What do you do when Alois Ruf, principal of RUF Automobile GmbH is in town for the holidays? You take him to your favorite driving roads naturally. Over the past few years I’ve had the distinct pleasure of getting to spend time with the man, and have watched him tend to his flock around the world with a patrician hand. RUF has been in business in some form or another since 1939, and as a multi-generational family business that relies on the fervent passion of its collectors, Alois and his family treat everyone they meet as one of their own.
Two of those customers answered the call when Alois came to town, and luckily I was around to capture a day in the sun.
Phillip Sarofim and Timothy Pappas are no strangers to the pages of Petrolicious, and I shot Tim’s Yellowbird a few years ago when I first moved out to LA. It’s an incredible car with many tricks up its sleeve—none the least of which is Bosch Motronic 6.2, an engine management system fully lightyears away from the original Bosch system shipped with the car while the Berlin Wall was still standing. You’ll see more and more of this car in the coming months as we work around a complicated schedule to get some filming done.
Philip’s car on the other hand is a wholly different animal. A black CTR2 Sport with more bells and whistles than I can enumerate on these pages. Paris-Dakar 959 4WD Distribution knob? Check. 702HP? Check. It’s an unholy beast of a 993 that is desperate to bite your head off, and it is just fantastic.
Also along for the ride were Estonia and Aloisa Ruf, the wife, daughter, and business partners of Alois. They piloted the 100-point Bahama Yellow ’67 “Soft Window Targa,” personally restored by Alois Ruf for a member of the Porsche family. After chatting about the cars and getting reacquainted we took the Rufs up to the Malibu Country Mart as we usually would on a sunny Saturday above Santa Monica, before cruising some canyons not far beyond that. It was, and will remain, one of the best days of my life.
