If you’ve been keeping up with not-quite-current events in the Adrian universe, you’ll know a few weeks ago I was invited to another swanky event in Germany organized by the lovely people behind the appositely named Car Design Event. This time around things were slightly different – there was an assortment of classic cars for invitees to drive. These mostly came from the heritage fleets of the OEMs supporting the event, but there were also a couple of extra special cars present.
We asked you, our lovely members which cars you would like me to drive and report back on. I’ve already given you my impressions of the Lancia Delta Integrale, Toyota Sera and Mercedes 450SEL 6.9 so what follows below is the … er … fourth follow-up. We only had two afternoon driving sessions scheduled, and there were other journalists less fabulous than me present, but I was able to obtain car keys through cunning and guile rather than having to resort to more violent methods.
The 911 was the third car I drove on the second afternoon, and as I was by now a lot more familiar with the roads it seemed a good idea to jump into something a bit hotter and a lot more expensive. Everyone and their dog was out in this, so I had to bide my time until things had quieted down a bit so I could have a proper go rather than just a quick fifteen-minute jaunt up the road before heading back to the museum.
SportClasse 911 SPC
Thirty-five years ago, the greatest motoring journalist who ever lived drove a 911 for the first time and wrote a piece titled 911? Thanks, But No Thanks. Did this article sow the seed for my ambivalence toward Porsche’s most beloved model? Is it the subsequent deification of the thing by tedious Porsche bores, and their arcane knowledge of chassis and option codes that frankly turns the brain of any sane enthusiast to mush? Or is it the fact that no matter what witchcraft the Stuttgart engineers have managed to weave, putting a big engine behind the back axle of a sports car remains in 2024, a fundamentally daft proposition?
I have a confession to make. I’ve never driven a 911. Of any stripe. I know. I should be turning in my car designer/automotive writer badge right now. Perhaps I should say I’ve mostly never driven a 911, because I did once have a fifteen-minute go in a current 911T at the SMMT Test Day at Millbrook earlier this year, but the drive was confined to a short pre-planned test route inside the grounds of the test center itself. Embarrassingly, I had to ask the attendant Porsche PR people how to start the bloody thing because it wasn’t immediately obvious (there’s a sort of twisty nub thing next to the steering wheel I thought was the headlight switch). Nice to know ergonomic failures remain a 911 constant, even in the new models. But I’m not anti-Porsche. Years ago my daily was a 2.7 986 Boxster, and ever since sitting in one at a Docklands Porsche dealer one of my money-no-object dream cars remains a 987 Boxster Spyder. The one with the stupid roof.
These days you can’t throw a piece of Porsche branded automotive tat in the air without it landing on this week’s restomod. The bloody things are popping up with the tedious regularity of my morning bowel movement. Singer now has a UK base at Bicester Heritage where a lot of events are held throughout the gray English summer – at the Scramble earlier this year my attempts to view one of their cars close up were thwarted by the sheer number of people crowded round waving their phones at the bloody thing. When I was able to look I was slightly appalled to see a cheap rear fog light incongruously dangling below the rear bodywork. When presented with the keys to the SportClasse 911 SPC I was equally intrigued and skeptical.
SportClasse are not some Porsche parvenus – they have a real, genuine connection to the brand. The company was founded some thirty years ago by the son of Américo Nunes, who was a nine-time Portuguese rally champion at the wheel of guess what. These days they are one of the preeminent marque specialists in Portugal. It remains a family business, and Américo’s grandson Andre, who was the car’s minder for the event explained that restomodding was the next logical step for the business, given their knowledge and experience of these cars, and the expanding market for vastly improved, personalized versions of the evergreen 911.
This mint green example is surprisingly not 964 based – instead it’s spun from the earlier 1974-1989 911G. It isn’t some highly strung, brittle buzz box. As befits their rally background SportClasse are keen their cars are robust and usable. To that end this 04 model retains the original steel construction, which gives a curb weight of about 2400lbs (1100kg). Flinging it down the road hopefully, the pointy end first is a 3.6 hand-built motor, with electronic ignition and injection, plus a magnificent set of intake trumpets for a total of 320bhp transmitted through a five-speed box.
