I value a few high mileage 3.2 Carreras for Porsche agreed insurance valuation purposes, but none of them come close to the mileage amassed by this beautiful 3.2 with Freisinger restoration which has covered an incredible 680,000 kilometres from new.
I have to say I was a little disappointed by this, as it is not quite enough to go to the moon and back and not quite the million kilometres first believed when it arrived in the workshop for an engine and gearbox refresh. It is still incredible, of course, but a few more weeks clocking up mega miles would have made it really amazing. I’m no 3.2 fan but this car has really fired up my romantic streak – I just love it as a real piece of ownership history. So I was a good choice to write the sales text.
The lion’s share of this mileage was logged by its first owner: a German industrialist who had businesses throughout southern Europe. In 1986, the owner walked into his local Porsche dealership, specced up a Cassis Red coupe with sunroof delete and factory aircon (no point having a sunroof when you clock up hundreds of thousands of Autobahn kms at top speed). Once the car was delivered, he proceeded to run his businesses from the driver’s seat of the Carrera, putting 10-15k kms on the car every four to six weeks, with a full dealer service every couple of months.
As the miles wound on, the Carrera wrapped itself into shape around the driver. Like all great 911s, driving was almost no effort, so more than six hundred thousand kilometres were put on the Porsche before the decision was taken to change it – not to mention the rise of the fax machine and invention of the Internet making big miles slightly irrelevant.
Nowadays, the notion that someone would buy a car and drive 422,000 miles in it is simply unthinkable. Those days have well and truly disappeared. Notwithstanding the months it would take to accomplish this feat in an age of time poverty, the cost in fuel and maintenance would be hundreds of thousands of pounds. But cars like this prove just how the original Porsche sports cars were designed to last. Built by craftsmen from the best parts proven through several evolutions of one bodystyle, it was not unusual for cars to clock up fabulous mileages, helping their owners build empires. Having been under many newer Porsches with reasonable mileages, I’m not so sure that a modern Porsche would make it this far quite so easily.
Anyway, the Carrera’s mileage continued to increase, until one day, the car was replaced by a newer one. At that stage, the owner turned to childhood friend and rare Porsche parts guru, Manfred Freisinger, for some advice on restoration. And that’s where this car’s story gets really interesting.
Just as there are many types of car, there are many types of car restorations. At the lowest end is a quick blow-over in a back-street bodyshop and some folks believe that a factory restoration is the creme de la creme. But the finest attention to restoration detail is guaranteed by using knowledgable specialists like Freisinger or the legends at Ruf. You need deep pockets to send your cars to these boys: I hear a Freisinger restoration starts at €150k for a standard G-model 911 like this and Marcel Ruf told me that any serious SWB Ruf restoration project starts at €300k.
Previous restorations carried out at Freisinger list like a Porsche who’s who: 904s, 906s, 908s and 917s galore with a sprinkling of 962s in there, too. Countless 2.7 Carrera RS Tourings and Lightweights, 934s and four-cam 356s and one high mileage Cassis Red 3.2. When it comes to road car restoration, Freisinger does not take off, make good and refit: the team simply replaces everything with brand new parts. On this car, the list included brand new Fuchs wheels and brand new pinstripe sports trim from a 3.2 Club Sport, a complete set of suspension and brakes and many more bits and pieces.
The entire restoration was documented in a detailed photographic record. Freisinger also converted the car to 3.4-litres using a factory cylinder kit. The engine and transmission were recently rebuilt and both are now in as-new condition. The car has completed 300 running-in miles with 700 more to go and it is a wonderful example of how good classic Porsche can be.
Proper high-mileage Porsches rarely come to market. Cherished by their devoted custodians and handed down as heirlooms, they tend to stay in the family. This rare piece of Porsche motoring history has been fully rebuilt at great expense and is well worth a look. Priced at €79,000, perhaps it only makes sense if you’re a romantic like me – being part of this story would be an experience.
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On our road trip to Germany with Classic Retrofit last month, I had the chance to try my first water-cooled Ruf Porsche, with a test drive of a Ruf RT-12 currently for sale on behalf of a customer. It was an interesting experience.
My most recent run in a tuned 911 Turbo was in a Manthey M600 997 GT2. Fitted with a series of engine upgrades including Manthey’s high quality intercoolers and a reworked exhaust, this was a ballistic machine, with no shortage of torque to stick through the 2wd transmission. The car has been sold several times in recent years and a passenger ride never fails to impress, or to mildly terrify.
The Ruf RT12 is a different experience. At first glance, this 911 seems almost demure. The smooth Guards Red/Indian Red paint and those five-spoke Ruf wheels sit sweetly together, and the red-stitched interior is a nice place to be. But look a bit closer – where are the Turbo’s side intakes? They’re gone: one part of a Ruf aero package that lifts intakes to above and behind the rear arches, where they work rather better than factory items.
