I Got Married And Raised Two Kids In My 1978 Pasha Porsche 928

My name is Torsten Gebauer, I live in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany, in a city called Dortmund, and this is a brief story about the long history I’ve had with my Porsche 928.

On the surface it begins like so many others—a father’s influence and a young boy with a budding interest in motors—but I think it went a bit further for me, as my situation wasn’t one where I was learning from him using just a single family car as the hands-on material in our garage/classroom. My father was a car dealer, and his company sold all sorts of cars in all sorts of conditions, and they often used parts from the junk yard he’d built. In other words I had access to some variety, at least in the sense of what was on the roads of Germany in the ‘60s and ‘70s; Opels, Volkswagens, Fords, Fiats, etc.

Those were the formative years and cars of my childhood, but the Porsche 928 would be my dream car from my adolescence onward, and I still remember distinctly the first time I ever saw one. I don’t need to tell you that this was pre-Internet, and that the only way we could see new cars in motion was to see them in person. To catch one “in the wild” carried more significance back then I think, because you hadn’t seen videos of tests online or anything but a few photos in a magazine.

I was 15 years old, standing on a street corner waiting to cross, and in the traffic there was one car I was more than happy to stand still for. It was a 928, and I was fascinated from first glance. The noise, the shape, I thought to myself: that is my car. Of course, it wouldn’t be for a long time, but that was the moment I knew it would come eventually, and then almost ten years after the encounter my brother relayed an ad in the newspaper to me.

It was for a 928, and he was going to phone the owner to find out which gearbox it had, as he’d heard me say more than a few times that I would only buy something with a five-speed! As you guessed, it was a manual 928, but I had another longstanding stipulation: must be red. If you are patient sometimes you get exactly what you ask for, and this seemed to be the case for this car. I’ve happily owned it for more than 30 years.

It is factory equipped with blue-black “pasha” interior, of which all the LSD jokes about them have already been made. They are distinctly ‘70s, and set against the big expanses of red on the exterior I think the colors and designs contrast in a strong but stylish way. BBS RS wheels have been added, and though the design came out a few years after the introduction of the 928, they had plenty of overlap throughout the 928 production span, so I think they can still be considered period correct. I don’t really care either way, because I love the way they look on the car whatever you want to call them!

Though much of my 928 is original, it does have a story behind it, but not the kind you’d put in quotations. It’s been a staple of my family for a long time now, I married my wife in this car, and two of our three children grew up in the back seat. When the third came, I only used the Porsche for the occasional Sunday drive, but being too small for the full family now, it eventually stayed parked for a few years, only temporarily forgotten.

On our 20th wedding anniversary, our children pulled it out of storage in the garage, and together with my brother and sister they went about repairing and refreshing everything that attends years of immobility—timing belt, tensioners, water pump, every fluid, tires, everything! I can’t thank them enough for giving us back the experiences offered by this wonderful car. I love it as the day I first saw its shape. It has placable but timeless looks, it sounds fantastic, it’s more than fast enough for me, and its smells bring me right back to my early years as a budding car enthusiast.

It’s a member of the family as they say, and one that will stick around for a long time to come.