One of the most frequent questions I get asked is ‘Why Porsche?’ Well, it’s a pretty simple answer, but I’ll get to that in a moment. First, I need to rewind a little and tell you the back-story to my car collection which really began in the mid nineties. I spoke about my very first car, a Toyota Corolla, and my second car, the Saab. The third car was my very first Porsche, the slant-nose car that I told you all about. After that, well … how can I put it … Karen and I … we just liked buying shit. Business was good, as a couple and a company we were on fire, designing and selling cool clothes, all these famous people were digging what we did, the money was great, it was good times.
Like I said, we just liked buying shit …
At one time, we had a ’65 Mustang GT350R replica, a ’67 Series 1 E-Type Jag, two ’69 Dodge Super Bees, a ’73 Lotus Europa, a ’79 308 GTB Ferrari and three or four Porsches. That was from 1995 through probably 2005, so roughly a ten-year period. At that point, my car collection was a lot more diverse, so taking in Porsche but also American muscle cars, European sports cars – a much broader selection of stuff. I’ve always been a Porsche diehard, but I am also open to other ideas. Not all Porsche guys are like that. I know that might seem an odd thing to say when my garage is, at the time of writing, full of around twenty 911s. But remember, I was a kid growing up in the seventies, so I was well aware of all these other marques. I saw Jim Rockford’s Firebird, the Dukes of Hazzard car, James Bond’s Esprit, Colin Chapman and Lotus on the track, famous Ferraris, the Jags – all those cars.
The Mustang is an iconic car and an all-time American classic. We loved that car and even featured it in some of the Serious catalogues. The problem for me was that it didn’t stop very well and didn’t really go around corners. As for the E-Type, well, Enzo Ferrari said it was the most beautiful car in the world, and it was. However, the E-Type Jag really wasn’t a reliable car, you know. We paid twenty grand for a restored E-Type, which was a considerable step up in terms of the money we were spending on cars; I think at the time we’d never spent more than $10,000. The funniest part of this story is that we actually flew up to Sacramento with $20,000 in a backpack, met the owner at the airport and then drove the car back home! We got within two hundred yards of our loft when the clutch went. Welcome to the world of E-Type Jag ownership. Maybe it hadn’t been that well restored. Maybe we were a bit naïve back then, but we just wanted a cool car. And the E-Type is certainly that. Remember my uncle Mick, the market trader who owned an E-Type? Since then, I’d always wanted one. So I’d ticked that box, but that car was unreliable; we upgraded to a bigger radiator, all that stuff, but we’d seldom drive it. So it was in the garage a lot, just sitting there. Then sometimes at a weekend we’d go, ‘Why don’t we drive the E-Type? It’s so cool,’ and then you’d go for a drive and it would break down and we’d go, ‘Oh, that’s why we don’t drive the E-Type.’ I have to say, the great thing about the E-Type Jag is that no one ever said a bad word about it. People would sometimes give you the finger in a Ferrari and maybe look down their nose at the muscle cars like the Mustang, but the E-Type Jag was loved by everyone.
Super Bees … we loved them, had two of those. Hell, I’ve even got a ’69 Super Bee tattoo. We had a 383 four-speed and a 440 automatic, both just brute raw power. In essence, that was the Dukes of Hazzard car, same body style. So I ticked that off the list. One time, we were leaving the warehouse, driving through Downtown, I was in the Super Bee, and I think Karen was following behind in a Jag XJ6. Basically, I must have been displaying what some might call ‘an exhibition of speed’ in the Super Bee; problem was, I didn’t realize that there was a cop behind me when I was gunning it. Suddenly, I saw the flashing lights of the cop car and so I made a right turn and then a left and pulled over. The cop got on his walkie-talkie and then gets out of the car. Then he comes over to me, gets me out of the Super Bee, puts my hands above my head, and I’m spread-eagled on the front of the car. At this moment, Karen came around the corner and couldn’t believe what was going on in front of her! She got out of her car, but the cop told her to step back. Karen basically said, ‘No, that’s my boyfriend, what are you doing with him?’ This cop said, ‘We’re holding him for questioning.’ He asked me where I was going, so I said, ‘I’m going home.’ He replied, ‘Well, you were driving a little quick, what are you doing Downtown?’ To be fair, the neighbourhood was sketchy back then, he probably saw my tattoos and dreadlocks and jumped to the wrong conclusions. I think the cop must have thought I was Downtown trying to score drugs. I explained that we worked there and were in the clothing business, and it wasn’t until I pulled out my ID and driver’s licence that he started to back off. Being Downtown in a fast car in the nineties was not quite as enjoyable as it is now!
