#Porsche911

Before the 993 Targa came along with its fancy sliding glass roof, Porsche 911 Targas had real lift-out tops, just like the best 1990’s Japanese sports cars did (no doubt emulating what was perceived to be a suave alternative to a real ragtop). It looks like the 991 Targa will be returning to those roots.

Are you ready to have the value of your car double while you own it? From $25,000 to $50,000 and beyond? And are you ready to experience this appreciation for an incremental maintenance cost of between $2,400 and $5,000 a year?

Then Bloomberg has a car for you. Just make you read the article instead of staring at the pretty pictures.

I used to work for Porsche. You already know this because I mention it in most of my stories, hopeful that you will go tell your friends “TTAC has a guy who used to work for Porsche!” to which they will reply: “Used to? Road & Track has fifty people who still do.”

Just kidding. The cars get good reviews because they’re damn good. I know this because when I worked at Porsche I had several 911 company cars, and the ones I didn’t crash drove tremendously. This sentiment was not echoed by my rear seat passengers, who often said things like: “This is really cramped!” or “You want to give this up to be a blogger?”

When I worked there, I had two main questions on my mind at all times. Traditionally popular in the morning, the first one was: “Can I get away with a two-hour lunch today?” But when I got back from lunch around 2:30, the rest of the day was spent pondering the second one: “What the hell competes with the 911?”

When Tom Cruise and the Porsche 928 were taking their star turn together in Risky Business, the star had to be taught how to use a clutch pedal for the driving shots. This is faintly ironic because the 928 was the original iconic automatic-transmission Porsche, designed to use a slushbox from the jump by Ernst Fuhrmann and intended to be a continent-cruiser grand-touring car instead of a wobbly-nosed air-cooled icon.

Bring A Trailer rarely disappoints, but today is an exceptionally fruitful day. Not one, but three delightfully kitschy relics of the Reagan era are on sale, offering something for a broad spectrum of tastes, whether you like new wave, metal or the burgeoning urban genre known as “hip-hop”.

The 2.7-liter 911S was so problematic that I named it as one of Porsche’s Deadly Sins a couple years ago. Its engine failed with monotonous regularity, often between the expiration of the 12,000-mile warranty and the 50,000-mile mark on the odometer. The 1974 models usually lived a bit longer because they didn’t have thermal reactors, and the 1977 models had improved Dilavar head studs, but none of the “S” cars were reliable in any modern, or even contemporaneous, sense of the world. In the thirty-five years since the model was replaced with the “Super Carrera” three-liter, however, the aftermarket has managed to address the core issues and build reliable replacement engines for these otherwise charming classic coupes.

As the snow started to fall in Central Ohio this past weekend, I fired up my own aircooled 911 and took it downtown to meet a restored example of its ancestors.

Lost in all the hysteria which surrounds the VW Type 1 and its descendants is the fact that Dr. Porsche chose a rear-engined car at least partly for reasons of traction and mobility. The roads of post-Great War Europe weren’t all butter-smooth Autobahnen, you see.

Porsche’s marketing machine would have you believe that you need to buy a Cayenne to drive over a speedbump, but as you can see in this video, a 1983 911SC with some chunky tires can do the business. Check it out… but turn down the volume on your computer, the soundtrack is by “DISTURBD” or “STAIND” or some other group of no-talent djent-whackers.

Rick Ross, the gastric bypass candidate best known for songs like “Maybach Music” and “Aston Martin Music”, has debuted another video for his latest album “God Forgives, I Don’t” – simply called “911”.

Does the new 991 need more power? After all, in addition to the inevitable (and mandatory) color-mag fellatio you’d expect, it’s already impressed Brendan McAleer at a Porsche-operated press event and squeaked out a narrow victory over a Mustang GT in an impromptu challenge at Summit Point’s Shenandoah course.

In the days when Porsche was a manufacturer of sports cars, rather than a purveyor of two-ton plasti-metallic pig-mobiles doing the occasional sporting car for purposes of brand enhancement, its policy of continuous improvement meant that each year’s 911 was better than the last. Nowadays, however, the company sets out its marketing objectives and molds the product to suit.

Witness: the new 991 Powerkit.

The Time Machine Dilemma works like this: your time machine lands on Auto Row in some past decade, and you have enough cash to buy a certain iconic car of that era. Do you buy the iconic car, or do you hoof it to some other dealership, perhaps saving enough money to buy (gold, Microsoft stock, first-edition Philip K Dick hardbacks)? We’ve done this exercise with miserable econoboxes of 1986, a broad spectrum of 1973 machinery, and today the time machine will be hurtling to an even earlier decade.

When Porsche “tuner” Uwe Gemballa was found dead and wrapped in cellophane late last year, everyone in the Porsche community expressed sympathy for his wife and friends. Nobody deserves to be killed the way Gemballa was.

On the other hand, however, at least the guy wasn’t going to ruin any more Porsches. His “Mirage” 911-slant-nose-arossa-droptops were perhaps the most hideous custom supercars ever built, and Gemballa himself never really appeared to develop anything even remotely resembling an aesthetic sense. His goal in life appeared to be to simply create terrible cars, and he was reasonably successful at this. Porsche purists hated the guy. There was only one thing he could have done for us to have hated him more: he could have turned his attentions towards the irreplaceable aircooled cars once again and ruined more of them.

Which is precisely what “RWB” does.

TTAC was one of the first sources to call BS on Globe and Mail journo-hack Peter Cheney’s ridiculous justification for his son’s press-car incident, but as the week went on, more and more outlets picked up on the obvious fact that Porsches don’t jump out of garages on their own. There’s this thing called a “clutch interlock switch”. Mr. Cheney likely figured that, since he doesn’t know much about cars, that the public would know even less. Oops!

The decent thing to do in these circumstances would be to simply apologize to one’s readers and then to return to the whirlwind lifestyle of far-flung press events, free $180,000 cars, and hilariously low performance standards which is synonymous with “automotive journalism”. It would have been quickly forgotten. The man who was responsible for approving Cheney’s original Porsche loaner flat-out told me, “I’ll give him another one.” Of course he will! Porsche, and everybody else in the business, is perfectly prepared to turn a blind eye to Cheney’s misdeeds past, present, and future. I was recently contacted by an anonymous Canadian source who told me that “Cheney’s kid drives press cars all the time, and everybody knows it.” So what? We’re on the gravy train now! Let’s keep it rolling!

Mr. Cheney, of course, can’t just let that happen. He’s apparently done enough “real” journalism in his life to know that there needs to be a culprit behind this incident, and he’s self-deluded enough to somehow miss the fact that his own spoiled son is to blame. As a result, we’ve been treated to another story, in which Cheney, um, finds the real killers. “Now,” he hilariously writes, “I was searching for answers, sifting through the debris like an air crash investigator.”