Every afternoon in the affluent suburb of Armonk, N.Y., an indistinguishable blur of black sport utility vehicles and silver sedans line up outside Byram Hills High School to retrieve students.
Occasionally, however, heads turn and conversation pauses as a deep sky blue 1975 Corvette pulls in, driven by the state’s usually buttoned-up attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo. Boys give him a knowing thumbs up, but Mr. Cuomo’s daughters shoot him a look of mortification.
“The color is a tad electric for their taste,” Mr. Cuomo said. “The whole imagery of the Corvette, they don’t like. They are embarrassed by their middle-aged dad having a middle-age crisis driving a Corvette.”
If he is elected governor on Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo, 52, promises to bring tireless energy, prosecutorial zeal and legislative savvy with him to the job. But he will bring something else, too: his garage full of 1970s muscle cars and a custom-made motorcycle, which he has labored and obsessed over since his days as a teenage gas station attendant in Queens.
Mr. Cuomo is known to be cautious in conversation, and jealously guards his privacy, but he becomes animated when talking about pistons, camshafts and transmissions. (“The GTO has a Hurst his-and-hers shifter,” he said. “It’s automatic but you can shift it manually.”) And it is clear that the mechanical elegance of an engine captivates him in a way that little else can.
“There is something about it,” his brother, the television journalist Chris Cuomo, said, “the discipline of it, figuring out what is wrong, buying the right part, taking it apart, testing it out — the whole thing is sort of a religion for him.”
His private passion is about to become more public: Mr. Cuomo is expected to appear early next year on an episode of the Discovery Channel’s motorcycle-fetishizing “American Chopper,” a reality show shot in Orange County, N.Y. Cameramen filmed him visiting the studio during a campaign swing through the Hudson Valley this summer.
His fascination with vehicles was nurtured in the car culture of Queens in the early 1970s, which was awash in cheap, high-powered Chevys, Fords and Pontiacs unburdened by the fuel-efficiency standards that would dawn after the gasoline crisis.
“That was, in my opinion, the high point for what they now call the American muscle car,” Mr. Cuomo said, his voice brimming with nostalgia.
Local car buffs thronged to the B&G gas station in Hollis, Queens, where Mr. Cuomo, then a student at Archbishop Molloy High School, persuaded the owner to hire him. By day, he pumped gas and ran errands; by night, he learned the intricacies of an engine, under the tutelage of the station’s mechanics, who worked on their own cars after hours.
“We were mesmerized by it,” said George Haggerty Jr., the son of the station’s owner, who worked alongside Mr. Cuomo as a teenager.
| 
|