Anyway, back to my other cars. Next up, a ’73 Lotus Europa with a burnt-sand paint job, a beige/copper metallic colour. Back in the pre-internet days, I would religiously get Sports Car Trader on a Wednesday night and trawl through it looking for Porsches and muscle cars. I wasn’t looking for a Lotus Europa, but one week there was this car. I thought, That’s kind of quirky; my uncle David had that Lotus Type 47 that he worked on with Dad. I thought, Fuck it, this one’s not a Type 47, but it’s still a Europa – same thing. The car was for sale in Walnut Creek, northern California, near San Francisco. I called the guy up, told him I was interested in the car, long story short, he says, ‘My cousin lives in Orange County, I’ll drive the car down next week. You can take a look at it.’ I said, ‘Fair enough, that saves me flying up to you. You know what? If the car makes it, I’ll buy it.’ The car made it, so I bought it. Sadly, I never really clicked with that car, though.
I bought the ’79 308 GTB Ferrari for twenty grand in 1995. Again, probably ticking the box after my uncle had one. And that car was kind of nice and reliable, believe it or not. We only ever changed a water pump on that. It did break down on us once, though, coming back from Vegas along with my buddy in his Viper.
So, you can see, I have owned plenty of cars other than Porsches in my time. I have some great memories of those cars, too. However, that is not what my garage is full of at this very moment, nor is it what I am well known for.
So back to the question: why Porsche?
Like I said, it’s a pretty simple answer. As great as all those other cars were, they were maybe good at one or two things. The Mustang was pretty fast but didn’t stop or go around corners. The E-Type Jag looked good but was very unreliable. Also, as great as the E-Type is, I was not a fan of the ‘famed’ handling – that’s kind of a myth in my opinion. The Ferrari was great, but that isn’t a car you put high mileage on; you just don’t see a lot of high-mileage Ferraris or Lamborghinis. They are either not reliable or they don’t get driven that much because people just collect them and get all paranoid about racking up the mileage.
In addition, I have always found the world of ‘Porsche people’ absolutely fascinating; there are so many different characters, individuals, people from completely contrasting backgrounds and lives, yet somehow we all have this common interest, these cars, and that has opened me up to some great experiences over the years that otherwise would not have happened.
For these reasons, over time I gradually started to sell off anything that wasn’t Porsche. The last non-Porsche that we kept was the E-Type Jag, which finally sold in 2011 (coincidentally that was the fiftieth anniversary of the E-Type, so luckily that car had gone up in value). I’m certainly not dissing all these great cars; I’m just trying to explain how I came to own over fifty Porsches. The bottom line is that while other cars were good at a few things, the Porsches excelled at everything.
At this point, I was driving these cars only on the streets – fairly aggressive, ‘spirited’ street driving, shall we say. However, I realized that this wasn’t necessarily the safest way to enjoy the cars, so it was perhaps inevitable that my obsession moved up a notch. In late 2001, I joined the Porsche Owners Club along with its 115,000 members and took my spirited driving to the track. Over the next six years or so, I honed my driving ability and became increasingly fixated on racing.
It was John Williamson at Otto’s (the repair shop in Venice who worked on my first Porsche) who first got me into the Porsche Owners Club. I remember doing my first track day and it was perhaps the only time Karen ever went to the track. She went out in this short miniskirt, all rock ’n’ roll, looking beautiful, but it was in Willow Springs, the high desert in the middle of nowhere, over a hundred miles from our home. There was nothing else to do, it was a hundred degrees, just this bunch of gearhead guys talking about cars and racing (these were real ‘dedicated’ Porsche people!). Karen was bored stiff by lunchtime, ready to go home. She said, ‘Magnus, that’s the last time I’m ever going to the track with you!’
For me, the experience was altogether different. That was the beginning of what I like to call the Porsche slippery slope, sliding down towards modification. I just dove in at the deep end. I did my first track day at the first event of the year in 2002. You had to do four short track events to get what’s called your short track licence, which I did within two months. Then I moved on to getting my time trial licence straight away, such that by June I had progressed to the big track at Willow Springs.
