Junkyard Find: 1982 Porsche 928
Though the Porsche 928 was built all the way up through the 1995 model year, most of the ones you’ll see— on the street, in the junkyard, or at a LeMons race— are going to be from the Malaise-y 1978-1982 model years. I see them in junkyards every so often, although mostly they’ve been picked over too much to be worth photographing. In this series, we’ve seen this weirdly wrapped movie-car 928 and that’s been it until today’s ’82, which I saw in California last week.
I’d always wanted a 928 intake for my garage wall, but never had the energy to remove all those finicky German fasteners. Then a generous LeMons team gave me one last month. I thought about grabbing the rubber hoses and hose clamps from this one, but got sidetracked by one of the greatest finds I’ve ever run across in a junkyard.
This one has been picked over pretty well, with the interior and electrical goodies being most desirable.
These cars depreciated hard, and you can get a runner for under a grand if you don’t mind a little ugliness. Then you’ll be scouring the country for parts donors.
The interesting thing about these cars is that they’ve proven themselves to be among the fastest legit $500 cars that you can run in the 24 Hours of LeMons (the Ford Probe, believe it or not, appears to be the quickest of all the cheap crapcans, in terms of raw road-course lap times). 928s with automatic transmissions and stock suspensions have set down the quickest lap times at three of the past five races (and every single one has been knocked out by catastrophic mechanical failures, but that’s another story).
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
What an unholy mess! Who lets a Porsche, the star of Risky Business no less, get like this?? Ugh! Disgusting!
I can vouch for the fact that these were very well engineered and built cars. About 15 years ago when I would occasionally flip cars, I had an '85 928 and '85 Corvette at the same time. Both had right around 90k miles. The vette was an absolute rattle trap and the Porsche not a single squeak or rattle. I still remember the solid "thunk" when closing door of the Porsche as opposed to the sound of the Vette door closing. The little things that separate a high quality car from the rest, and the Porsche had them in spades. The Porsche just made the Vette feel like a piece of junk....and I'm a vette guy. Whenever I see a 928 I regret selling the one I had. I personally prefer the later restyled ones, especially the rear end. To me the newer ones look less akward.