I’m pretty sure that if you are reading my book, then you probably like cars. There’s also a good chance that you are a Porsche fan. By this point in my story, I think I need to explain in more detail – from a car point of view at least – why all these magazines, online blogs, TV shows and journalists have been interested in my collection. It’s time to take a walk around my garage. So, if you don’t like cars or Porsches, I suggest you skip on ahead.
I spoke earlier about how I fell in love with Porsche as a ten-year-old, then it took me fifteen years to acquire that first 911 in 1992, the ’74 wide-bodied, slant-nosed conversion that I bought at the Pomona Swap Meet. Well, since that point I have owned over fifty Porsches, so let me pick out a few of the highlights. When it came to working on this chapter, I decided to sit in my garage in Willow, surrounded by the cars, so that hopefully I can give you a flavour of the collection I have been building all these years.
Let me tell you, I never take the cars for granted. No matter what is going on in my world, good or bad in business or pleasure, I can come in here and it always feels fantastic. If I’ve been travelling and have been away for a couple of weeks, the first thing I do when I get back is come in the garage and just sit in here and vibe it out, you know. Then, of course, I get in a car and go for a drive.
Superficially, this chapter is about cars, then. However, in telling you these stories, I hope you can see that Porsche is actually all about the people. Every vehicle in here has a tale to tell about the people behind that car – that’s what I love so much about this marque. Porsche people, shared passion. So let me talk you through a few of my cars, the back-stories behind them and what I did to them once I owned them. Hopefully it will give you a flavour of why I do what I do, how I approach these cars and maybe you might take a few ideas away for your own car project.
Let’s start real early. I’m a goal-orientated collector, and I like to collect from the beginning, the early years, so initially the goal was to have one of every year from ’64 through ’73. That goal was not achieved in chronological order, obviously, but it was eventually completed. In 1964, Porsche made 232 models of the 911. None of them ever came to the States. Technically, they were all ’65 year models. For me, to own a ’64 911 was the holy grail. I now have one. It took me a long time to find that car. Of the 232 documented, I think there are no more than about sixty or so recorded as surviving. That seems probable, as you have to figure those cars are now well over fifty years old, so they are either rusted, wrecked, crashed, stolen, parted-out or chopped up. Maybe there’s a hundred surviving and of those sixty-odd are documented. I think three dozen are in the registry with original motors and transmissions. The one I’ve got back there in my garage is slate grey with a red interior, a matching-numbers car. So that is the holy-grail car right there.
So how did I find this super-rare 911? Long story. I was running an ad everywhere that simply said, ‘Wanted: ’64 911’, I was writing letters to people on the ’64 911 registry saying I was looking for one, but these cars don’t just crop up. Sometimes when I’m after a certain car I’ve run adverts for eighteen months with no joy, then suddenly someone will get in touch. People think the ’73 RS Carrera is the holy-grail car, and it is indeed an iconic 911, but they made 1,580 of those. Today, a good ’73 RS is about a million bucks, but we could go find a dozen for sale right now. I guarantee you are not going to find a ’64 911 for sale right now because they only made 232 and, as I said, maybe only sixty or so survive to this day. Of those 1,580 ’73 RSs, there might be, say, 1,000 surviving. So that is a way more common car in that respect.
So anyway, I’m running this advert but getting nowhere fast. Then I get an email from this guy I’ve mentioned called Joost Hermès, who had been following my thread online on the Pelican Parts post. He said he’d found a ’64 911. The great news was that the car was on a non-Porsche-related forum; had it been posted on a 911-specific site, the geeks would have been all over it. It was on some little car blog, like a single paragraph by this guy Chuck Rizzo who was the owner. It was pretty much just a generic post, enquiring about some information on a ’64 911. So Joost gave me his email, didn’t ask for any finder’s fee or anything, just turned the information over to me.
Then I started a three-month-long conversation with the car’s owner, Chuck. The car was in Pennsylvania. I say this all the time – it’s all about the people. Without the people, there are no car stories, right? Truth be told, probably 70 per cent of the cars that I own or have owned have never been for sale. It’s all word of mouth, someone knows someone who is thinking of selling a car. So this process teaches you a lot of lessons, but the number-one lesson you must learn is patience. You cannot rush the sale. You have to just let the guy talk. These people are sometimes hugely attached to their cars, and if you rush them they might panic and decide they can’t sell after all. Sometimes sellers get remorse and all of a sudden they don’t want to let go of the car. You have to respect their story and their relationship with the car.
So Chuck’s story was great. This ’64 911 was purchased by a US serviceman stationed in Germany somewhere in the middle of the 1960s (I believe I’m only the third or fourth owner of the car, but I haven’t fully traced it back). This US serviceman buys the car in Germany while stationed there, brings the car into the country in ’69/70, then Chuck buys the car a year or so later. Chuck tells me one of his memorable stories about driving down from Pennsylvania to Florida with his then-girlfriend and getting pulled over by a state trooper after supposedly speeding at a hundred miles an hour. He had to pay the state trooper a fine not to impound the car and let him keep going.
