The one car that everyone always asks me about is 277. Truth be told, that’s kinda funny because it’s a car that has so few of my signature touches. Yet it seems to have captured people’s imaginations and is always first on the list when magazines and websites want to photograph my collection. 277 is the second 911 I ever bought, and it is a one-off car, very much the sum of its parts. If you are after a matching-numbers, factory-stock car, 277 is not your 911. It’s a ’71 911T, which I first saw at the Pomona Swap Meet in 1999, the greatest place ever for this sort of story. There are so many cars, the air is full of the smell of oil and petrol, the occasional squeal of tyres. People are chatting passionately about their cars, and there’s a real buzz and energy.
The guy who owned 277 was actually an aerospace engineer who worked at Lockheed Boeing. I paid seventy-five hundred dollars for the car, which had already been modified, with a 2-7 motor in it, but it was still narrow bodied, it hadn’t been flared. The car was originally gold, although it had been painted green and then various shades of white. It was a great running, driving car, so I paid the money and brought it home.
Straight away, I wanted to build my interpretation of a ’73 RS replica. I have never lusted after an actual ’73 RS. They made 1,580 of those and when I bought 277 for seventy-five hundred bucks, a ’73 RS was probably a fifty-grand car (at the time of writing, a great RS is now a million-dollar car). The point being, back then fifty grand may as well have been a million bucks to me, because under ten grand was where I was at.
I ended up buying real RS flares for seven hundred and fifty bucks, and they were butt welded on to the car within three months of me owning it. Then I got the ’73 RS Carrera fibreglass ducktail, repainted the car white and put black Fuchs on it, so within six months it was a ’71T that looked like a ’73 RS.
I did my first track day at Willow Springs in that car. My obsession with racing meant that I very quickly made more and more modifications to the car, always searching for better performance. The modification side was not something I did to make the cars look good; it all began when I went to the track with a somewhat basic car and then you get a dose of the need for speed, so I started doing performance modifications which were generally suspension, brakes, wheels and stickier tyres. When I moved up to the next level in the Porsche Owners Club series of bigger tracks, a number of safety requirements came with that escalation. So I put a roll bar in it, bought some cheap Momo bucket seats for two hundred bucks, fitted a five-point harness, fire extinguisher – you know, safety first. The fact that the car is a ’71 made it ‘presmog’, so it didn’t have to be tested for catalytic emissions. That’s one of the many great aspects of these early Porsches, I say it all the time, everything is interchangeable. So I could put a 3-6 motor in and it still wouldn’t have to go through smog, because it’s built before the smog cut-off of ’76. Like I said, these were not modifications for style or looks; I was doing all this so that I could continue to progress on the track. That was sort of the step from street car to track car but, saying that, 277 has always been what I call a ‘street-able’ track car, meaning that I drive it to the track and back, it was always street legal.
For the first couple of years, the car was number 731, just a random number that I was given by the POC. Then I put it on wider rims, lowered it, did some suspension work, inserted thicker, heavier torsion bars, some race spindles and really set it up as an aggressive, canyon carver/street-able track car.
Around 2004 I painted the Brumos stripes on the car. Brumos is my favourite race team and car dealership, one that has been in business for over fifty years. Their number-one driver Hurley Heywood won Daytona five times and Le Mans three times, and when I later met him, a genuine legend, it was a real ‘pinch-yourself’ moment for me. So 277’s colour scheme was Brumos-inspired. Of course, the red, white and blue Brumos livery also ties into my love of Americana, Evel Knievel, all that stuff I have already talked about.
For some reason, at one stage the POC gave me a new number. You could pick any number (if it was available), and I just wanted a low-digit number with sevens in it because I was born 7/7/67. People always say, ‘What’s 277 mean? What’s the significance?’ There is no real significance; it was just as simple as that. Besides, 007 would have been perfect, but guess what? Yeah, that was taken.
The car has had four motors in the back, with the last 2-6 one being heavily modified. The initial 2-7 motor it had when I bought the car started getting a little bit tired, so I put in a 2-4S spec motor which I’d bought used. Eventually, that motor started getting a little bit weak, but this is a car that I’ve never spent big money on, so I’m not spending thirty grand to have someone build me a whammy motor. I’m finding used motors online. So then I had a 2-5 motor put in it that I’d bought for eight grand. I’ve always been one for just driving all my cars, you know, ‘plug and play’, enjoy the cars with the motors for a couple of years, then change them if they get tired. Whenever a motor got tired and started excessively leaking, instead of rebuilding it I would just put an ad online: ‘Wanted: plug and play motor’. It doesn’t have to be pretty, ideally some sort of combination of short-stroke, twin-plug 2-4, 2-5, 2-6. I never wanted a big motor. It doesn’t really matter if you don’t know the differences between all these engine specs – the point is I am happy to swap an engine as soon as I think it’s getting tired. Plus, I don’t need some huge amount of power, that’s just not what these cars are about, in my opinion. Some guys love putting big motors in cars, 3-2, 3-4, 3-6, 3-8, because they do drop right in. However, 277 has always been a small displacement, momentum car, because I believe that makes you a better driver. I used to love hounding faster cars on the track, where, fair enough, they’d pull you on the straight, but you’d outdrive them on the turns. I had buddies who’d say, ‘Why don’t you just put a 3-6 in it? Why are you dicking around with these small motors?’ Well, it’s not really going to make me any faster, truth be told, because I can’t physically keep my foot planted with 277’s short-stroke, twin-plug 2-6 motor with about 230 horsepower, so why do I need 300 horsepower? I’m not going to be going that much faster with a big motor than in a small displacement, momentum car that is really well balanced and set up. I describe 277 as a ‘flat-foot car’, meaning I can keep my foot planted on the accelerator most of the time. You can’t really keep your foot planted in some of these huge-engined cars, they are just too brutally powerful for that. In 277, you can keep your foot planted all the time, and I enjoy that.
