"I'm thinking, 'OK, I can buy one for $6,000 — a decent car.' And I'd find one, and it was $8,000," he said. "I remember finding one in Wisconsin that was $8,000 — and it actually was in really good shape, because it had been bought by a kid who went to Vietnam and got killed, and his parents kept the car, and it had been sitting there. It hadn't been driven.

"They wanted 8,000 bucks — and I thought $8,000 was outlandish, because the market, I thought, was $4,000-to-$6,000. So I passed on it. Then I thought, 'Well, I better go buy that car.' It was gone. It happened about three times. I found a car for $9,000. I didn't buy it. Then I went back, and I was always a day late and a dollar short. Finally, I just said, 'I've got to find a good car and buy it.' "

As an eight-person business meeting broke up — he was working for Toyota at the time — Miller took a shot in the dark.

"I said, 'By the way, does anybody know anybody with a Cobra,' " he said. "Now think of the odds of that — if there's only about 1,000 cars that exist."

As it turns out, someone had a cousin in California who just happened to have a Cobra for sale.

Miller recalls the trip to Westminster, Calif., as if it were yesterday.

"I flew down and saw it, but it was 13 grand — $13,500, actually. I was like, 'Wow,' " he said. "It was a good car, never been wrecked. I had to leave about three days later to go Japan (on business), then on the way back I picked the car up and drove it home.

"Gail flew down from Colorado to meet me, and the two of us drove it home. It took about two-and-a-half days. So, that was the first car. It was just a stock 289 Cobra — just as stock as they come, which is still a pretty cool car."

From there, the collection grew, each car with its own story and its own personality.

Fast-forward again, this time to 1998.

Miller had rekindled his serious interest in road racing, which "had kind of languished in the back of my mind since I was in high school."

He bought a 1 1/4-mile racetrack located about 20 miles north of Denver, which he still owns. He then purchased 160 adjacent acres, hoping to build a 3-to-3 1/2 mile track there. Only after buying the land, though, did he try to get it zoned to allow racing — not his shrewdest business decision ever, he realizes now.

Unable to expand in Colorado, Miller set about trying to find land for such a track in the Salt Lake Valley. After two unsuccessful years spent trying to get the requisite approval of regulatory agencies, he turned instead to Tooele. Agreement was reached with county officials there on the undertaking, and groundbreaking was last April.