Chuck was a fascinating character and a great guy. He wasn’t really a full-on Porsche guy, he was actually more of a Corvette and Harley-Davidson fan, so the 911 wasn’t his daily driver. By the mid seventies, he had a wife and kids as well as a business, the Porsche was parked up on blocks in the garage and he hadn’t driven it since 1979. Actually, that probably saved the car in terms of it being chopped up or stolen or raced or modified. I chatted with Chuck and he found out my background and where I was coming from. I think he liked the idea of me becoming the next custodian of the car, the 174th 911 ever made.
Once we had agreed on a price, the next problem was that at the time I didn’t have enough money to buy it, so I told Chuck I’d put x-amount down as a deposit and pay him the balance over the next two months or so. I don’t think I even told Karen I was buying the car because I was probably … well, let’s just say by then I was probably at the point of having bought just one Porsche too many. The last thing we needed was another car, and this one was a little bit more expensive than the others, though still really well priced, in my opinion (today, the price would be astronomical).
Anyway, during the talks with Chuck, it became apparent that he hadn’t been to LA in about twenty years, but he was due to come to town within the next eighteen months, and he said, ‘Hey, when I come to LA can I borrow one of your cars?’ Sure, no problem. At the time, it was just part of the negotiation, I don’t know if I ever really anticipated he’d take me up on the deal, but long story short I got the money together, paid him the balance and bought the ’64 911. I didn’t hear from him for about a year, but then he did come to LA after all and I let him take out my Irish Green ’66. Despite its age and condition, I use the Irish Green a lot; it’s kinda the car I jump in to go and get some milk. That was the first time Chuck had driven a 911 since 1979, back when he’d parked the ’64. So he spent a whole week in LA driving my car around, fell in love with it and now he is chasing his second Porsche 911! It’s that Porsche slippery slope again.
Now, remember how my Dutch buddy Joost turned me on to the ’64 car and never wanted a penny for a finder’s fee? A lot of people could have bought that car and flipped it for a lot of money. Well, I made sure I took care of Joost. I sent him quite a few things (for example, I did a louvred deck lid for his own 912 and sent him that as a little thank-you gift) and then we became sort of pen-pal buddies, although I’d never met him in person. That’s why when Urban Outlaw came out and premiered at that Raindance Film Festival in London, who should fly in from the Netherlands but Joost. When I visited Porsche after I got that letter from the factory, I flew to Amsterdam first and who should pick me up at the airport but Joost. Then we did a Rotterdam outlaw run and Joost let me drive his car. Fantastic guy. So when I talk about Porsche I’m really talking about Porsche people. Joost is a perfect example of that, because if it wasn’t for his tenaciousness and ‘Sherlock Holmes’ ability to have sleuthed out a ’64 911, I’d never have found that car. But even more importantly I’d never have made the friendship with him.
Just over in the far corner of the warehouse at the moment, I have a ’65 911, a silver one that I call the gentleman’s racer car, with a Paul Smith stripe. That was another example of a nine-month acquisition project, working on it just to get the guy to sell. That car is the 310th 911 ever made. That’s 136 cars later than the ’64. What’s great about the ’65 car is that it was one of the first half a dozen cars that Brumos Porsche (as you know, my favourite Porsche dealer ever) imported into the States. In fact, I made a video about that car for Brumos.
I’ve spoken about the ’69T that I bought in 2008, which was my first restoration project, and how I’d restored that car with Sergio and the help of a few other friends. So once I had the ’69T and covered that base, the next part of the collection really was the most iconic Porsche, the car I fell in love with, the one I always talk about: the 911-930 Turbo. Yet again, I started my Turbo collection right at the beginning with what’s known as a generation-one, three-litre car, built in ’75, ’76 and ’77. This is the iconic shape. As I scribble down some notes for this chapter, I am sitting right here next to six of them (I’ve owned seven of them). So, back to the very start – the first one I bought was a silver 1976 930. The Turbo came out in ’75 in the rest of the world, but for some reason those early cars didn’t meet US emission standards so, believe it or not, America didn’t get the Turbo until ’76, which is bizarre given that the USA has been Porsche’s biggest market for fifty years. So the first Turbo available in the United States was 1976 and I have one. That’s a real special car. It’s a lifelong California car, never been out of the state (although, to be honest, I never understand adverts that say a car has never seen rain! You have to drive them!). The car was delivered to Bob Smith Porsche, built in October of ’75 as a ’76 model, and it really works in silver. That history is documented by the factory, and it’s VIN number 15, which makes it the very first US-production Porsche Turbo sold. It’s not the first one built – there’s four prototypes, VIN numbers 11, 12, 13 and 14, and my car is number 15. Number 11 is documented, that’s a silver car with red interior; number 14 is documented, I believe it’s a green car. Numbers 12 and 13 disappeared, and apparently legend has it that one of them got stolen from a magazine’s offices. So the first four ’76 US Turbos are sometimes talked about as ‘the prototype cars’. I don’t think they were really prototypes; they were just four cars that were pulled off the production line. Not everyone would agree with me but, hey, let’s not get into that! I had an inkling that mine might be the first ever US Turbo because I knew the VIN number was super-early, but I didn’t know the whole history. I was 90 per cent sure and then when I visited the Porsche factory and museum and scoured through their archives in 2013 with Dieter Landenberger, I was shown the handwritten build records of that car.
