Sometimes the whole Safari thing gets misunderstood. You see a lifted 911 idling into cars and coffee with rockers so clean you could eat off them, and it becomes easy to think the trend is all costume and no consequence. But every once in a while you meet someone who uses the idea the way it was always meant to be used. Someone who treats the platform for what it is at its core: simple, durable, honest.
The old 911 is a natural candidate for this life. No coolant to boil over, no temperamental electronics waiting to strand you. Just a flat six that rewards being wrung out, torsion bars that don’t care what surface they land on, and a chassis that shrugs when the pavement ends. It’s a car that gets better with dust in its seams and honest miles under it.
Mike Denkers lives on that side of the fence. His ’83 SC Safari isn’t a trend piece. It’s a tool. “Cars pull me into a kind of different area of life,” he says. “They let me focus on just that thing for a little bit.” He doesn’t name his cars, but he pays attention to them in the way only real drivers do. “I can sometimes tell when a car… it’s just turned on different from the last time I turned it on. That, to me, is an attitude or a mood shifter.”
What makes Mike different is he never let the 911 become untouchable. Utah practically forces you into the dirt anyway. “Being in Utah, you kind of have to have some sort of off road component in your life,” he says. His hobbies before sixteen died the moment he could drive. The 911 just happened to be the car that fit the terrain and the mindset.
Under the red paint and tall tires, the car is still beautifully simple. That’s why the air cooled cars make sense as Safaris. Mechanical honesty. A layout Porsche perfected by refusing to abandon it. “The Germans stuck with something for so long that was so imperfect, they’ve made it perfect,” he says. The quirks that terrify people on pavement become advantages in the dirt. All that weight over the rear axle means traction where other cars flail. The lift-off rotation that demands respect on a canyon road becomes a tool you can lean on.
His build is extensive, but never gratuitous. The Rothsport 3.2 changed everything. “You can just rip this motor all day long. First gear, second gear, redline it.” The coilovers with remote reservoirs. The Works Group bumpers and skid plates. A center mounted winch he admits is “a really weird upgrade… but it’s kind of cool that we have it.” The hydraulic handbrake, the half cage, EFI, Morimoto headlights, a limited slip, and a 915 that’s “probably due for a rebuild.”
The difference is he actually leans on the car. “I have lost it, right? I’ve totally whipped it around and not meant to.” Dirt gives you room to screw up, but it still teaches lessons fast. On 29 inch all terrains, the tires give up long before he does, and he knows it. “These tires specifically, you’re going to have a limit that’s way before my limit,” he says. For him it all comes back to repetition.
Purists aren’t part of the conversation. “I’m not buying this car and not putting miles on it for the next guy to enjoy.” The mismatched hood and trunk lid add that small outlaw slant. The ritual stays the same: clean it, get it dirty, clean it again. “It’s always a fresh start.”
A 911 from the early 80s will never be perfect, which is exactly why it thrives as a Safari. It’s a car that gets better the more you ask of it. A car that rewards being trusted with a hard job. Mike treats it that way. And the car responds the only way a good 911 knows how.
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