RM Sotheby’s has added more Porsche content to its rescheduled 2020 Essen Techno Classica auction on June 24-27. The catalogue now totals 215 lots, including twenty-nine Porsche cars: nine 356s, one 914, two 912s, seventeen 911s and a 904. There is also a Spider replica with 1600cc Beetle running gear.
The 911s include seven impact bumper models, dating from a 1974 2.7-litre Coupe to a 1988 911 Turbo. All merit closer inspection.
Finished in Light Yellow with red leather trim, chassis number 9114102746 is a 1974 911 Coupe said to be in largely original condition throughout. Described by the auctioneers as ‘immaculate’, it has had a repaint in its original colour, and is accompanied for sale by a toolkit, space-saver spare wheel, owner’s manuals, and correct period radio.
The newest G-model 911 in the current catalogue is chassis number WP0ZZZ93ZJS000080: a 1988 911 Turbo. Showing just under 117k kilometres, the late four-speed LHD 930 is finished in Marine Blue with special order light grey trim. The driver’s seat is heated and this car also has a sunroof.
Two 3-litre 911s are offered: a 1977 Carrera 3.0 Coupe previously shared on Ferdinand and a 1981 Porsche 911 SC Targa. Finished in Platinum Beige Metallic over Black Pascha trim and riding on 15″ Fuchs, the SC Targa showing 120k kms is said to be unrestored and will lay down an interesting marker. The photos show several points to a trained eye but the car is handsome nonetheless.
Finally for the impact-bumper cars, a 1984 3.2 Coupe in Grand Prix White with Burgundy trim The seats are showing the usual seam splits and the original wheel is missing, which sort of makes me wonder what else is up with it. All air-cooled 911s including early 3.2s like to wear valve guides and piston rings, so it would be good to see a mention of a previous top end rebuild to the engine.
There are ten more 911s entered in the sale. A total of eight 911s are up without reserve and I look forward to seeing their final prices. June will come up quickly after lockdown and it will be interesting to see whether any pent-up demand has accrued for cars of this era, or whether people will wait to see how the second half of the year shakes out economically.
Despite the doom and gloom one reads in the news, there is a quite bit of business going on behind the scenes during lockdown. I wouldn’t be too hasty to pronounce things dead as yet.
Sir Stirling Moss has passed away aged 90. A sad day, but this was a life very well lived by a man so well loved. He will be missed.
Moss was a real Porsche enthusiast who notably owned a 718 RS 61 Spider. Porsche reunited Stirling and the RS 61 at Goodwood a few years ago. However, Moss was more famous for his achievements with Mercedes, particularly at the 1955 Mille Miglia. The silver arrows were always keen to pay tribute to Sir Stirling and organised a wonderful 60th anniversary tribute at the 2015 Mille Miglia.
At the Mille Miglia 2015, Sir Stirling Moss again took the wheel of the same Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR with starting number 722 in which he won the thousand-mile 1955 Italian road race from Brescia to Rome and back, in the best-ever time. At his side was then team-mate Hans Herrmann, who six decades earlier was another hot contender for victory. Herrmann delivered a stunning performance in 1955, but his race ended due to an unfortunate defect on the Passo di Futa while lying in second place.
The story of the 1955 Mille Miglia is now legend, but there is much more to know about Stirling. Below is a great documentary about his life, presented by the ever-watchable Sir Patrick Stewart. Take the time to learn more about a great racing hero and our fellow Porsche admirer.
I have a great Stirling Moss story but it is NSFW! He was just a proper old boy. We can all learn something from Stirling.
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Happy Easter to all! I hope this is a good weekend for everyone. I’m busier than ever with valuations and client work during lockdown, but losing the long daily school run has freed up some time for personal projects, including improvements to my Porsche 911 forum at impactbumpers.com.
About ImpactBumpers.com
I started the impactbumpers Porsche 911 forum after a conversation with a friend who despaired of the lack of support from established Porsche Clubs for the lowly impact bumper cars, which were then regarded as throwaway ‘starter’ 911s. I like all of Ferry’s creations but, as a child of the ’70s, my passion has always been focused on impact-bumpered 911s from 1974 to 1989. After a decade in various marque ownership clubs, I was over the system’s lacklustre parochialism and am not much of a club-type at the best of times. As Groucho put it, I wouldn’t want to be in any club that would have me as a member. The online space offered the chance to construct a completely different member experience.
After playing around with various types of discussion forum software, the forum launched on February 14th, 2006. My aim was to get maybe twenty like-minded people on board to start working on their own cars and sharing their experiences and give us some buying power for better deals on track days. Fourteen years later (and despite a fairly hardcore early routine of deleting accounts that had not been used in the previous twelve months), the board has over 7,000 members.