What is a fact is that those four, the 11, 12, 13, 14 VIN numbers, were press demonstrator show cars, loaned out for PR and publicity. The first one that was publicly sold through a dealer, as documented by Porsche at the factory archive, is my car. I’m the fourth owner. My buddy Marty had worked on that car over a period of twenty years, for the second owner, the third owner and then me. I met Marty through the Porsche Owners Club, and he builds a lot of my transmissions and helps out mechanically; he is the Turbo guy.
My car is now forty years old and it’s got an interesting back-story; in fact, Marty told me a little bit of great history that’s undocumented. Rumour has it that the car was ordered by the actor Robert Redford, who apparently never actually took delivery of it, so the Turbo was never titled in his name (whether he took delivery of it or not can never be proved, this is hearsay). That doesn’t mean Bob Smith Porsche didn’t bring it in, give it to Robert Redford and for some reason he never bought or titled it. Frankly, who knows what went on. Now, you may be aware I made a video called Turbo Fever where I touch base a little bit about that story. Well, when I was at the SEMA show in 2014, this guy came up to me out of the blue, said he’d seen Turbo Fever and told me a story about how he’d run into Robert Redford in a silver Turbo somewhere in Colorado in ’76. True story. So even if that guy was making this incident up, I don’t think my buddy Marty would do that because he’s effectively been with the car for the past twenty years. Was it the same car? In a sense, it doesn’t matter because Redford’s name was never on the title. It doesn’t matter to me, but it’s kind of an interesting story … yet again, it’s about the people. For me, the most special thing about that car is that it’s the first Turbo I ever bought and it’s the first US-production 930.
So the first Turbo I bought was the ’76, America’s first. I was immediately really taken with the whole Turbo vibe, and so at one time I owned five Turbos – three ’76s and two ’77s – but I didn’t have the holy grail of Turbos, the ’75, the first ever year of production. That car was the missing piece to my puzzle. The ’75 Turbo is almost as rare as the ’64 911 because they only made 284 of those cars in 1975. However, unlike the ’64 911, the Turbo was notorious for people driving it off the showroom floor and wrapping it around a tree in the first week – you know, lifting off the throttle, oversteering or having the boost come on and then someone bails out or their talent doesn’t back up the performance of the car. So those really early Turbos were notorious for either being crashed, stolen, parted out or upgraded. People wanted to upgrade to the later edition with bigger motors and bigger brakes, so finding an unmolested early Turbo is pretty hard.
So I was on this quest for a ’75 and they were already getting pretty expensive, but fortunately I was still ahead of the curve. One of the things I’ve been lucky at is being ahead of the curve when it comes to collecting early cars. For example, I’ve had five ’67Ss, although only two of them were matching-numbers cars. One of them I bought for nine thousand five hundred bucks. Another one I bought for eighteen grand. Today, those cars are worth ten times that. Everything in my garage has been bought really inexpensively. I really want to make this point: I’m not some rich guy with loads of money just writing out cheques for any car he vaguely fancies. I like to research the cars I want, enjoy the whole experience, find the right car, show some restraint. When I started looking, early Turbos were twenty to thirty grand cars in the US. Nobody wanted them. So that’s how I’ve been able to get six of them.
Anyway, so I am on this quest to find a ’75 Turbo and I get on the beautiful thing known as the worldwide web, where you can sit in your home and find cars all over the world. I missed one in Japan but remained undeterred. After months of looking, I find a right-hand drive ’75 Turbo in, of all places, Australia. At first I was like, Fuck, Australia, the other side of the world, really?! However, you know me, it doesn’t really matter where the car is; I’m not afraid of shipping them all over the world. Besides, a lot of people were put off with this car being in Australia. It was a right-hand drive car, but I couldn’t get hold of the seller. The car was on some Australian car website where, frustratingly, the guy’s phone number and email wasn’t displayed, so you had to log in and put an Australian phone number in to even be able to contact this guy. Well, I didn’t have an Australian number, so I’m trying to put a US number in … it’s not working … long story short, I never got hold of the guy.
