Part II: The Pilgrimage
Photos: Gavin Sullivan
This article first appeared in Petrolicious Post 004
They walk you through the car with the care of people who understand they're handing you something that matters. Then they point toward a door, you drive into a dark room and the door closes behind you and just when the silence gets strange, it isn't silent anymore. Music. Lights. A neon sign on the wall: “It all starts with a dream.”
It's the kind of line you'd find stitched on a throw pillow somewhere between the scented candles and the inspirational calendars. It is also, sitting in a Porsche carbon fiber bucket in the dark and your heart doing something embarrassing, completely and totally true. I'm 43 years old. I've built companies, fifteen52 being one of them, out of this obsession. I've touched this world from every angle except the one where you're just a person who loves cars, standing in a room, letting a new car be beautiful at you. The light show fades. The door opens. I drive out into the morning.
As I pull out of the Porsche garage and into the daylight for the first time, the Glanzmann truck is already there, ramp down, waiting. I hand the keys over before the car even knows what a road feels like. Some things you protect before they need protecting. We have days to fill, so we fill them.
ABT Sportsline in Kempten is, for anyone who spent their formative automotive years in the VW and Audi universe, something close to sacred ground. fifteen52, in its earlier incarnation as VW Sport USA, was the ABT importer in the late nineties and early 2000s. So walking through the facility, past Super Touring cars and DTM machinery that never crossed an ocean, is like finding letters your younger self wrote and forgot about. I buy two keychains. It seems inadequate. We drive south.
Garmisch-Partenkirchen arrives at night and the Werdenfelserei meets us with the particular warmth of a place that understands what mountains do to people. Raw wood paneling. A concrete fireplace roaring in the corner. Zugspitze somewhere out in the dark. We spend a day at the spa. We eat and drink well. The Bavarian rivers seem to run that impossible blue that no photograph has ever actually captured, but we try anyway.
Then north. Neuschwanstein in the morning mist, Ludwig's impossible fantasy calcified into stone, a monument to the kind of dreaming that doesn't care what's practical. Then Stuttgart again for the Sonderwunsch tour with Ralf, dinner with friends and the slow accumulation of a trip becoming a memory in real time.
KW Suspension in Fichtenberg is engineering in its most earnest form: organized, precise, built by people who care about the unglamorous infrastructure that makes the glamorous parts possible. Tom and Carlos from Sight Magazine arrive in a Porsche-supplied 911 Carrera S, because by this point the trip has become the kind of thing that attracts its own gravity. I haven't been to KW in twenty years. The company has grown into itself in ways that feel correct, the way a person does when they've been doing the right thing long enough.
We head back to Stuttgart. Alex Glanzmann hands me my keys.
The Spyder RS is ready. It is wrapped and perfect and white and sitting in the light like it's been rehearsing for this moment. We climb into our respective Porsches, four of them now once Joel shows up in his 964 Carrera 4 and point west into the Black Forest.
Here is what I need you to understand about a naturally aspirated flat-six spinning toward nine thousand RPM on a cold road in the Black Forest: it is not a sound so much as a reckoning. Each kilometer I turned over, I let the revs climb a little further, like a question being asked in a language that only the road and the engine speak. The air through the open top smelled of pine and cold and something metallic, the specific scent of winter giving way to something else. Snow fell in fat, indifferent flakes. The temperature dropped to one degree Celsius, which I can confirm is not the most ideal condition for an open-top roadster on summer tires. But that's the thing about memorable experiences, nobody ever told a good story about the time conditions were perfect.
Baden-Baden at night, Roomers hotel, the kind of evening that earns its own private mythology between the people present. The next day: more Black Forest, sun and rain taking turns, coffee and beer and the specific joy of being nowhere important and exactly where you should be.
The last day belongs to the museums. My old friends Max from the Porsche GT program and Lukas from Porsche Classic take us through both, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, the whole arc of what this country built and why it mattered. Then Frankfurt. Then the flight home.
Somewhere over the Atlantic again, the same dark ocean, the same displacement, I try to locate exactly what the trip was about. The car is magnificent. It will be, once it clears customs and arrives and I finally get to drive it on roads I know, under skies that know me back. But the car wasn't the point. Or it was the beginning of the point. What I had for ten days was the thing I'd quietly been missing: the experience of being inside something I love, not building it, not selling it, not making it possible for someone else. Just feeling it.
The knowledge that a moment is beautiful and temporary and worth every deliberate effort to be fully present inside of it. That's the battle. And for ten days, I won it.
I'm already thinking about the next car. I'm already, again, planning to bring my wife. Some dreams don't end; they just find new roads.
Products from the article
Sold out
Sold out