I started competing and did relatively well in that quite quickly. Between 2002 and 2007, I was tearing around tracks such as Willow Springs, Thunderhill, Laguna Seca, California Speedway, Las Vegas Speedway and Phoenix Speedway, honing my skills and always tweaking the cars I was driving. I’d like to think I earnt the respect of my racing peers, and certainly I have quite a few trophies and race wins to show for my efforts. Some people would turn up with their race cars on trailers, but I would always drive the car to the track, thrash it around and then drive it back home. That’s what old-school racers back in the twenties and thirties did, characters such as the Bentley Boys and all their old-school contemporaries, so for me that was just the natural thing to do. And besides, it was usually a 911, so it was easy; these cars are very adaptable.
I was winning races and earning trophies and plaques – in 2004, I won my class championship and placed second in that year’s HP Time Trial Series. I still have the Porsche Owners Club year-end review book for that season. I am in there as the short track champ and there’s a little interview with me. The writer asked me if I had any advice for upcoming racers and I said:
Get real comfortable with your car and drive it as often as you can, try to resist the urge to spend money to go faster right away, ask other drivers about their lines around the track, if possible drive with them. Always set yourself a reasonable goal and try to achieve it. Take little steps, remember smooth is quick, buy some good tyres, paint some racing stripes on your car … it just feels faster.
They then asked, ‘How does Magnus balance racing and real life?’ to which I replied, ‘Being nice to my wife Karen certainly helps, always trying to drive home at night from the events.’ In the same interview, I described my racing as a matter of self-preservation: ‘You can only go so fast and get so many speeding tickets on the street before you realize fast is better attempted in a controlled track environment.’ (Truth be told, I was still doing quite a lot of spirited driving on the streets and getting a lot of speeding tickets.) I also told the interviewer that my lucky charm was my Serious Number 1 patch and the Union Jack flag on my helmet. My parting words to fellow racers and competitors were, ‘Stay Motivated.’
At that same time, I was also doing a lot of coaching, so I became a Porsche Owners Club instructor. By then, I had gone through the whole programme (short track licence, time trial licence, club race licence), so to make the day go real quick and to get more experience, I’d instruct students. I didn’t view that as a chore; I saw it as a way to get more seat time even when I wasn’t driving. I was seeing different parts of the track and also learning from coaching someone else.
By the middle of the decade, I was doing forty to fifty track days a year – that’s as good as one a week. Each event is a whole weekend, and I was instructing too. The problem was that the more competitive the racing became, the more pressure was introduced and the more costly it became, too. Thunderhill was five hundred miles away and there were other away days like Laguna Seca, Phoenix and the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Those events would be a Friday, Saturday, Sunday at the track, meaning you’d have to leave on a Thursday to get there. That’s four days away, three nights in a hotel. Most likely you are flying there. Someone’s shipping your car and you’re buying a set of tyres – that’s a thousand bucks. At the same time, you are modifying, upgrading brakes, suspension – you know, it’s a thousand bucks here, two thousand bucks there, three thousand bucks at times. Then there’s entry fees, etc., and you better hope you don’t break the car. It was getting so expensive. Let’s say a track day is a minimum of a thousand bucks. If you are doing fifty a year, do the math.
Over time, as the racing became more serious, I found myself enjoying it less. The pressure was greater, the costs were higher, but I wasn’t necessarily having a better time. So around 2008 I started withdrawing a little from that scene, racing less, going to fewer track weekends. The attraction was wearing off, and I started to think I could have more fun buying, selling and modifying cars instead. That’s when I started putting all the money I had spent racing into acquiring Porsches. Karen would always say, ‘You love buying cars, you are great at buying cars’ – that was one of her famous lines. Then she said, ‘But you need to become great at selling them as well.’ She had a point. Karen was always thinking about our situation, scoping it out; she was super-intelligent. That kept me focused.
So I got myself on Craigslist and Auto Trader and started buying these project 911s – five grand here, six grand there, real inexpensive cars. I remember the very first one pretty well. It was a matching-numbers ’69 911T that barely ran. I bought it for five grand here in LA, and then my buddy Sergio, who works with me, and I attempted to restore it ourselves. We didn’t get the five-hundred-dollar paint job, we went for the thousand-dollar paint job, and, to be fair, the end result was half-decent. Sergio and I stripped all the interior and did the headliner ourselves, the seats and carpet, changed the wheels, too. I think we were probably into that car for maybe twelve grand when we were done. So it was a real budget restoration. We sold it for twenty, so we actually made money on the car and that felt great! Often it wasn’t easy money, though. There was another car I remember well, a ’74 911 Carrera that I bought for eighty-five hundred bucks It needed a bit of work, some paint correction. The Porsche market was quieter back then, so I had a really hard time selling that car, finally offloading it for twenty grand in about 2009.