Being a car designer means apart from being good at drinking coffee and pointing at models while scratching my chin, I’m also a professional nitpicker. Give me an hour with any car, and if there are fit or finish issues or some small detail is not right, I’ll find it. The first thing that struck me is just how well turned out the 911 SPC is. A standard air-cooled 911 is a good starting point given how overbuilt they are, but still.
There’s a misconception with builders of this sort of car that more bodywork and more tire is automatically better, The exterior is not overdone. The 911 SPC avoids this trap by keeping the flared rear from the 930 Turbo and filling the arches with gently widened Fuchs style wheels. The stance, as befits a usable road car with a rally pedigree is just right, allowing plenty of compliance and suspension travel. Too often restomods of any car are simply over-wheeled, making them look daft and visually very heavy. Cars from the sixties and seventies were just not designed to accommodate 20” rims smeared with non-existent sidewall rubber.
The interior is a beguiling mix of caramel Alcantara and leather and tastefully uses the mint exterior hue as a highlight color on the instrument panel. There’s a small row of black period appropriate pull switches for things like the electric air conditioning (an Adrian essential in any car) and altering the valving in the exhaust for extra volume, not that it’s really needed. It’s all very beautifully done and exceptionally well finished.
On the exterior the chrome surrounding the glazing all lines up. The toast rack in front of the RS-style ducktail spoiler is aligned perfectly. The paint is deep and lustrous and the panel fit (another thing restomods frequently don’t pay attention to, particularly musclecar-based ones) is exemplary. It all sounds simple enough but this level of attention to detail is not always an easy thing for small companies to get right.
The second thing that struck me as I climbed in was just how compact it is. Close the door and it’s right there, next to your elbow. There’s no center console between the seats because there isn’t really room for one. The gear lever, half rubber gaiter, half metal stick emerges straight from the floor at a slightly ungainly angle, as do the floor-hinged pedals. The dashboard and the base of the windshield are remarkably close – it feels like you’re wearing the car rather than sitting in it. Through the windshield there they are – the headlights perched proud on the end of the fenders. I’m beginning to see where all those eighties 911 road test cliches come from.
I’m trepidatious. Not just because air-cooled 911s like to swap ends in the blink of an eye and I have the reflexes and coordination of a sedated sloth. No. This car is a customer’s car that has been sold. And it’s worth about €500,000 (approximately $540k). And in addition to the pedals being at an awkward angle, there’s no power steering or power brakes. Gulp. The compact dimensions go a long way to assuaging some of this. It doesn’t feel like a lot of car to get away from you, which I’ve managed to convince myself it will.
In fact the steering is incredibly manageable, due to there being little to no weight in the nose. It’s brilliant in the way only the best non-assisted setups can be. Road markings, tarmac texture, ripples in the surface, and exactly where and what the fronts are up to is all transmitted faithfully to the palms of your hands. The brakes do keep catching me out – regularly requiring more effort than I’d anticipated. A couple of times piling into a tight German countryside bend I had to take an additional stab to scrub off more speed. If I was commissioning one of these I’d definitely want a servo.
The motor is mostly terrific, wanging up to the upper echelons of the rev counter with deep lungs and a dry howl, a pleasingly deep baritone bass section from the exhaust anchoring the soundtrack. We get stuck behind a Unimog (because Germany) carrying out some roadside topiary, and the throttle response fluffs and stumbles slightly as I pin it for an overtake. Andre said the motor doesn’t really like bumbling along in a high gear – one slightly awkward change down, 3.6 liters clears its throat and we’re blasting past. The shift action is the weak dynamic link here, the lever is a slight reach away and it’s not terribly accurate. Take your time and be very deliberate with it.
That’s the beauty of cars like this – you have to drive them. You can’t absently mindedly faff about. You need to concentrate, think about what you’re doing and coordinate your inputs to what the car and the road require. Get it right, and the SPC rewards you with a thrilling, visceral experience. Get it wrong, and despite the upgraded suspension and wider rear tires, the 911 SPC is still capable of biting if you do something silly, says Andre, such as backing off in the middle of a corner. Armed with that important information, I made plenty sure to get all my braking and gear changes done in a straight line and cornered at a speed that left me enough margin to squeeze on a bit more throttle if required, not wanting to do anything that might bring about a mid-corner €500k whoopsie daisy, even though I was nowhere near the limit.
