Friday, 0600h, somewhere in LA
If Magnus Walker's world of artfully contrived 'outlaw' retro 911s stands out our next stop on our Californian Porsche tour showed a very different side to Californian Porsche culture.
Jonathan Sieger and his outfit TheCarBrewery is a more modest operation than Walker's on the face of it but his business of sourcing Californian 911s and exporting them to European buyers eager to snap up rust-free 70s and 80s Carreras, SCs, 3.2s and Turbos is booming. Situated on the fringes of Hollywood in a street filled with interesting looking car lots packed with dusty (but not rusty) old Mercs, BMWs and American iron, as we nosed the 991 into his workshop's car park a noisy old RS-rep was spluttering into life outside.
But it was the orange recreation of a 1968 Trans Am championship winning car that was our real reason for being there. More on this fabulous car in due course, the car built from an old 912 by the original team of driver Tony Adamowicz and mechanics Mac Tilton and Don Breslauer with Marc Zurlinden and now in the hands of Sieger.
Run in period with lots of improvised parts, no rear valance and upswept conical exhausts the original orange short-wheelbase 911 won six out of 10 races in the 1968 Trans Am championship and was runner up in two more and, as Jonathan tells it, a true underdog hero. A heritage he wants to maintain and story to be kept alive with this car.
Our contact with Jonathan was David Bouzaglou of well established Californian Porsche specialists TRE Motorsports. We arrived at his busy workshop to meet with two customers Alex and Stefan, the former in his new 991 (he has a '72 S in progress in the workshop) and latter in his standard looking Slate Grey 911T. Standard looking but packing a 3.2 motor, Turbo brakes and some very, very trick looking chassis components.
Once David had shut up shop for the day we all headed out for a drive in the nearby hills, the sudden transition from LA sprawl to deserted and twisting, roller coaster canyon roads enough to mess with your head. One second you're dawdling from stop light to stop light. The next flat out and frantically trying to pick your way round hairpins bordered by cliffs on one side and (probable) huge drops on the other.
The darkness put a premature end to the fun but there's more where this came from, Maz from Singer promising to show us some of the local roads when we visit them later on today. Before that we've a little time to kill - time for some 'tire' kicking in some Californian car lots to see what you can get for Shed money out here.
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