We were kind of learning as we went along, trial and error. Early Porsches are pretty easy to modify and upgrade. We figured out how best to get stuff chrome plated, powder coated, cad plated. We scouted around for the best paint jobs, the different ways to work on the interior, all these various details and methods. Essentially, I am completely self-taught. The great thing about these online forums is that you can just Google an issue you are faced with, maybe how to strip paint off a Porsche, restore a certain part or whatever, and people will help you. Ask questions, be nice, be grateful, treat people with respect. They will enjoy helping you and you can learn so much.
Then I found a painter called Jose who worked out of his backyard down in Vernon. He was painting cars for three grand but to a really high standard, so gradually the quality of the restorations went up, even though to start off with we were still buying rust-bucket 911s. I did a couple of 912s, too. Over the period from 2008 to 2011, the quality of the cars I was working on continually improved. At that point, however, truth be told, my personality wasn’t on the cars. Quite a few of these earlier cars are now cropping up for sale as ‘an ex-Magnus Walker 911’ because I registered and titled them to me. Yet a lot of those early cars have little or no elements of my personality or signature touches whatsoever; those are stock cars that were just restored and flipped. Even though I’ve owned them, they are not cars that I have outlawed.
I started to document the process a little bit. You may or may not have heard of Pelican Parts. It’s a comprehensive website and parts supplier, and their online forums are really great. So, around 2010 I started a thread, nothing headline-grabbing, just a few words about my cars and Porsche stuff. I called it ‘Porsche Collection – Out of Control Hobby’. It was the first time I’d ever done that, because even though I had been on the Pelican Parts forum since 2004, I had never really posted anything. I’m not one of those guys that is necessarily computer savvy, I didn’t have an iPhone, this stuff didn’t necessarily come naturally to me – still doesn’t to be honest. I think you are either a tech/computer guy or you’re not, and I was never one of those guys that had to rush out and get the latest iPhone. In fact, at that point I was still on a Motorola Razr flip phone. Did me fine.
So I had this little thread going on both Pelican Parts and the Early S Registry, which is more early Porsche specific. The ‘Out of Control Hobby’ vibe and my posts seemed to tweak people’s interest and began attracting quite a lot of attention and views. I was having fun posting about the cars that I was assembling and building, all the time documenting my work with photos, and so that was, essentially, my first little bit of exposure. Before that, I wasn’t really known other than probably in the local community and around the streets of southern California and on those track days as, like I say, a spirited Porsche driver.
By now, I’d moved away from the complete basket-case five-grand cars and I’m buying cars in the teens. Some of these I’m actually just selling on, making a little bit of money. So that’s how I’ve got through over fifty-odd cars. We were still not making much money at this point, barely breaking even on some of them, but this was not about money for me. The location filming at Willow was bringing in a good income, but more to the point, the car builds were all about the process and the education, and it was something I loved to do. I’m very passionate about it. Losing money on a car or making a grand or two didn’t matter to me. This was purely a hobby.
Like I said, it was a hobby that was getting out of control …
The real turning point came when I started injecting a little more personality into the cars. What people now call my signature touches. The louvred deck lid for example. You will find those on a lot of hot rods but not many Porsches. Also, other little touches such as two-tone hoods, drilled door handles, integrated turn signals, central filler caps, chrome-faced gauge bezels and Plexiglas bubble windows. I became a lot more detail orientated. By then, I had a buddy from the Porsche Owners Club called Phil who was helping, too. Now that we were able to do most of the work in-house, I started to learn a whole lot more, the quality went up again and, crucially, the costs went down. I always pride myself on the way things fit. Take a bumper, for example. You can put a bumper on in ten minutes, but it won’t necessarily fit perfectly. Sometimes you can literally spend all day getting the bumper to fit, so if you are at an independent shop and they are charging you one hundred bucks an hour, that’s not good.
I slowly began to modify in my own unique style. This led me to develop what I call ‘Street-able track cars’. The 68R was arguably the first signature build that gained widespread notoriety. That was a serious, defining build. I’d worked on that car back in 2009 – I had a guy doing metalwork across the road and some of the build was done in-house. Then I get this email from a dude called Liam Howlett. Classic example of Porsche people vibing with each other. Turns out he has a band called the Prodigy, whom I was obviously aware of. He’d seen an STR that I was working on around the same time, which I will come to in a moment. Long story short, he shot me an email and said, ‘Love your work, seen you on Pelican and a couple of magazines, I would love you to build me a car.’