Fast-forward six months, I looked again and the car was still advertised for sale. A couple of months earlier, I had met these guys from Autohaus Hamilton near Sydney when they visited me during a trip to California. So I called them up, told them about the car, and they’d already seen it but also couldn’t get hold of the guy. Anyway, I guess one day this elusive seller picked up the phone and they had a conversation, so I sort of hired Autohaus to go inspect the car for me. This is the only car I’ve ever done a pre-purchase inspection on, and I did it because I couldn’t get hold of the guy and didn’t have much to go on. While I’m on that subject, let me veer off a moment: sometimes when I am in England and around people buying 911s, they are very restricted and guarded, all worried about provenance and mileage and what it’s going to be worth when they sell it. I always end up saying, ‘Guys, loosen the fuck up a bit, you know. If it feels right, just buy and enjoy the car.’
So, anyway, getting back to the story of this ’75 Turbo. We knew what the price was, Autohaus took a little margin on the car, naturally, for taking a look at it and helping me, and they ended up buying the car on my behalf. Then I simply shipped it from Australia. It’s copper-brown metallic, although that’s not the original colour. Apparently, it is a former UK car that left England in 1980 and went to Australia and then it came back to me in the States in 2014. I believe they only made seventeen right-hand drive Turbos that year, so how many do you think exist today? I would suggest less than ten. So that is a really, really rare car. I don’t know any collectors that own both the right-hand drive and left-hand drive ’75 Turbo.
Sitting next to that car to my right is Turbo number twenty-seven for the US, a black one that also looks super-cool. If you do the maths, if car fifteen was the first one sold then car twenty-seven is still only the thirteenth car (they don’t actually necessarily sell in chronological order, of course). Another of my favourite Turbos is the European Minerva blue car that we featured in Outlaw Fever, where we debuted the fifteen52 collaborative Urban Outlaw signature wheel. That’s a car that people seem to have connected with a lot. I also acquired a ’77 ice-green metallic one with tartan interior. That’s also a pretty special car.
You’ve seen how patient you have to sometimes be when you are buying cars, and also how much investigative work you might need to do. I’d also like to think this next story proves there is such a thing as Porsche karma. One day I get an email from a guy asking if I have any interest in a ’75 Turbo roller, namely a car missing the transmission and motor. I’m like, ‘Sure, of course I do.’ This guy told me the story of how he found the car behind a tow yard in Albuquerque, where it had been under a tarp. Apparently, the car had lost its motor, the engine somehow becoming separated from the vehicle. Again, listen, be patient, this guy’s not necessarily looking to sell, but he’s definitely looking to see what my interest level is. Then he made the mistake of telling me what he paid for the car, and it was peanuts. I asked him what he wanted for it now, and, of course, he replied with the answer I always hate, ‘Make an offer.’ Well, I knew what he’d paid for it, so I just doubled what he’d paid and made him the offer, which was still pretty low ball. He didn’t take that, so I offered him another five grand. He didn’t take that offer and then I offered him another ten grand, but he still didn’t take that offer. So then I backed off. A lot of people call me up or email me out of the blue trying to offer me cars. Some sellers don’t really want to sell, they think they’ve got a car that is the holy grail, but for me it didn’t really matter, this particular Turbo was always going to be a non-matching-numbers car … at that point.
So three months go by, during which I also buy a red ’70s Turbo wide-bodied-looking car with a ’75 Turbo motor and transmission. Then I went back to the guy with the ’75 Turbo roller, but obviously I didn’t tell him I’d found a donor motor and trans.
I asked him again, ‘What do you want for the car?’
He goes, ‘Well, really I just want a Turbo-looking car.’
I had an idea.
‘How about this red car I’ve got here, it’s all Turbo-looking, minus the motor, would you be interested in trading that?’ He was, so we did the deal. So now I own the ’75 Turbo roller, which has no engine in there.
Then I get this email saying that someone has found the original motor for this ’75 roller that I’ve just bought. This particular guy had actually tried to buy the roller too, but when that went to me, he did some what I like to call Porsche sleuthing and realized that he knew where the original engine was. So, all of a sudden, I have the rolling gear for a ’75 Turbo and I know where the matching-numbers engine is. Without going into all the detail, I made contact with the person who had the motor and after quite a lot of back and forth, negotiations and agreements, I finally get the motor for the ’75 Turbo roller. So the original motor was fitted back into the matching car that had carried that engine when it was first produced way back in 1975. Therefore, it was now a matching-numbers 1975 Turbo, which is obviously worth a lot more than a non-matching-numbers car. Talk about finding a needle in a haystack!
