photos: Tiziano Niero
"It's almost like you are wearing something," Joe Buzzetta says. Not sitting in. Wearing. The 904 demands that kind of commitment. Low, purposeful, unforgiving. The kind of car that reminds you it was built for one thing and you're sitting in it anyway.
Joe saw his first race car when he was six. Probably a 906, sitting in his father's shop. The memory isn't sharp, but it stuck.
His father lived racing. Started in the late 1950s with British cars, an Austin Healey that taught him what commitment meant. Then came the Speedster, more reliable on track, faster when it mattered. Military service interrupted in 1958, four years that included two in Germany, in Frankfurt. But even overseas, he kept racing. European circuits, the highways, anywhere the car could run. He was good enough that the factory noticed. Good enough that they invited him to join the team.
The shop was Joe's classroom. Race cars weren't exotic objects to admire from a distance. They were family business, torn down and rebuilt in the same space where he did homework. You learned by watching, then by doing.
That's the thing about the 904. Ferrari had already committed to mid-engine layouts. Lotus was proving that balance mattered more than tradition. Porsche could defend the rear-engine past or design its future. The 904 was the answer. Designed for one thing. Winning. Everything else, road legality, comfort, civility, was negotiated only as far as regulations demanded. Lightweight fiberglass body over a steel frame. Mid-engine layout. Purpose-built for racing in the GT class. When it appeared in 1964, it changed the conversation.
This one is chassis 005. An early car. The fifth 904 built. It raced from day one, entered in nearly every event Porsche could justify, and it performed. Always near the front. Sometimes winning. At the 1964 12 Hours of Sebring, it took a class victory. Then on to endurance races at the Nürburgring and elsewhere across Europe. The kind of career that validates a platform. The colored hood it wears isn't decoration, during night racing, factory teams used bright colors to identify drivers at speed. You couldn't read numbers in the dark, but you could see orange, yellow, red. Quick visual reference in the chaos.
The factory used it as a test bed too. Different engines cycled through over time. A six-cylinder at one point. A flat-eight from a 908 at another. Porsche didn't treat 005 like a museum piece. They treated it like a tool, swapping components to see what worked, pushing limits, learning. Now it carries a six-cylinder. Not the engine it was born with, but period correct none the less.
"Being small displacement, being high revving, designed to really be over 6000 rpm," Joe explains. "If you're not familiar with it, it doesn't behave like a 911."
A 911 gives you torque from 2,500 rpm onward. Meaty, accessible power you can lean on. The 904 asks for patience. Below 5,000 rpm, it's polite. Above that threshold, it wakes up. The engine spins freely, the gearbox snaps through ratios, and the chassis responds with the kind of directness that only comes from simplicity and low weight. There's no power steering. No ABS. No electronic mediation. Just a driver, a four-cylinder, and the road. The car does not compensate. It waits. Or it punishes.
Joe doesn't race it much anymore. Laguna Seca, years ago. A couple of sessions at Daytona. Enough to remember what it asks of you. "You roll it out of here, you get to the warm up areas," he says. The cantankerous nature reveals itself immediately. You're already committed. The privilege of sitting in chassis 005 isn't lost on him. Neither is the weight of it.
His father's loyalty to Porsche carried through the decades. In 1964, he won a class at Daytona. A victory at one of motorsport's most demanding events. Not a sprint. Not a short circuit. The Targa was something else entirely... public roads, elevation changes, blind corners, and the constant threat of disaster. Daytona and Sebring were high-speed endurance tests. The Targa was survival.
Joe acquired the 904 in 1993 as part of a larger European collection. It wasn't meant to be a race car anymore. More of a collection piece, something to appreciate and occasionally demonstrate. Exhibitions, sometimes. Historical events, when it makes sense. The kind of car that exists between worlds. Too significant to thrash, too purposeful to ignore.
"This will likely end up in someone's museum or maybe back to the factory," Joe says. "But it's just one of those things."
He understands what he has. Chassis 005 isn't just a 904. It's an early example of Porsche's commitment to mid-engine sports racing. It's a car that proved itself in competition, evolved through factory testing, and survived into the present carrying that history forward. Joe doesn't treat it as nostalgia. He treats it as a machine with intent. One that deserves to be understood before it's exercised.