I’d long since realized I didn’t have the time, energy and passion to just work on cars and then sell them on, so I said, ‘Dude, with all due respect I don’t build cars for people, I don’t do customer cars, it’s not my business. I just like to build forty-year-old street-able track cars.’
He goes, ‘Well, I have never owned a short-wheelbase car, and I really love your 68R.’
I had a think about where I was at and eventually I said, ‘Okay, I’ll sell you that car.’ So he comes back at me with, ‘Can you do me one favour? Could you do your integrated turn signals?’ (He’d seen those on the STR.) Initially, the 68R didn’t have integrated turn signals, or rather it had them on the front but not the rear. You might think that’s a relatively small request but, hey, far from it. In fact, I actually ended up repainting the entire car again to get it exactly right. I didn’t charge him any more money though; I stuck to the deal, even though some guys might have charged many thousands of dollars for the extra paint work. Liam bought the car and at a good price. I think he bought well! He was a cool guy, and I actually asked him if I could keep the car for a short while as I had a film project coming up that I wanted the 68R to feature in – but I am getting ahead of myself again.
Like I said, around the time of the 68R I had previously been building my first STR. It began life with me as a non-running, non-matching-numbers 1972 roller. It had a 2.7MFI motor built from the remains of some other parts. What I built was aggressive, very sharply focused on style, performance and detail. When I decided to sell it, I threw out a price and it sold very quickly for sixty-five grand. In retrospect, that was probably too low, but this was still a steep learning curve.
These later cars with more personal detail and precision were starting to put me on the map, building my reputation. Then I started getting attention from the media. The first article I ever had written about me was in a Dutch magazine called RS Porsche by this guy Erik Kouwenhoven. Before that point, I had kind of shunned editorial coverage for some reason, I don’t quite know why. I just didn’t feel comfortable, the timing wasn’t right – that was what my instinct was telling me. But Erik had seen me on Pelican and that interested him enough to write this article in early 2011.
That same year, I had got an email from a Dutch guy called Maurice van den Tillard, a former BMX rider who works in the Dutch Air Force as a mechanic on fighter jets, a clever guy. Anyway, he is an automotive enthusiast and a great photographer, and he wanted to document the So-Cal scene, mostly based around hot rods, BMX bikes and choppers, for his blog called Dutchman Photos. He’d already done articles for magazines in those scenes and with various So-Cal bike builders, but now he was looking to get into the Porsche world a little bit. He wasn’t a Porsche owner himself, but he’d seen the Pelican Parts thread and was interested in what I was creating, so he contacted me.
I met him at the Rennsport Reunion, this great Porsche heritage event, at Laguna Seca in 2011. We had a chat, then he drove down to LA and we kind of clicked, you know. He’s a little bit younger than me but also comes from a punk rock background, so not your typical Porsche person. He ended up writing an article which went into Issue 83 of Total 911, England’s number-one independent Porsche magazine. The article was all about me building these unconventional Porsches. Maurice’s article introduced me with the words: ‘Meet Magnus Walker, the Urban Outlaw …’
I didn’t come up with the term ‘outlaw’. That had been around a long time. The obvious Porsche connection is from the fifties when people were customizing 356s back in the James Dean era, but the essence of the idea goes back much further. Guys had been rodding cars when they returned from the Second World War in the late forties and early fifties, you know, old flat-top Fords and cars like that. Remember, the car-culture scene in southern California has been around for ever. Less than a mile down the road from where I am writing these words there is an old Ford Motor Company plant, opposite where I used to live, which is now being converted into apartments. Cars and California are just inseparable.
If you look up the definition of ‘outlaw’, it means someone who is beyond the normal confines of the law, ‘a person who refuses to be governed by the established rules or practices of any group; a rebel, a non-conformist’. That term has evolved beyond the history of renegades and criminals and into more of a general description of an attitude and a lifestyle. With regards to cars, it was applied to people who were taking stock vehicles and working on them in a way that was outside of the norm, outside of the boundaries of standard factory specifications.
Like I said, for many years the term ‘outlaw’ was very frequently used with Porsche 356s. Rod Emory and his company, Emory Motorsports, are arguably the most renowned proponents of that particular art. However, the outlaw instinct is the same regardless of what marques you are talking about – essentially what I’m doing with my Porsches is adding hot-rod touches and elements of customization that people have been doing for decades. That’s the creative lineage that Total 911 saw. In that particular article, Maurice said, ‘I am sure that we will see a lot more of these beauties in the future …’
And so the seed was sown.