Other bits changed include the suspension, which goes from PASM to Ohlins. The airbox is also changed to a carbon airbox of Ruf design. Spec on this car is fairly simple, with extended leather, Bose, carbon centre console and Ruf’s green-numbered gauges a subtle little tweak. This car has the old dash (pre-PCM3), but it’s not that offensive and you won’t be looking down much in any case.
Built on a 4wd 997 Turbo rather than a 2wd GT2, the RT12 perfectly embodies this company’s user-friendly philosophy. The engine is taken to 3.8-litres and mapped to be docile at shopping speeds. But open the throttle and the beast is unleashed: 650 PS equals 641 bhp at your instant disposal. That shoots this car from 0-60 in 2.8 seconds. Other versions make even more power, and gearing changes can take the top speed from 219mph/350km/h on this car to almost 230mph. But of course, we don’t chase from 0-60 all the time, nor do we drive flat-out all day: what we generally do for an entertaining drive is to travel cross-country at speed. So how does the car deal with that?
Ruf RT12 Test Drive
Ruf’s Pfaffenhausen base is centred in farmland, with the smooth local roads set slightly above the fields and giving a great all-round view, way into the distance. For unsuspecting potential buyers to try this car on b-roads, this location is perfect, as visibility is great and the surfaces are generally excellent. I was very excited to have a drive.
Pulling away, the clutch action is solid and shift is well defined – already a step up from standard. Steering feel is excellent and the damping is beautiful: just enough front end bounce to feel like a Porsche, but not too stiff like so many tuned 997s. No tramlining to speak of either: the car just felt ready to go.
No doubt the 997 Turbo is a quick car out of the box, but Ruf’s RT12 is entirely different. My first few overtakes were fairly clumsy as I got my head around the new boost and shift points, but as we clocked up a few more kilometres, things began to gel and the joy of effortless boost was as addictive as ever. This would certainly cost me a licence if it came to live here in speed camera-land.
The chances of this happening with me are fairly remote. Price for this 55,700-kilometre beauty is ten grand shy of €200k: a big saving on the original cost of over €300k, but some way beyond my humble means. Rufs remain exclusive because sharing this incredible passion for Porsche through ownership requires considerable investment. But, if you have that to spend, you could do far worse.
Took a ride out to Snetterton last week for the regular impactbumpers.com August memorial track day, held to remember a petrolhead who was with us there one time, many moons ago.
I don’t give myself much time off at the minute and any downtime is spent away from Porsches, so it was nice to be back around 911 guys for a few hours and to remember what it used to be like when many more people (including me) took air-cooled cars out on track. Some of those who no longer track their 911s have moved on to other cars, so there was a good mix of stuff to jump in for passenger rides, including Steve’s beautiful E46 M3 and Paul’s similarly desirable RS Clio 200 Cup.
What the modified 911 group lacked in quantity, it made up for in quality. In the mix was Ben’s 3.6-litre SC, freshly remapped by Wayne Schofield. Recent mods included a custom 2-out exhaust made by Walton Motorsport, which took power to 299.6 bhp on the Schofield dyno and measured 104db at Snetterton, which means it should just scrape into 105db days.
Ben’s SC was not the only 3.6-litre present, as Henry had come along for his first day on track. Snetterton is a great place for this, as there is plenty of runoff, the days are cheap and not always packed and the layout is easy to get your head around. Henry had fitted db killers for noise limit niceness, but the car still sounded excellent. This ’79 has had the usual rust repairs to sills and kidney bowls, all carried out by the owner, who learned his welding skills on previous cars including a Triumph GT6 and a BMW 2002 Tii. Looks great now and is clearly a source of much pride.
No IB track day would be complete without Longman and his secret sauce 3.2 Carrera, which makes numbers well above standard on dynos everywhere for no obvious reason. I think it’s a 3.4 conversion carried out back in the day but IB rules ban anorak oneupmanship, so if he doesn’t care what the reason is, then no-one else is allowed to bug him about it. Except me, that is. All Longman wants to do is drive it hard and that attitude is highly commended.
There were plenty of other cool cars on track and everyone had a great time. The main thing was a great day of social and we got to drink a glass of bubbly to JJ’s health. Cheers JJ and well done to those who turned up!
Porsche has decided to shut down its LMP1 programme from the end of 2017 and switch to Formula E from 2019. The 911 RSR GT programme continues and Weissach will focus on bringing the 911 back to the head of the field.
It is not a huge surprise that Porsche has canned its hugely expensive LMP1 programme after two back-to-back titles. The promotion value of the effort has already begun to tail off and, with France and the UK already planning to ban new sales of petrol engined cars from 2040, the motor industry focus is clearly on electric cars now. The next twenty years will see a revolution in motoring with autonomous cars, electric vehicles and further downsizing as more households run just one car, or no car at all.