Some are less active than others, but all are welcome as long as they behave! Pointless arguments (hello religion and politics) are not permitted – save them for Facebook. Those who throw stones and hide behind keyboards get a holiday. There is no adult content anywhere: the board is son-and-daughter safe, so the kids can keep using your laptop or iPad.
The board sets out to support an upbeat experience of Impact Bumper ownership and has managed to do that pretty well over the years. The forum for those who have had an IB (forumspeak for a car from ’74 to ’89) and moved on to other classics, but would like to keep enjoying the IB camaraderie, is one of the busiest boards on the site.
Impact Bumper upgrades
Easter Sunday has ushered in several upgrades to the board to make things better and brighter. First and most obvious is a new design. It’s a work in progress, although this is the bones of it. Driving my 1976 911 Carrera 3.0 (a.k.a. The Orange) on the Col de Turini for two days just after going full-time freelance in May 2010 was a defining moment for me in connecting to the soul of these cars, so that is the main header pic.
Second is the addition of a feedback system. In the bottom right corner of every post, members now see a heart icon. Hovering over that opens three options: like, thanks and a laugh. Liking or saying thanks for a post earns a ‘reputation point’ for the poster. Total points earned going forward are displayed in the member’s profile. There are no points for a laugh as we should all be bringing good humour!
Members get a set number of points to give out per day and daily points do not carry over. The idea is that a post to say cool or great or whatever can be more than some want to give, but clicking thanks or like gives the poster a feel-good moment. One can also go back in time to say thanks to a post that has helped you. Making one another feel good in times of stress and bringing common sense to Porsche ownership is at the heart of the forum, so we will see how this goes and tweak it as appropriate.
The third upgrade is a raft of other small tweaks including links to associated social profiles, a number of new forums to break content into more digestible indexes, and a few improvements under the engine cover. I think it is all a step forward.
IB Membership and Trade Ads
More new modules will be added as testing progresses, so more new features are coming. I have always resisted offering membership packages and trade advertising, preferring to bankroll the forum myself to keep it indepedent, but it is now becoming more work not to offer these features, so the options will launch over the next few weeks. I hope this may also support independent Porsche specialists, some of whom could find things tricky as the lockdown shakes out.
For now, I hope anyone who has not been on IB in a while will revisit the impactbumpers.com forum and see what they think. Feel free to contact me with any notes or enquiries, or if you can no longer access your original account.
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Ferdinand blogs my freelance adventure with Porsche at the centre. To support the blog or engage with me in other ways, you can:
Independent filmmaker, Gary Hustwit, is sharing some of his work online for free during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Gary’s excellent documentary on legendary designer, Dieter Rams, is available from tomorrow for one week only. I will be watching it again and recommend it to everyone.
I'll be streaming my film about Dieter Rams (with Eno score) free this week, starting Tuesday. During this COVID-induced isolation I'm streaming my design films free for viewers staying indoors worldwide.
“You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people,” says Rams, who is often described as the father of modern product design. Dieter’s core principles will chime with any classic Porsche aficionado, as they had an undeniable influence on Ferry Porsche’s design team. Rams’ famous ten principles state that good design:
is innovative
makes a product useful
is aesthetic
makes a product understandable
is unobtrusive
is honest
is long lasting
is unobtrusive
is thorough down to the last detail
is environmentally friendly
is as little design as possible
The philosophy is summed up as “less, but better” and that is just how this documentary is shot. Everything is considered and measured. The addition of a soundtrack by the great Brian Eno is perfect simpatico.
About Gary Hustwit
I can’t remember how I found Gary Hustwit: it might have been credits in the “Abstract” series on Netflix. However it happened, it was a good day. Gary’s journey into creating unforgettable design documentaries wended its way through an early career releasing punk music for SST Records, running an independent book publishers, founding a media website and eventually opening an independent DVD label: Plexifilm. Work released through Plexifilm included films by Andy Warhol and David Byrne and encouraged Hustwit to create his own content.
Hustwit’s directorial debut came in 2007, with the release of ‘Helvetica’: a feature-length documentary about graphic design and typography. The first in a trilogy of work on design, it was followed by 2009’s ‘Objectified’ (covering industrial and product design) and ‘Urbanized’: a 2011 documentary about the design of cities.
Gary’s feature-length 2018 documentary on Dieter Rams is a superb introduction to this exceptional design mind. Produced and directed by Hustwit, the director describes ‘Rams’ as “a documentary portrait of one of the most influential designers alive, and a rumination on consumerism, sustainability, and the future of design.”
