“I’ve been screwing with old Porsches since I was 16,” Chris Stavros says. “I’m 56 now.”
When Stavros told me that at the beginning of our interview, I figured he knew his way around a metric tool set. Just one month earlier, in May 2013, he got a call from a friend who worked with Starvos at a Porsche dealership in the 1980s.
“He told me he got a call from an old lady, probably 80 years old, whose husband used to race Porsches,” he says. “She told him, ‘I’m moving to Huntington Beach to a retirement community. I need to sell my Porsche.’ ”
Her Porsche was a 1955 Continental Coupe that became hers when she and her husband got divorced in 1970, when it was last registered. Prior to then, she drove the car daily when she sold Tupperware. “There was crap packed all over the car, so if the garage door was open, you’d never know a Porsche was in there.”
“Would you be interested?” the woman asked Stavros.
The car had matching engine numbers and the only repair he noticed was in the rear clip from when the woman was rear-ended. “I had a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other,” Stavros says. “She had no idea what the car was worth.”
Chris Stavros got a call about a woman who needed to sell her 1955 Porsche Continental because she was moving into an assisted care facility. She had once delivered Tupperware in this car! CHRIS STAVROS
He made her a market-value offer, and she accepted. The Jade metallic green Porsche now sits in his garage next to a Speedster in the same color.
“What are the chances to find two barn-find Porsches in exactly the same, non-factory color?” he wonders.
Somehow, the more of these stories I hear, the more likely they seem.