The man speaks, and passion oozes. Words purr, a certain poetry to the flow. No sputter, not a piston out of whack.

It is 6 a.m. on a summer Saturday, and Larry H. Miller is bound to be at the wheel. The canyons are his roadway, and with each passing mile his sense of satisfaction multiplies.

The ride is a far cry from Miller's very first, a two-tone medium metallic green 1952 Olds with a light-lime and white hardtop that cost him just $20 but had some sort of pesky electrical problem he never could fix.

Rather, Miller is driving one in his multimillion-dollar stable of high-performance and historically significant Cobras — and he is enjoying it so much that even wife Gail has had to interrogate him on the attraction of the affair.

"The answer I gave her: 'I deal so much with people, and I have high expectations, whether it's basketball players or employees. And I have a lot of really good ones. But, people are still people," said Miller, the Utah Jazz owner whose ever-expanding business empire revolves around a vast collection of automobile dealerships. " 'You can do all the preparation and training, but you still can't determine the outcome — because they're still people, and there are so many variables.' "

" 'With Cobras . . . you do certain things to them, and you get certain results. Now is it 100 percent assured? Absolutely not. Things break. But they respond in a very specific way when you do certain specific things. I like that a lot. I like the reliability that you can build into them, and that you get out of them what you expect because of what you put into it.

You'd like to be able to do that with human relationships.' "

Imagine going from zero to 100 miles per hour, then stopping — all in 12.7 seconds. That is what Miller recalls Cobras doing in the mid-1960s, and doing it in nearly half the time that it took the fastest Ferrari of the day. That is what the rare Cobra — only 1,011 were ever built — still can do today.

"It's just unbelievable what happens with these things," Miller said. "It is shocking."

For that reason, Gail's query does not slow there.

Yet Larry drives on, whether it's an occasional joy ride at the drag strip showing off for friends or a 60-, 80- or even 100-mile loop of solitude through the highlands.

"She'll worry: 'Oh, you're going to get hurt.' I say, 'Most times I go out, I don't even get on it real hard.' She says, 'Then why do you do it?' I say, 'Two things: One is I know what will happen if I do, and it's just neat knowing that. The other thing — and you'd almost have to have something like this in your life to know, but — I hear one of those things start up . . . and just listening to its heartbeat, and just knowing what's there . . . it becomes part of you. It's hard to explain, but it's a special thing.' "