Gulf Colours 944

[Ryvita]

Been meaning to get this written up for a while. This is my 1984 Porsche 944 2.5 Lux. It was found on Ebay in early 2018 and has been going through a variety of repairs, maintenance and upgrades since.

It was bought for £4800 with about 115,000 miles on the clock. At the time of purchase I was pretty excited to have found something so visually unusual, and maybe this made me a little blind to potential faults. But we'll get to that.

It's a square dash car, with the 8v 2.5 engine, manual, with half leather seats. The colour is paint rather than a wrap, with the Gulf vinyls. The alloys are original BBS split rims, with the rears sitting out on some thin spacers to fill the arches.

It drove pretty well to my expectations for a car of this age, so I started taking stock of where we were and what needed doing. This was the list of immediate obvious issues in terms of functionality:

Wobbly driver's side mirror
Driver's side passenger window switch not working
Rear-view mirror fell off
Screenwash system leaking
Rear windscreen wiper not working
Cracked foglight
Passenger side brake light not working
Interior light not working

There was also some significant rust, the radiator was deteriorated, the exhaust was rusty and the sills were just beginning to bubble. Wonderful.

[Ryvita]

So, we set too. The first things done was oil filter and oil change, for MOBIL 1 10W-60 Motorsport Formula Extended Life. Coolant was flushed and refreshed, and it was off for some fresh tyres; I went with Toyo Proxes. A few other little things got sorted and that was it for the first few months.

The car was getting a bit of regular use with Friday commutes and some weekend drives. One day in spring, on the way home from work the engine lost all power. I wasn't far from home but it wasn’t at all happy, sounded like it was firing on maybe 2 cylinders. It would move under its own power in 1st gear, but wouldn't rev or take any load. I nursed it along to a carpark and for lack of better ideas, got the car recovered.

Back on the driveway I started trying to diagnose. It was running (just) so I figured it might be ignition. On general principles, I changed the sparkplugs, leads, ignition coil distributor cap and arm. This resulted in absolutely no change in behaviour. It turned out it was somehow running on only one cylinder. It was remarkable it moved. I tried refreshing the DME relay by removing the cover and running a soldering iron over it to refresh the contacts. Still nothing.

Out of ideas I found a local specialist (GT-One Ltd, near Chertsey) and shipped it to them for help. They went through a process of elimination, which involved changing out the cam position sensors (x2). Unfortunately it turned out that it was the EMU. GT-One were able to put this through a refurb / exchange process which got me up and running again. It wasn't a cheap fix.

I swapped out the radio for a nice little Blaupunkt unit (modern but looks appropriate) and used the Design 911 window refurb kit to ease up the electric windows. It turned out the broken window switch just needed to be picked apart and have the contacts cleaned.

[Ryvita]

Then it was time to get an MOT. It got through, but with some gentle words from the garage about the next chunk of issues needing attention:

Radiator corroding and has some stone damage
Centre exhaust box outer skin corroding and falling off
Centre to rear exhaust flange has poor repair
Fuel lines corroding by rear axle
Various oil leaks from engine - seals, cam belt, balance shaft belt, water pump & ancilliaries
Play in n/s/f wheel bearing and strut
Play in inner Steering rack joint
O/s/f suspension top mount noisy
Play in both rear wheel bearings
Brake wear sensors bypassed
Both front brake flexi-hoses in poor condition and ferrol corroded on n/s/f
O/s/f lamp lens cracked
Both sill panels corroded
O/s sill quite badly corroded and evidence of previous localised repairs.

The intent was to continue to do the jobs I could myself (With some help from Pedalbox.show, a friend's Youtube channel driveway show) with GT-One as the back-up for hard stuff or if something goes wrong. I managed to source a replacement radiator, so we got that replaced, along with thermostat and some anciliaries. Here's the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWps06J4ulY&t=...

Then it was time for the painful one, dealing with the sill rust (picture above). The first quote I got was prohibitively expensive but after a recommendation from a friend, I ended up with Carsavers at Aldershot who gave me a more reasonable price for a cut and replace job on both sides. They reconstructed the sills and ran a black hammerite-style belly-band around the work. Previously the sills had been orange, but given the multicolour nature it kinda worked. I'm of the view that this is a "5M car". It's never going to be concourse, but it looks ok from a distance.

[Ryvita]

With that done, and the car hopefully clear of structural brown stuff for a good few years, it was time to start thinking about some tactical upgrades. Goodrich braided brake hoses went on the front, to get rid of another rust point, and some new brake fluid went in. The oil leaks on the front end of the engine were starting to affect the belts so the aux belts were done.

An annoying intermittent fault started to appear, where the speedo would stop functioning, and with it the odometer. This one went to GT-One and they found the cable from the hub was frayed and dodgy so replaced that, which seemed to fix it for a while, but it has recently started re-occuring, so will probably need the speedo unit out and checked.

For the MOT this year, the screenwash system had to be fixed. The leak was in the headlight washers so the choice was made to blank those off rather than pick apart the whole front of the car to get at it. The wheel bearings were also fixed as that had the potential to be a fail.