About Dieter Rams
Dieter Rams was born in 1932 in Wiesbaden, Germany. While training as an architect at the Wiesbaden School of Art, Rams also completed a carpentry apprenticeship. He began his architectural career with a practice in Frankfurt, but his work soon caught the eye of the Braun brothers, Artur and Erwin. The brothers had taken control of the family firm after the sudden death of their father, Max, in 1951. They liked Rams’ design ideas and brought him to their company in 1955.
Rams served as Head of Design from 1961 to 1995, championing the relationship between form and function. Rams unified the identity of all Braun products, whatever their purpose. The success of this groundbreaking approach was no accident. Artur and Erwin Braun’s vision and the new design attitude personified by Rams were perfectly attuned.
Sadly, the Braun brothers passed away before Hustwit could interview them for his documentary, but there was no shortage of contemporary designers willing to testify to Rams’ influence on the German design renaissance though the 1950s and 1960s. Watching the documentary, I found I had unknowingly owned and enjoyed quite a bit of Dieter’s work, including a much-loved Braun travel clock, which I got as a present before leaving Ireland for London in the late 1980s. To top it all, we find that, of course, Dieter Rams drives a Porsche 911.
I urge you to watch this excellent documentary and to check out Gary’s other work. It will make you think differently, and perhaps make you act a little differently, too. Also check out the Oh You Pretty Things webshop: after watching the Rams documentary, I bought a signed poster from the South Korean launch of the Rams’ documentary. It will go on the wall of my office, whenever I finish that!
It’s telling that item two of Dr Brett Johnson’s list of “eleven essential items to bring along when heading out to view a Porsche 356 for sale” – part of Veloce Publishing’s latest Porsche 356 Essential Buyer’s Guide – is reading glasses. “Take your reading glasses if you need them to read documents and make close up inspections” advises the good Doctor. He is not wrong. Most people I know with the resources to buy a classic Porsche 356 have definitely advanced to the reading glasses stage.
“There was a time when Porsche 356s were reasonably priced transportation for people without children. Regrettably, that was fifty years ago. Now they are high-priced toys for the same demographic,” says Brett. I enjoy this sort of writing. The latest edition of “The Essential Buyer’s Guide: Porsche 356” has the same tone throughout, asserting what to steer clear of in a clear and light-hearted way, without being overly onerous.
The book opens with a short introduction before working its way through seventeen chapters. The early chapters explore considerations when the purchase is still at the dream stage, but as the first viewing looms closer, the content firms up, with two chapters on what to look for in both a 15-minute inspection and a 60-minute inspection.
Four pages cover the model evolution: you’ll probably have experienced a few cars by the time you decide to get serious. I’ve driven quite a few 356s and they are all fun to be in, so it’s hard to pick one that I would buy if in the market. While the early cars have that proximity to the origin story, the later ones get things like disc brakes. Early cars are perhaps a bit prettier: I think a pre-A is a beautiful thing. They are all fairly tough. Whichever model you drive, it will turn heads, especially with ladies. Good 356s are also very solid residually.
The author’s track record is worth noting. The former veterinarian and Porsche part expert’s 1997 book: “The 356 Porsche: A Restorer’s Guide to Authenticity” has a 4.5 rating from 32 Amazon reviews. With circa 45,000 copies sold to date, the original version gets a few thumbs down for the lack of engine details and darker black-and-white photographs typical of a budget production, but good feedback on the rest. Later editions are available.
This compact 64-page Buyer’s Guide from the same author features many colour photos, but all are quite small, contributing colour and diversity rather than much information. The text has many interesting details, however: certainly enough to educate any 356 novice. I like how Brett engages the reader. I found nothing disagreeable. As a 356 fan but no sort of expert, I learned quite a bit by reading the book.
Reaching the end left me hungry for more, so I looked at used prices for the bigger restoration guide and dug out some of my own 356 books. While there is more than enough information in the Essential Buyer’s Guide to justify a purchase, I can see some people getting through it quite quickly and reading a second time to review what they missed.
While a buyer’s guide book should not be expected to replace the trained eye of a seasoned expert – and my advice is to always have a car inspected by an expert before any money changes hands – the low cost of this work versus the substantial time one would have to invest elsewhere to learn all that it covers means that this book should be considered essential reading for anyone setting out to buy a Porsche 356. With 356s now costing upwards of $56k for a barn find with interesting one-owner provenance at auction and no real upper limit for the very best cars, educating oneself on what to watch out for and thus save a lot of wasted time and effort is a total no-brainer. This little book is definitely worth having.
The publisher’s price is £13.99 in the UK, although Amazon is showing some cheaper prices. Veloce is currently doing a 35% off stay at home sale, so that’s worth a look too. Visit the webshop at veloce.co.uk/store/.
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Ferdinand blogs my freelance adventure with Porsche at the centre. To support the blog or engage with me in other ways, you can:
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