You might think that would be a one-off, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. Not so. I’ve found the needle in the haystack three times, or, let me rephrase it, the motors have found me. You might ask why such a valuable car has the motor or trans ripped out? Well, 911s haven’t always been so valuable, for a start. Practically too, transmissions get damaged, broken, people swap them out. Thirty years ago, when a ’65 was worth nothing, some guy blows a motor or the engine gets damaged, let’s say hypothetically it’s five grand to rebuild that motor. So he goes to the local Porsche garage and the guy in the shop suggests, ‘I’ve got a 2-2T motor there in the corner I can put in the car for fifteen hundred bucks and you can have it next week.’ That happened all the time with these early 911s. Or people say, ‘You know what? Why am I running around in a two-litre with 130 horsepower when I can put that 3.2 in it with 230?’ So out comes the original two-litre motor, in goes a three-litre or 3.2 because the guy’s building his race car or whatever, then the ’65 motor is forgotten and separated from the car. Then the car goes through five owners, it’s still only a five-grand car, ten-grand car … but then thirty years later, when the car’s worth two hundred grand, someone’s trying to find the original motor, right? Times have changed. That’s how it happens – like I said, common story.
So, how about another needle in a haystack and car 1036? I’d bought it for like eleven grand or something, sat on it for a while, then sold it for fifteen grand, made a few bucks, thought nothing of it. Just moved it on. This was when I was buying and selling a few cars and also when I used to be more active on the online forums. One day I get an email from this guy, and he goes, ‘You’re not going to believe this, I’ve got the motor that was in your 1036!’ Turns out the motor was on Craigslist in a shop in LA. So it’s kind of comical because I’d never looked for the motor, but all along it was here in LA. So I said, ‘Well, I’ve sold the car, but I’m still in contact with the owner. Let me put you in touch.’ So, long story short, I put them in touch, and I think the guy ended up paying more to buy the matching motor than he did for the car! He ended up with a matching-numbers 1036, which he later sold at Pebble Beach; it was even listed as an ‘ex-Magnus Walker car’. Anyway, it sold for quite a significant sum of money.
Then, in 2014, I was at the US Grand Prix in Austin, Texas, with my buddy Helmut. Even though I’d been watching Formula 1 since the seventies, this was actually the first time I’d ever gone to an F1 race. While we were there, this French dude walks up to me and says, ‘I have one of your former cars.’ Turns out the guy was Nicolas Todt, son of Jean Todt (former rally driver and now president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile) and he’d bought car 1036 with the matching engine back in there. That was nice – it kinda brought the story full circle.
The third time this has happened to me was with the 365th 911 ever made. I had it on sale on eBay for some reason. Anyway, long story short, and with four days left before the auction closed, this guy contacts me and says, ‘I have the motor to your car.’ I ended up trading the guy … so three times the needle in the haystack found me, two of them on very, very early ’65 911s and one very early ’75 Turbo. The Porsche gods have shined down on me quite a few times.
Now, let’s talk about one of my highest-profile Porsches, the car known in some circles as ‘the Religion 911’. I’d got the Turbo collection going, so then I moved on to G-bodied cars, which essentially means ’74 through ’89, covering the 911 from ’74 through ’77, the ’78 through ’83 SC and then the ’83 through ’89 3.2 Carrera. This car, my ’78 SCHR, is very well known as it featured in its own YouTube film called Cruising My Religion.
It’s a car that a lot of people related to because it was what I’ve described as my ‘budget build’. It was a former track-day car that I bought relatively inexpensively. It was a little rough around the edges, but it was a running, driving car. I simply did a six-week cosmetic makeover: essentially lowered it, swapped the rims, put the ducktail on. I removed the front half of the full cage. The seats were bought used for $150. The tartan fabric on the interior was from a roll of material we had in the Serious archive, which I also used for the RS-style door pulls. I used a sheet of ABS plastic to create a lightweight splitter. It has some black Vitaloni Sebring mirrors tucked into the body, which I got off Pelican Parts. This was a project of restraint. It wasn’t a full-blown build. I wanted to build a car on a budget in less than eight weeks as an exercise in itself. It’s all very well seeing cars that people have taken years building and have spent thousands and thousands on, sometimes hundreds of thousands, but a lot of Porsche fans aren’t in that position. They might not have the money or the energy to do that. So the goal was to show that a cool car could be built on a tight budget.
As I said, I started with a somewhat solid running car, but it was rough around the edges, no interior and fitted with a roll bar. However, the car had been pretty well documented and respected. The point of the video was to show that these cars are affordable, they are not all high-dollar cars. I get letters all the time from people saying, ‘I want to buy my first Porsche’, and I always tell them there’s a Porsche for every budget. You just want a Porsche, you’ve got five grand, go buy a Boxster. Go buy a 924. You’ve got twenty grand, you step up a little bit, go buy an SC or 996. And so on. The Religion car was a way of showing it can be done. Funnily enough, that car really resonates with people, and I am always being asked about it. Just recently, a pal of mine came to visit from the UK and before he left home his wife had made him promise that he wouldn’t come back from California with a car that he didn’t need and couldn’t afford. He’d agreed and was totally intent on being well behaved when he arrived. Then, on day one of his visit, about two hours in, he saw the Religion car in the flesh, his favourite, and made me an offer on it there and then. Luckily for his marriage, it wasn’t for sale.
