Photography by SSSZ Photo
If you mingle in certain circles or spend enough time on car sites or Instagram then you might think of a 911 as pretty ho-hum, nothing to write home or an article about. The air-cooled 911 market in particular has been discussed to death, everyone and their mum’s already talked at length about how the car has evolved since the mid 1960s, and in the quest to stand out from the Cars & Coffee crowds we’re now seeing many a shark-jumping build—all respect to individual tastes, but it’s only a matter of time before someone decides a “safari” 992 is a good idea.
In other words, it’s very hard to find a fresh way to approach the world’s most famous sports car unless you’re working at Porsche on the next generation—better then to just enjoy them at the personal level instead of trying to keep up with the ebbs and flows of trends or attempting to make some grander statement. Buying a water-cooled example doesn’t mean you’ve taken sides against the water-cooled folks; cutting one up for wider fenders isn’t sacrilege; leaving it in the garage to remain in perfect shape isn’t a crime; nor is daily-driving one in a place with all four seasons. If you own one, enjoy it however you like, there are plenty of other 911s to fill the roles blowhards have assigned to them.
We love meeting up with Porsche owners at events and less formal get-togethers throughout the year, and these experiences have brought us in contact with so many different slices of the 911’s vast following. So much so that it’s almost as interesting to observe the types of people that show up as it is the cars they bring with them. When a particular model has this much mythos built up around it, you tend to get some drivers who seemingly only bought one in hopes that some of the prestige would rub off on them, but in our experience, these are the outliers in a group of people that are often in it for the right reasons.
The owners of these three cars fall smack in the center of that camp. They don’t have the meanest, the rarest, or the most preserved 911s out there, but you would be hard-pressed to find three people who wring more enjoyment from their cars more than Martin, Mario, and Tom. We first met these guys on one of the “tunnel runs” that our friends organize in Europe, and we stayed in touch and became good friends in the time since, with plenty of driving and photography sessions along the way. We recently found an overlapping block of free time in our collective schedule and decided to grab the keys and cameras for a day of exploration around Solingen, a pleasant city a few miles east of the Rhine.
Martin’s is the 3.2L coupe with the black hood and white Fuchs, and like Mario’s SC Targa (which he drives all year), is mechanically stock and maintained on a regular schedule. Tom owns a G-model as well, though as you can see his has a few more modifications than his buddies’. It is a completed and very faithful backdate to the legendary lightweight RS, and after the two and a half years that went into building it, he’s driven all across Europe with it, and it’s no stranger to ferry decks either seeing as he’s already checked off Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the U.K. in addition to a lot of shorter road trips within Germany.
We had one of those soothingly pleasant days that makes itself feel separate from the rest of the world’s goings-on (being in an empty warehouse with just a few people, a few Porsches, and a single happy dog can have that effect), and as usual, it really wasn’t about the cars.