Late in 2019 the car had one of its high points, doing a half-day track day at Goodwood. This was awesome fun. Really nice way to find the limits of the capability as is. The learning points were - need as much improvement to the brakes as possible, and need to find a way to improve the turn in, as I was having more issues with understeer than oversteer.

[Ryvita]

(Something I forgot from earlier. In 2019 the car went down to Surrey Rolling Road one weekend and blew 140 bhp on the dyno, which I was pretty pleased with. Will be interesting to see if K&N, exhaust and other works have affected that at all, at some point in future.)

That was pretty much it going into lockdown. It had a new battery as the old one died from disuse. During lockdown I managed to find a 911 wing mirror which would allow me to fix up the wobbly one, and this was duly primed, painted up in orange and slapped on. It now has odd ears, but with the profusion of extra stickers it's now gaining, I think it's a reasonable look for a track day car. I also replaced the plastic strips in the door handles with painted orange ones - these bits are shared with the VW golf, as long as you can live with glueing them in, they are the same shape but have slightly different fixings.

Coming out of lockdown, there was more upgrades to be done, with some improvements to breathing via a K&N filter on the front, and a full Dansk downpipe-back exhaust. This got rid of the rusty and very dubiously welded exhaust, which, it transpires was possible the original, because the mid box was one piece with the downpipe and had to be cut. It may not have resulted in any more power, but it does sound better. Nice bark, particularly between 3-5k. At the same time, to provide a bit of a primitive "throttle remap" the throttle actuator cam was replaced with a circular non-lobed one, to provide a linear throttle body. Nice little upgrade. Here's the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9HxTAKD76c

Next maintenance planned is to have GT-One investigate and rectify the oil leaks on the front of the engine. Next upgrade on the list is front brakes, with EBC grooved discs and yellow stuff pads.

[joropug]

Awesome. Recently been eyeing up the 944 if I ever get a chance to have a second car.

Guessing it's the only one, it featured on an AdamC video I watched today funnily enough ! (1m in)

https://youtu.be/VolyTMqXtQ0

Edited by joropug on Wednesday 22 July 17:05

[Ryvita]

joropug said:

Awesome. Recently been eyeing up the 944 if I ever get a chance to have a second car.

Guessing it's the only one, it featured on an AdamC video I watched today funnily enough !

Just had a look, and yes that's me... I had no idea, I was just on my way into town. Was there a car show on that day, why was he randomly standing on a street corner?

I would say it's a good choice second car if you're comfortable doing some of the spannering yourself. Go in eyes open; I've spent more than the purchase price on it since I bought it.

Edited by Ryvita on Wednesday 22 July 17:16

[joropug]

Just added it to my original post!

[joropug]

Ryvita said:

Just had a look, and yes that's me... I had no idea, I was just on my way into town. Was there a car show on that day, why was he randomly standing on a street corner?

I would say it's a good choice second car if you're comfortable doing some of the spannering yourself. Go in eyes open; I've spent more than the purchase price on it since I bought it.

Edited by Ryvita on Wednesday 22 July 17:16

His MO is attend meets film people leaving (usually spiritedly), he has set up a number of drive by car shows in lockdown. You drove through the middle of one it seems! I haven't attended one myself, just watch his channel.

This is the one I kept looking at : https://www.carandclassic.co.uk/car/C1210092

Moving house at the moment so no chance. Looks awesome though, the top gear Patagonia episode got me looking at 928s then into the 944. My grandfather had a Mitsubishi Starion widebody from new, I think the fact it looks quite similar is what draws me to the 944 in red.

Edited by joropug on Thursday 23 July 07:18

[Ryvita]

Looks like a nice example with some sensible items like DME, cam belt and crank sensors done. Paint is in good nick too, that Guards Red often fades.

[Ryvita]

Sorry, been away on holiday. Behold the boxy glory of this unreconstructed 80's interior:



The dash, as these all do, is HORRIBLY cracked, and when I got it there was a thick rubber matting cut to shape and slid in over it. That's still there at the moment, but when I get round to it I will be replacing that with a shaped cover as produced by the good people at Club Autosport - https://clubautosport.co.uk/product/porsche-924-94...

[Big Tomm]

Nice 944, I’ve been very tempted to Gulf wrap mine.

I recently sold a load of square dashes on eBay as I bought an oval last year. All of the dash boards were bought by the same chap and he told me he restores and sells them. I could possibly dig out his number if you wanted to enquire about a replacement?

Would you mind sharing your wheel specs (if you have them) as I’m currently weighing up options for replacements on my own.

[Ryvita]

I keep meaning to measure up the wheels. I don;t have the specs but I will get them.

Also today I found I have a german doppleganger whol apparently has been hitting the Ring (I'm very jealous): https://www.racetracker.de/event/morePictures/1038...

[Ryvita]

This car is now for sale if anyone is interested: https://www.pistonheads.com/buy/listing/11550155