Another interesting tale with a similar car was when I bought what seemed to be a ’79 SC. Again, it was a former track car, and I had it in my garage across the road for a year and a half while I was working on other things. Originally, it was red with white wheels and a Turbo tail, and I ended up doing a two-tone gold respray on it first and then a while later I had it painted black. Anyway, long story short, my buddy Ollie really liked this car, and as he had never owned a Porsche he really wanted to know if I would sell it to him. At first I didn’t really want to sell, and then one day I decided, You know what? Fuck it, it’s his first car. It was kind of ideal for him. However, there was a sting in the tail, for me anyway! I never looked at the title in close enough detail; well, turns out this was actually a ’76 Carrera. For some reason, it had got titled as a ’79 SC, but it was in fact a ’76 Carrera. By this point, I had given Ollie a price and maybe you don’t know but there is a big difference between the value of a ’76 Carrera and a ’79 SC, but obviously I honoured the price and he’s in love with the car, so that’s all good.
So, as you can see, I’ve had my fair share of Porsches. Now my goal is to have one of every 911 model, every series, and there’s seven of them. So I’m currently up to the 964, which is the last of the short-hood, iconic G-bodied style of air-cooled car. In reality, the 993 is the last air-cooled 911, but it doesn’t look like that. The 964 essentially doesn’t look that much different to an SC other than the big bumpers and side rockers. Without going into an in-depth history of various 911 generations here, even though the DNA and underpinnings are vastly different on the 964, visually it’s very, very similar.
Since Urban Outlaw and all the publicity I’ve had, my builds are widely anticipated and hugely scrutinized. Truth be told, you are only ever as good as your last car. Well, as I write this book, the build that in some ways is still my signature car is the ’72 STR that the Ingrams bought, and we know all about that story. However, I am very proud of my most recent build, which is just starting to gain attention: a slate-grey 964.
The 964 is the follow-up to the ’72 STR in the sense of it being a full-blown, big build. At the point I started the 964, I had actually barely built ten variations of outlaw cars (rather than just cosmetic makeovers). My 964 is obviously instantly recognizable as a 911, but it’s the details that you’ve got to soak in. There’s elements of a 356 in it, there’s elements of the Sport Classic, there’s elements of the current GT3 RS with the channelled roof and hood. This is my updated interpretation of throwing quite a few different cars into the blender and making a new creation that is better than the sum of the parts.
There are two common approaches with 964s. The first is to backdate these cars to look like a ’73 RSR or an ST, which is a really popular trend. Some people building these RS lightweights in essence just take a lot of shit out and are not really changing the car. Alternatively, others create a wide-bodied conversion that looks like a monster race car and eventually doesn’t resemble a 964 at all. I felt that no one was doing a narrow-bodied 964 outlaw. So I decided to build on that idea and bring in elements to update the 964 but still keep the original DNA of that model. By that I mean I didn’t go mega-wide-bodied with big, flared wings, I built it unique and distinctive but still very much a 964.
We didn’t pay much money for the 964; it was another former track car that had gone off the road backwards, so we had to replace the rear quarter. This beat-up race car already had a 993 motor in it, so that was never going to be returned to stock. My 964 build is all about stealth. It’s all distressed leather inside because I want it to have elements of an old, aged look. I have used a classic colour combo of slate grey with a red interior, which is actually the same colour combo as my ’64 911. At first glance, the 964 is a subdued car because it’s just wrapped in slate grey. It’s not all these different colours with boy-racer speed stripes. I decided the car was so cool that it didn’t need multicolours – that would probably have taken away from the ethos of the car. However, don’t be fooled. From a performance point of view, this is the most focused build I have done to date. The car weighs around 2,376 lb dry, so it’s a touch under 1,100 kilos. It’s got a 993 3.8 RS motor that’s punching out about 340 horsepower. It’s got a Brembo club race brake package all around.
There’s not a square edge on that car, it’s organic, there’s a flow and that’s ultimately what’s great about it. For example, the wheel arches of 964s have a squared edge. Well, on mine we’ve rounded those off; that’s hundreds of hours of bodywork just there. Maybe at first glance you don’t notice, but the detail is there if you want to soak it in. Almost everything on the car has been tweaked. From the front bumper that has been filled in, to the channelled hood, the channelled roof, the channelled whale tail, the louvred front fenders, the stretched, more aggressive-looking flares. The only thing that’s really not changed on that car are the two doors.
