Porsche has announced a concentrated programme of dealer recruitment for its Porsche Classic brand of parts and restoration services. The company plans to increase the current handful of Classic-approved service partners to a total of more than 100 over an unspecified period of time.

Joining current Porsche Classic franchisees in France, Germany and Thailand will be branches in Japan, USA, South Africa, Australia, Colombia, Great Britain Italy, the Netherlands and more. Customers can look forward to “the complete range of services of Porsche Classic” including access to over 52,000 original spare parts, servicing and repairs as well as complete and partial restorations.

How many classic Porsche owners will switch to Classic-badged dealers to have their old Porsches attended to? Your guess is as good as mine. Adding one hundred old Porsche specialists to an already well-stocked specialist landscape will certainly cause some excitement.

I can’t imagine that many grass roots guys will be tempted away from their current providers, with the best established doing a consistently excellent job of keeping old Porsches together. What little I heard about the recent programme of dealer restorations for the 911’s 50th anniversary won’t have too many UK restoration specialists worried about the future.

The 356 Roadster and Porsche 912 Coupe seen here are both currently undergoing full restoration at Tuthill Porsche by a team of guys who share hundreds of years of restoration experience between them. That sort of experience takes more than a few training courses to pick up, so the planned expansion of Porsche Classic past one hundred specialist partners, all producing work of a consistently high standard, and at a price to compete with the established specialist network should be interesting to follow.

That is not to say that Porsche Classic in Stuttgart does not have a team of highly committed craftspeople working on site. I have seen some of their work and it is fully up to scratch. But, as many of my restoration friends know only too well, the highest quality does not easily scale. Hence five-year waiting lists for the best restorers.