Junkyard Find: 1978 Porsche 924
Many Internet Car Experts believe that any Porsche, no matter how battered, is worth big money. Spend some time around the 24 Hours of LeMons and you’ll learn otherwise, and of course you can always find 924 s, 944 s, 914s, and even the occasional 928 in the cheap self-serve wrecking yards. The 944 is the most common, but for some reason I have never shot one for this series. I’ll remedy that soon, but for now here’s a much-abused 924 I spotted in Denver not long ago.
My favorite Fun Porsche 924 Fact is that you could buy a DJ-5 mail Jeep with just about the same Audi engine as the Porsche 924 (you could get the engine in other AMCs as well, including the Gremlin).
Still, the 924 was fairly sporty for its time, and I’ve seen plenty of well-driven ones knock out decent lap times on road courses.
This one doesn’t seem rusty, but we can assume that its last half-dozen owners were not meticulous types who treated it gently.
There’s a 944 at the same yard now, and I’m still bummed that some guy beat me to its nice VDO gauges by about 30 seconds at the All-You-Can-Carry-For-$59.99 junkyard sale. I’ll go back and photograph it soon.
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I recall seriously considering one of these new. The 944 had just come out, and the 924 was still being sold as the price leader. Two things made it a no sale. The steering column was low...in your lap low. This was fixed in the 944. The other was that I'd recently had a VW Scirocco, from the "cheap and cheerful" side of the lot, and I was floored by the amount of common parts in this "very expensive" "Porsche". Lots of that was fixed when the 944 got its own engine and the platform was revamped, but for the-at the time amazing price of $25,000, I wasn't using the same climate controls, door handles, and such "behind the facade" parts that my VW had, in the 924 loss leader. It was pretty, though, and for the time, very pretty. My GLH Turbo was less pretty, but way faster.
One Saturday morning few years ago a day laborer knocked on my neighbor's door, looking to do an odd job or two. My neighbor gave him a bucket of paint and a brush, and said he could paint his porch, since he hated painting and had a long list of chores to do that day. A couple of hours later the day laborer found the home owner in the back yard, repairing a sprinkler. He handed him a few bills, and the day laborer smiled and said, "Thank you. But you are mistaken, Meester. It ees not a porch, it ees a Volkswagen!"