Around 2006, the Brumos-inspired livery on 277 evolved into the current well-known livery, when I swapped the original striped steel hood for a fibreglass hood that just happened to be red. I was like, Don’t bother painting it, just put it on, it looks cool. Then I painted the bumpers blue and replaced the whale tail with a louvred deck lid.
It’s still running torsion bars and shocks, the car never got converted to coil-overs; it’s still running the original steel trailing arms. I didn’t upgrade to lightweight aluminium trailing arms, although the brakes were upgraded to SC brakes. That was another thing, a lot of guys were always upgrading to more powerful turbo brakes which are heavier, but when the car only weighs 2,200 lb you don’t necessarily need a lot of stopping power because I’m on super sticky Hoosiers – fantastic, very grippy tyres. In essence, the sum of the parts of 277 – certainly by today’s standards – is nothing special. In fact, given that the car has been developed over many years, many of the parts are dead-old components now. So it’s not the latest, greatest, state-of-the-art racing machine; it’s more of a basic, even somewhat antiquated approach.
As anyone who has seen the car in the metal will testify, along the way 277 has got plenty of road rash and patina. I describe it as my favourite pair of old shoes, it’s an old warhorse. People always say to me, ‘What’s your favourite car?’ and I go, ‘Without a doubt, 277.’ Why? Well, everything … aside from what I said about 277 being a flat-foot car, I love the patina – the more chips and cracks the better, those are all memorable moments. As great as a brand-new custom build or hot-rod 911 is, there’s no personality on those cars yet; they’re essentially brand-new vehicles. To me, 277 is perfection in a different way. Perfection doesn’t necessarily mean a shiny paint job. I don’t even know how many miles I’ve got on that car, I don’t know really how much money I’ve got in that car, it’s a classic case of five grand here, three grand here, two grand there. Frankly, I don’t care.
People don’t always understand my view of 277 and the idea that a car with patina and personality is often far more appealing than a concours perfect specimen. Let me give you an example. At one point, I was approached by Sparco and Recaro, who very kindly wanted to give me new seats for 277. Now up to this point I have never taken anything for free, I have never asked for a discount, I’ve never gone down that route. So I thanked them but said to these guys, ‘If I wanted a new seat, it’s six hundred bucks, I’d buy one myself. Why would I put a new seat in the car?’
I don’t like new jeans, I don’t really like new shoes, so why would I put a brand-new seat in it? One guy asked me why the driver’s seat is Sparco and the passenger’s seat is Momo, and suggested maybe he could give me a new one so that they matched. However, that driver’s side seat is the one I’ve done all my races in, that’s why it’s ripped up and damaged, it’s scuffed from the seatbelt harness. The $250 T-bucket Momo seat on the other side used to be the driver’s seat before I could afford to get the Sparco. I did actually have a pair of them, but I gave the passenger seat to a buddy who couldn’t afford to buy one. That’s when I bought the Sparco and I moved the Momo over to the passenger side. So why would I take them out of the car? They’ve been in the car since 2002 when I went club racing with the Porsche. That’s the DNA of the car, that’s its personality. A funny aside, the number plate is 71T24S. Sometimes people stand next to the car and say, ‘What year is it?’ I’m always like, ‘Dude, look at the number plate, it kinda gives you a clue!’
Sometimes 277 needs work for reasons other than modification. In 2015, I was at a press event when I took a journalist out in 277, spun on the road and hit a truck. That was the first time I’ve ever crashed a car, believe it or not, the only time. My first thought was, Is she okay? Thankfully, she was, and I walked away without a scratch. The car took a heavy hit, but luckily the impact was right by the roll bar and that dissipated most of the energy. Most people would have totalled that car; I didn’t even run it through insurance. I paid for it myself. Shortly afterwards, I took the repaired car to the Rennsport Reunion and people were saying, ‘Dude, that can’t be the same car, there’s no way!’ I just said, ‘It is, trust me, I drove it here. This is 277.’ The car is the same as it was before the crash, but now it’s got even more stories to tell, more memories to think about.
277 has become the ‘go to’ car, it’s the car I’m most associated with, that I’m most recognized in. As I’ve started to get more publicity for my builds, it’s the car that’s been in most of the videos, magazines, websites … it has grown to be inseparable from me, really. It has become a celebrity in its own right, in a way. I once got invited to the opening of an independent Porsche place in Tokyo and there was a guy there who had replicated 277 in minute detail; there are probably a dozen replicated 277 cars out there. I’m not talking in the virtual world of people building them online; I’m talking about actual cars that look exactly like 277. As I said, that’s kinda ironic because the car actually has so few of my signature touches. Other than the louvred deck lid, it doesn’t have integrated turn signals, louvred fenders, channelled hoods, drilled door handles. Why? Because 277 preceded all that; the car came before I was building outlaw Porsches.
Like I say, the sum of 277’s parts is nothing really special, but it’s the memorable miles, the moments, the smiles, the stories, all the people that have been in that car, the experiences I’ve had sitting behind that steering wheel. I think it’s fair to say that 277 has become pretty iconic. It’s irreplaceable.