Am I now a convert to the temple of 911? I was never not. Not really. It’s just they always were the default, easy choice. Become successful, make a bit of money, go down the Porsche dealer at the weekend and hand over a check for the latest model. It all seemed so cliché, and I think that is partly what fueled my skepticism toward them. That and the latest cars seemed to have become bloated GTs, moving away from the compact wieldiness and practicality that made them popular in the first place.
At half a million euros the SportClasse is a relative bargain compared to something similar from Singer. The problem is now I’ve been spoiled. Appropriately I’ve done things ass-backwards. I should have driven a standard 930 first.
If it counts I’ve never driven one either tbh though I’ve craved the experience since i was young when my uncle gave me one of the first Christmas presents i remember, a pretty detailed RC 996 911 turbo. (Which is wild since he’s always been a man of GM) It kinda set me on my love of cars at a young age.
The interior, oh the interior. Reminds me of the house my daughter bought. Each and every surface of every room was painted in the same beige color ala, a Mr. Bean paint job. And over a rough texture. At least this car’s interior surfaces aren’t rough, but good golly there is way, way too much of the same color.
I was set to, at least somewhat, dislike this car. I like the 911, but so many of these restomods are overdone. Not only did I expect it to be overly-fancy, but it is painted too close to my most disliked colors (turquoise and seafoam). Then as I looked through the photos and read Adrian’s prose, I realized they made it nice, but kept that older quirkiness intact (unlike some of the other restomod makers who do their best to make an old 911 drive like a new 911). I even started to like the color, though I think the wheels are just a bit too large in diameter.
Yeah they look like 18s or 19s. Too big. 17s max.
Exactly. 17″ Fuchs are nearly perfection in wheels.
Agreed
I daily drive a hotrodded 1977 911S Targa during the summer.
I pretty much knew nothing about 911s when I got it. I bought before the 911 boom super cheap, because it had bad paint, interior, suspension, brakes, engine, trans, etc. It wasn’t rusty, but everything was bad. At the time, you could pick up a hotrodded midyear for around $15k USD.
Over the next decade, I upgraded it bit by bit. I scoured the classifieds over at the pelican forums for used parts; I pieced together an upgraded suspension for under 1k, 17″ Fuch reps for $600 (euromeister), rebuilt the front calipers ($13 rebuild kit on RockAuto), had the seats redone for $400, snagged a used exhaust for $1300, and bit the bullet and pulled my motor and trans myself and went through everything. That bit was expensive; the trans rebuild was $7500ish, and I probably spent $3k on the engine, which seems cheap until you realize it’s not a fresh engine, and I was just replacing seals and gaskets and hoses and whatnot. After a 3 years hiatus, I got it back on the road last Easter and have put over 5,000 miles on it since.
I realize that the car you drove is wayyyyyyyy faster than mine, and way nicer.
But at the same time, it doesn’t seem $475,000 better than mine.
That’s my issue with all these 911 resto mods…. you can get kind of close to them by assembling them yourself, for a lot less money, and it’s still the same flavor.
BTW if anybody wants to get into aircooled cars, look into 74-77. Significantly cheaper for dumb reasons that don’t matter anymore.
Yes absolutely – hence my line about driving a standard car first. Singers retail for multiple millions and there’s no way they are that much better than this. I would be just as happy with a standard 964, which at the moment in the UK is probably £70/80k for a coupe, slightly less for a targa or cabrio. Although what I’d really want is an RS in Rubystone.
Rubystone is ridiculous, I love it! Also a sucker for Miami Blue
Your way would be more fun, that’s for sure.
Cars like Singers are spectacular, and are works of art, but they cost so much I would be scared to drive it. Or touch it.
Now fix it up like a nice driver for as little as possible…that’s the way to fly. And if you do it yourself, you have that connection with the car.
I’ll never swing a 911, or fit in it. But a Boxster…
I am not the magician of the written word as our dear Adrian is. Nor am I as astute at picking out the finer and not so fine particulars of a fine German automobile. However having had the pleasure of being a passenger in one of Porsches automotive vehicles my take is: Porsche, what you get when econo airplane designers start designing cars. I’ve had more room in a 18 seat prop airplane than you will get in the largest Porsche.
