe a few elements of that ideal design trickle down into the street car you’d see in a dealership.
“But as I understand it, two guys created a brief to build a car so German the Germans wouldn’t dare to design it. And when they rolled that car—this TT—onto the floor, everyone did go nuts. Audi said, ‘We’re going to build it, and we’re not changing anything.’” He pauses again, “There were a couple small compromises, which I can point out to you, but for the most part, from the design of the switches to the unique font used on the dashboard. They decided to make it as great as possible.”
Something complete. Nothing left to wonder, what if?
Joel has a hard time identifying the “best things” about this car. I realize I’m over simplifying, possibly offensively. Which is your favorite child? With whom did you have the best sex? He ponders its rarity: one of only 250 on the road today with this particular package. That doesn’t quite capture his affection. He does love that his Aviator Gray TT included the 225 horsepower engine vs. the 180 horsepower version. I don’t give 45 horsepower much thought, but for a person such as Joel, with the particular type of love he has for this particular car, 45 might well be a million. For as long as he’d been thinking about the TT, knowing the car wasn’t able to live up to its potential would be inconceivable. An incomplete ding on an otherwise perfect design.
Love at first sight.
Joel first saw a hard top Audi TT from an elevated sidewalk situated just above LaSalle Street, which runs beneath the Chicago Board of Trade Building. He was fresh from college and finding his way as a junior designer in a big design firm in the biggest city he’d every lived in.
“The Board of Trade was built above two working streets, making kind of a canyon in the middle of the city.” It’s in fact known as the LaSalle Street Canyon. “I’m walking down the street, and I see this Audi TT, which I’d seen pictures of in car magazines, but I’d never seen one in person.”
I may not be a car guy, but I do consider myself an armchair architectural enthusiast, operating with just enough information to pick one obscure skyscraper out of a skyline or stop to photograph a particularly telling Art Deco adornment. The Chicago Board of Trade building is Art Deco at its best and biggest, humble not in the slightest with intricate stone carvings and an audacious aluminum statue of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, adorning the top. She’s a proud nod to the Board of Trade’s roots in commodities: though grand, a backdrop at odds with the TT’s Bauhaus-inspired design and in no way commoditized existence. Especially at that exact moment for Joel.
“You’re above the cars and this TT just kind of crawls under me. I had a high-angle view, a very flattering angle of the vehicle, and I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, that’s amazing.’”
A few years later, living in Kansas City, another TT crossed Joel’s path. Parked a block down his street, rarely moved, he looked forward to seeing it each day. He thought about the car on long commutes into the office. He’d think of the Board of Trade and slowly become more obsessed. He found other car guys with hobbyist affectations for the TT. In comparison and among conversation, his was not mere lust, but love. Affection, not affectation. His dad’s Porsche crossed his mind during those online message board chats and regular eBay searches: Aviator Gray Audi TT. This was the closest he'd come to that flip-up headlight feeling.
And this is around the time I first met Joel. Both working at the same design firm in Kansas City. Both driving Volkswagens, though the circular badge was the start and end of our cars’ similarities. His a reflex silver GTI with a VR6 engine, mine a base-model Jetta Wagon, purchased for its ability to move both my Labrador Retriever and mountain bike between park and home. One day our boss showed up in a red TT—there it was again— a roadster, for which Joel tried to explain his displeasure. It’s just not a complete design. It bothered him, always there. Yet another TT in his life. A reminder, however roofless.
From city street to midwest neighborhood to the next parking space over, the TT remained, just out of arm’s reach, never out of mind.
“I kept stumbling on them, they were like touchstones, always there.”
Until the middle of an otherwise unremarkable night, within the final minutes of an eBay auction, with Joel’s index finger vibrating above his computer mouse. A bid in hand. An Aviator Gray, 1.8L 250 Horsepower hard top Audi TT on the screen. His three year old daughter asleep. His wife, awoken politely before Joel placed his bid. For as long as she’d been with Joel, so too had the TT. The rest, he remembers, is a bit of a blur: sitting and staring, scrolling back and forth through the images on the screen, letting so many years settle in. His. What if, now What is.
Winner, winner.
Today this is a physical thing, in his physical garage. Something to show for years of wishing.
“Touch the switches, they’re cold. They’re made of aluminum, not plastic.” We’re back in the garage after our short drive. The sheen hasn’t dulled, the relationship not near routine. I touch the tuner knob: cold. It strikes me how rare it is to realize one’s dream. To have something material, a manifestation of what we wonder about in our minds. Joel gets out and, with a fancy cleaning wand, brushes something from the hood I don’t even see and I wonder what I have to show for my 40 years. Which of my obsessions, desires, dreams do I have at hand? In hand. The things I’ve always loved. The what ifs I’ve repeated like mantras.
“There is something about opening the garage and just seeing it,” Joel says as we walk back into his house. “It’s mine.”
I nod, wondering what those feelings feel like. The feelings you can see across his face when stares at the vehicle, in the way his fingers gravitate to the cold aluminum. A lifetime of love unrequited, now remedied. Every so often, we win. We come full circle, finishing what we started, answering what we asked—again and again. Trophy in hand.
Joel Kivett runs KCraft Design and can be found on the Web at https://www.joelkivett.com or on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/kcraftdsgn/