Look at the hood, for example. The Turbo has got a twenty-two-inch scoop, but this one has been channelled and customized down to twelve-inch. It has a whole custom roof skin. The original car had a sunroof, but I don’t like the wind in my hair and the sun on my face, plus half the time they don’t work. But if this car had been a non-sunroofed car, I probably would never have done the scooped channelled hood. One of my favourite Porsches, the Sport Classic, has a channelled roof, so I took elements from that as well as the current 991 GT3 RS which has a channelled roof, too. This was more of a retro interpretation of that idea. These are all precise and very carefully thought-out details that refine the car and make it stand out as a true one-off.
Perhaps one of the most notable features on the 964 is that the fenders have louvres in them. This mimics the louvred deck lids that I am known for, but let me tell you, putting them on fenders instead is a far from straightforward process. Porsche first put louvres on the 917 back in 1970 and then, of course, the slant-nose had louvres. However, if you look at those louvres they’re just flat, they aren’t radius-ed, it was just an insert really. Unlike a straight deck lid, the fender is obviously curved, so when you start to insert louvres on there, every one has to be made with precision, the arch and angle of the curve has to be exact. That takes a very long time – just to do one louvre is hours and hours of work. It’s something that’s never been done before.
Because it had never been done before, that meant there was no precedent, no previous example to draw upon. In this case, I hooked up with Rod Emory, the legendary 356 outlaw guy, took him a fender and told him what I wanted to do. Rod is a super-talented guy; he’d never done it before, but he was up for the challenge. I had gone through a couple of people trying to find someone to make a louvred dye, but they weren’t really set up to do it. It’s a team effort, I’m not building these cars on my own, there’s a lot of outsourcing, but essentially I come up with the concept and project-manage.
The work on the fender’s curve is so fragile, you don’t want the metal to crack or split; there is a lot that can go wrong on every single louvre. These are not eye-balled by a laser, it’s all done by the human hand, real craftsmanship. If you are one sixteenth of an inch off square, they are all going to be off, the bad louvre will stick out like a sore thumb and all your work is scrapped. It’s about as precise as you can get. The 964 has two louvred fenders, a dozen louvres in total, and that’s exactly how many times that process had ever been done before, at that point.
The window crank and glass is from a ’65 912 and it dropped right in to the existing 964 frames. The actual pressings in the doors were no different to the SC or the 3.2, which you could get with manual windows. I didn’t have to modify anything, just dropped it right in. So this just goes to show how well Porsche engineered the 911 in 1964. That’s why I talk about those first thirty years being interchangeable. The cars from the period I am fascinated with are so well engineered. My outlaw 964 is the perfect example of that. You couldn’t take a 1965 Ferrari glass and put it in a 1990 car.
So, visually the 964 might not look as much like an outlaw 911 as other cars, but in the purest sense, it’s the most intense outlaw build I’ve done to date. There’s way more bodywork in it than anything I’ve built previously, and there’s way more performance and suspension and upgrades in it than anything else, so if you want to pick out the definitive outlaw build that I’ve done to this date then, yes … the slate-grey 964 is that car.
That car also represents a degree of reinventing my own signature touches. If I only ever do the same thing with each build, I will get bored. I have to keep moving, keep creating. I’d like to say I think this is what separates me from most other guys. There are people out there building similarly inspired cars from similar eras, but the difference is, in my opinion, that a lot of people aren’t putting as much of their own personality into their cars, or maybe they are just emulating something that the factory did. I would like to think that a lot of my builds stand out because of my personal taste, my individuality and how that comes through on the car.
Sometimes people ask me where I get my ideas from. Well, I believe that’s pretty simple: the car determines the path. The 964 had a sunroof, that is why it came to have a channelled roof. Other cars need a much lighter touch, so, for example, on the first US-production Turbo ever sold, the only thing I’ve done is lowered it, because you are not going to modify that car. Same with the ’64 911, original matching-numbers cars in original colours. These cars have become so valuable. Why would I modify them?
The cars that I leave stock tend to get less attention. I’m known as this rebel outlaw customizer, hot-rodder, whatever you want to call it. I think that’s more interesting to a lot of people from a journalistic point of view. There will always be the purists that like to keep everything original and matching numbers. However, this whole ‘outlaw versus stock’ debate is a nonsense when you think about it. A car is only original once. As soon as you replace a tyre or nut or bolt, it’s no longer original, so where do you draw the line? Actually, although I am most well known for my outlaw cars, half of the cars in the garage are original matching-numbers cars. I actually wrote an article about ‘stock versus Rod’ for Total 911.
However, to me, all these cars are special because they all have personality and that’s why they are still here. For example, I don’t know if I’m going to sell the 964 outlaw. That’s not the plan. It wasn’t built to be sold. It’s just a way for me to put my personality on to a car, to realize a vision I had for how a 964 build could look.