The 930 is cozy, but I’m 6’2” and fitted no problem. The author of the linked piece, the much missed Russell Bulgin, was 6’7”…
A friend in Germany had an early 80s 911 SC Targa that she allowed me to drive on occasion. Rocking down the autobahn was fun for a minute, but where the car truly came into its own was carving turns in runs down the Rhein Gau alongside the river. Favorite ride was late fall/early winter, cool to crisp temps, top off (the car’s), blasting the Eurythmics (my choice) or Bon Jovi (hers) till sunset when we’d pull into Rüdesheim to warm up with a Rüdesheimer Kaffee. Then, top in place, the return run through the dark at a more stately pace. Good times; great car.
We’ve all had a Bon Jovi phase. Mine was for about a month in 1987. When i was fourteen.
The year’s the same, but she was just out of her teens (I think).
Interesting Neil Young reference.
Like a Stradivarius, all the Mittel engines have names.
“How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?”
I once was fortunate enough to flag for a hill climb in Northern California and the sponsors led a familiarization run up the course and when the class with all the 911’s came through, it was one of the most magical sounds I have ever heard.
Years ago, I had a Honda Gold Wing, which also has a flat-six. But the fuel cut-off is at like 6,000. So, when your romped on it, it kind of sounded like a Porsche, but then it just didn’t finish and hit the high notes.
The only 911 I ever drove was a drug-dealer’s car back in the 80s. It was an 80s build: big tires & a hopped-up motor being the only modifications to the running gear. Even knowing about them and having experienced off-throttle oversteer on gravel it almost bit me. Older, wiser me would love to experience a stock 70s model now.
Adrian, this was well-written and almost poetic—and I quite enjoyed the linked piece.
Russell was absolutely the best. Anything of his is worth reading. I have the book of some of his collected work released as a tribute after his death and it’s one of my most treasured posessions.
Besides his wonderful prose, he was so often laugh-out-loud funny at the same time as being a brilliant observer, apparently looking at the world perpendicularly to the rest of us.
Will wonders never cease. I once ran into an Italian gentleman in a little bar in Royal Palm Beach. We drank we chatted. Then went to his bar in Wellington. It was a nice place where we drank more. Then he said he needed to take his boat out to meet a guy. Me being none to steady said sounds fun. Took his cigarette boat out seas got choppy but we met up for a delivery. I’m not sure why I was not concerned. My big issue was trying to pee off the back of the boat going 60 mph on choppy seas. We got to shore he gave me a ride back to my car and that was it. Until my dad leant me a book written by a mafioso about his time in Florida in the area before he turned state evidence. I apparently knew a few gangsters and undercover FBI agents that I never realized what was going on.
My first 911 drive was at the Bondurant School at Ontario in 1973. It was the perfect demonstrator vehicle for lift throttle oversteer.
Well, that was also easy to induce in my high school freinds’ VW Beetles.
I had a Datsun 510 station wagon and it was not agile as the sedans of the same generation. It was pretty dedicated to terminal understeer.
The first, and only, Porsche I’ve driven had been modified with a VW D24 diesel engine from a Volvo. It’s fair to say that as a result I, too, have been spoiled on the brand:
https://www.murileemartin.com/UG/LAZ18/0987-_MG_1834.jpg
They don’t use that one on their boastful advertisments.
That’s their loss, then. It took Organizer’s Choice at the 2018 Arizona Lemons race so it’s got, like, provenance and stuff.
I had a 924S, and hopefully I will again. I like the body without the wide 944 additions but with the 944 motor.
What’s the reason for a rear facing ‘headlight’? I don’t think I’ve seen that before.
I tried googling, but all I got were folks wanting to swap out runny egg headlights
It’s a nod to the rally background of the company.
My MGB had one to the left of the license plate:
https://live.staticflickr.com/4103/5072064860_872de135d8_o.jpg
It really was quite useful for reversing in the dark, which is why I was under the impression they’re particularly popular for evening gymkhana events.
Pffft. Cheap Corvair Copy.
You are too unique to have a 911 anyway.
A 911 is a red MGB for men, who aren’t old enough for a red MGB yet..