In 1967, Dan Rowzie watched a lady from the German embassy pull the winning ticket for a 1967 soft-window Targa at the National Porsche Parade in Washington. He had just joined the club, but he’d been around Porsches for a while. He still remembers the number on her ticket. Two seventy-six.
Eight years later, he was on the roof of the Red Ball Garage in midtown Manhattan waiting for a different clock to start. He was in the passenger seat of Leo Lynch’s car. Lynch had a clean ’73 911 Targa, but the car they were running wasn’t the Targa. It was a 911 with an IROC engine in it, a three-liter flat-six, the same one that had run the international racing championship the year before. RSR Mechanical high butterfly injection.
The clock was for a Cannonball run. New York to Redondo Beach. Brock Yates and Dan Gurney had set the record at thirty-five hours and fifty-three minutes a few years earlier, in a Ferrari Daytona. To beat it, Rowzie and Lynch needed to average eighty miles an hour. Coast to coast. Timing was critical. Rowzie had a Secret clearance at the Navy Department waiting for him on Monday morning. He says he probably would have lost it if he’d been locked up. He wasn’t.
Like Rowzie, the truck drivers on the CB had the hammer down. They finished in thirty-eight hours and thirty-nine minutes. Rowzie believes it’s the best Porsche time of any of the four Cannonballs that Yates and Car and Driver organized. He says they could have beaten the record if they hadn’t stopped so much.
“It was more interesting to talk about than do,” he says now.
The 1968 Porsche 911 in his garage today is Burgundy with black interior. It has a vintage race motor. It's a 2.2, 911 S crank, upgraded rods, 10.3:1 compression. Bigger torsion bars front and rear, new shocks, fresh coilovers in place of the Bilsteins. Its low key, purposeful, and built with good taste.
Now he’s walking it back, slowly, to stock. Easier for whoever buys it next.
The interior is original, ableit hugged with a roll cage. The seat harnesses are new because the German ones from the sixties weren’t really seat belts in any modern sense. The car came with reflectors front and back, federally mandated, which he calls “the federal crap.”
“There’s a lot of feedback and spirit,” he says, “that’s missing in the later heavier cars.”
He turned eighty-eight this year. He says he can’t stop that, and that he wishes he could pull it back, but he can’t. In his mind he’s still young, even if mobility isn’t. He still has his eyesight and most of his hair. The hearing, he says, is selective, especially around his wife.
The 911 is in the garage. He works on it when he can and drives it when he can. He’s thinking about who comes after him.
In 1975 he had eighty miles an hour to beat across America, and he didn’t beat it. The 911 in his garage was three years old that year, parked somewhere he wasn’t. The car turned fifty-seven this year. He turned eighty-eight. He says he’s learning to love it more and more.