There’s not that many cars out there that have been sold with my true DNA. There’s a handful, maybe six. Those are the ones that have really been injected with personality. In addition to that, there’s about a dozen earlier restorations and cars that I owned ten or so years ago but never did much to in terms of my personal touches. Some of those cars I was just playing around with and never planning to sell, but then someone makes you an offer. I had seen some of these so-called ‘ex-Magnus Walker 911’ cars selling for forty grand before Urban Outlaw and now, after the film, they are selling for five times that. Some cars you connect with, some you don’t. I don’t currently have all fifty Porsches that I’ve owned because I didn’t fully connect with most of the thirty or so that I let go. At one time, I had a bunch of the first thousand 911s, and, yes, I can quote the VIN numbers, so I had car numbers 174, 310, 342, 365, 841 and 1036. Those cars were special, but I didn’t keep them all. There’s only so much room, sometimes you’ve got to pay bills, so you let certain ones go, maybe to buy another one or, very occasionally, something else. However, certain cars are irreplaceable and will never be sold.
The prices of all air-cooled Porsches have escalated a lot in recent years, and my profile has certainly helped with my own cars because my stock value or social currency, or whatever you want to call it, has gone up. However, these numbers don’t really mean much if I’m not selling them anyway; their theoretical value is kind of irrelevant. If I do finally decide to sell one of my builds, then it will feel more special than buying from someone who is putting out dozens of cars all the time. At the time of writing, the last real outlaw build I sold was over three years ago, when the Ingrams bought the STR.
With escalating prices in mind, one question I often get asked is, ‘How do I go about buying my first air-cooled 911?’ My advice is the same: don’t expect perfection. Remember how the ’75 Turbo had the only pre-purchase inspection I’d ever done? Maybe some people think that’s crazy, but my motto has always been the same – expect the worst and hope for the best. Of course, don’t be reckless with your money, but rust is the number-one issue with these old Porsches, and you should expect surprises with the floors, rockers and front suspension, too. But this book isn’t the place for me to issue a buyer’s guide! The point is, generally these cars are so in demand now, you don’t have time to procrastinate. You’ve got to be ready to pull the trigger, bite the bullet and go for it. So I advise people to just dive right in. I have a buddy who has been searching for the perfect 911 now for three years. I’m like, ‘Dude, you should have just bought one because there is no such thing as a perfect 911.’ Having owned over fifty of them, I’ve never bought one at any price point that didn’t need something doing to it, so you’ve just got to be prepared for that. But mostly my advice to people is just don’t be too picky, get behind the seat and figure out the kinks as you go along, that’s part of the thrill and the adventure.
The 911 obsession has kinda evolved for me, if I am being honest. The big goal now, once I’ve completed my 911 ambitions, is to have one of every Porsche sports car ever made. So that’s front-engined water-cooled, which covers the 924, 928, 944, 968, and then mid-engined air- and water-cooled, so I already have two 914s and next on the list will probably be a Cayman. I like roofs, I’m not a big Boxster fan, but the Cayman will cover the water-cooled, mid-engined era. That way I get to experience everything Porsche has ever made in a sports car.
In the garage at this precise moment, there are over twenty 911s. Inevitably perhaps, people often ask me why am I compelled to buy so many cars. There are a few reasons. Firstly, I want to have completeness in my collection. As you now know, initially the idea was to collect one each of every 911 from ’64 through ’73. Then the Turbo idea took root. Now I’m chasing the wider goal – what I call ‘air and water’. So the goal is to get a 993 and then obviously the water-cooled 996, 997 and then ultimately, possibly a 991. It’s great to have that variety. You don’t want to drink the same milkshake every day, do you? It would be hard for me just to have one Porsche. Each car is rewarding and challenging in a different way, and there is something in each and every 911 that I’m really drawn to. You can’t always say what the individual appeal is – it’s a feeling. It’s hard to describe, but when you are in that car, it’s the smell, it’s the sound, it’s a unique adventure.
It can be addictive. Chasing the car itself is a really exhilarating process, sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t, but along the way you meet all sorts of fascinating people, and I love the whole process.
Another reason I have so many cars is time travel. If I go for a drive in the Irish Green, I am literally stepping back in time fifty years. If I get in the silver Turbo, then I am suddenly thrust into the mid seventies. So – next question I get – why do I want them all at the same time? Because I want to have the ability to choose the year, select the era that I want to travel back in time to. These cars don’t drive the same, they don’t give you the same feeling, the same sense of time, the same experience. That also allows me to compare and contrast each car. Each one is individual.
So … I keep more than one.
Okay, in my case, over twenty.
Occasionally, people will ask me how I would feel if I didn’t have any of these cars and what would my life be like if I didn’t have a 911 … Well, I don’t actually remember what that was like.