These trends are still in their infancies, but as momentum grows behind renewables of all sorts and the exploding global population requires an ever-cleaner world in order to survive, manufacturers will not wish to be seen as irrelevant in the clean air/electric car landscape. While the racing in Formula E is nothing to get really excited about right now, the series offers a reasonable option for brand positioning (many Porsche competitors are already there), not to mention the cross-R&D advantages to those who need to train a bunch of engineers and maximise the development curve of renewable drivetrains.
Porsche says that the shift from FIA WEC to Formula E is “derived from the direction set out for the company in Porsche Strategy 2025, which will see Porsche develop a combination of pure GT vehicles and fully electric sports cars, such as the first fully battery-powered Mission E road car”.
“Entering Formula E and achieving success in this category are the logical outcomes of our Mission E,” says Michael Steiner, head of Research and Development at Porsche AG. “The growing freedom for in-house technology developments makes Formula E attractive to us. Porsche is working with alternative, innovative drive concepts. For us, Formula E is the ultimate competitive environment for driving forward the development of high-performance vehicles in areas such as environmental friendliness, efficiency and sustainability”.
I had an interesting visit to Tuthill Porsche at the weekend. Francis took one of his 4-cam 356 Carrera engines out of storage and brought it into the engine workshop for the team to carry out a complete restoration and rebuild, including upgrade to 904 spec (pistons and cams ready and waiting).
The 587/1 GT engine was found sitting in the corner of a garage many years ago. It had been in a fire and done a bit of damage but nothing too serious. Fran took it home and started rebuilding it with the help of a friend who made valve guides for Formula 1 engines and had rebuilt a few race engines also. They rebuilt the bottom end, bought new valves from Porsche and made a full set of valve guides (superb things to look at) but never got around to doing the top end. Now the Tuthill engine builders will get stuck into it as a special project and I am excited to follow the work.
The 4-cam engines are a bit of a minefield, but no doubt when they work they are pretty special. Ferry Porsche had a 4-cam in several road cars and put a fascinating piece about development of the first Fuhrmann 4-cams into his autobiography, which offers an excellent insight into how the factory was operating at this time (late forties).
“For some time, our total work force comprised less than a hundred men, but we made good use of the cramped and limited space (a 600m2 rented workshop in Stuttgart) and even managed to find room for a diminutive test and racing shop, which held just two cars. It was shielded from prying eyes by an ancient closet and a primitive sliding curtain.
“We knew when we started using the Volkswagen engine for our Porsches that the maximum to which we would be able to increase piston displacement would be 1,500cc. The pushrod system of valve actuation, while completely reliable, also placed limits on engine revolutions. But we had foreseen this problem, and already by 1950 Dr Ernst Fuhrmann, an outstanding engineer on our staff, began designing our future Carrera engine.
“Different technical drawings were made which examined the possibilities of driving four overhead camshafts. One method was by chain, another by gear drive and so on. It seemed to us at the time that the best method to use would be a gear train, and that the distributor could also be driven from the end of one of the camshafts; but this arrangement led to difficulties.
“Each of the four camshafts operated two valves, and as the engine gained speed, a vibration began which ended up by destroying the ignition system. We therefore had to make changes in the ignition drive – not too much of a problem. The Carrera engine originally had a piston displacement of 1,500cc but was so designed that could be enlarged to 2 litres. However, we are anticipating a little, since another five years were to pass before we introduced this famous engine into our production line.”
Looking at the myriad parts spread out across the work bench in Tuthills, I simply cannot imagine how much effort went into making this thing work reliably. It is insanely complicated – the camshafts have flywheels and each camshaft is driven by a shaft which needs two position adjustments (one at each end and in opposite directions) to alter the cam timing. Even the flywheel is complex: it is fixed to the crankshaft by two tapered spacers, which interact under torque to lock the flywheel solid, but need huge torques combined with a specific routine of taps with a brass hammer to do their thing properly.
The first Type 547 crankshafts were Hirth roller bearing assemblies that came in separate pieces. Can you imagine starting an engine build by assembling a crankshaft? There is wonderful madness to an engine designed for production that took 120 hours to assemble and up to fifteen hours to set timing on. Compare this to the 41 hours often cited as start-to-finish build time for a complete 996!
Every single piece of it is outrageously complicated, making the flat-four 4-cam engine fascinating but frustrating. It leads me to wonder how much of Fuhrmann’s love of the complex fed into the convoluted, overweight transaxle cars which he had scheduled to replace the 911 before he was eventually replaced as Porsche CEO by Peter Schutz in 1980. An interesting question that would no doubt draw many comments on engineers as MDs, and the eternal battle between technical staff and accountants.
Setting aside my musings on four-cam contribution to Porsche boardroom history, this engine build is a fascinating project and one I am really looking forward to following. For example, valve lift on the 904 spec 587/2 engine is confirmed as 10mm exhaust and 12.5mm inlet. This would be mental enough with small-ish valves, but the 4-cam valves are huge and weigh a shedload. It is simply unbelievable and wondrously exciting!
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