Ten years ago today, photographer Jamie Lipman and I drove 60 miles from Ventura in California to Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. It was my first trip to LA and I was driving my own 911: an SC Coupe that I had bought on Craigslist a few months before.
Our destination was the Bel Air Presbyterian Church: a vast structure built in the mid-fifties on a ridge overlooking Burbank Airport, the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood. The view was entirely appropriate, as we were en route to meet a new star.
RGruppe hot rodder and owner of what was then the world’s coolest early 911, Rob Dickinson, had emailed a few weeks previously, asking if Jamie and I would do the first story on his brand new creation, presenting it to Porsche enthusiasts before it was launched to a wider audience. I was well up for that and arranged a magazine cover. I found some space in the schedule for a run to LA and waited for the day to arrive.
We spent a few days shooting various Porsches in and around San Francisco before driving to Ventura for the Porsche show there. The hotel and showground was packed out with RGruppe friends and family, and everyone wanted to talk about our date with Singer. Most people had an opinion and it was not all complimentary. But they all loved Rob.
The Zuffenhaus boys (who had supplied the wheels) and Harvey Weidman (master wheel refinisher) were also in town showing their RSR brakes and steering wheels. They shared great insight on the attention to detail that went in to getting the stance just right.
The designer had put a lot of thought into his creation and I was looking forward to seeing it. I was also excited that we’d been given the first proper feature: many big-name journos have covered it since, but we had been covering the underground in an interesting way and Rob was one of the taste makers. So getting this story was cool.
How to shift a culture
If you want to shift a cultural mindset, the best place to start is where people are open to shifts. I’m Irish, Jamie’s English and we expressed our ideas in an anglocentric way. We did sell our work overseas, but the primary outlets were British titles. Rob is obviously British and was steeped in the culture. The country that had birthed Monty Python and Punk was likely to click with where he was coming from.
Selling my output across the world, I’ve found that there’s a big difference in how ‘British’ car writers are regarded: look at Chris Harris and Henry Catchpole’s subscriber counts and read the feedback on their work to see the evidence of this. A lot of the people around Singer are British or some way Anglophile and the latest cars have had a lot of engineering in Britain. We will revisit this another time, but, to me, there is a clear public perception of a link between British creatives and a taste for new things.
From 2008-2012, our work covered (mainly RGruppe) modified cars in what up to then had been a sea of conservative content. RGruppe was widely regarded as mould breaking and this marked us out as a fit for Rob’s work. We didn’t have the reach of the big boys – it took me very little time to reject that path – but we were exploring and reporting the fringes of Porsche culture in an authentic way, had an idea of market tastes at a certain level and were likely to provide a warm welcome for the mould-breaking 911.
Three Types of People
In a Seth Godin podcasts called “Anthems, Pledges and Change”, the marketing thought leader explores how there has been substantial pushback over the years in response to certain interpretations of the American national anthem. Seth cites the examples of Aretha Franklin and Jose Feliciano: popular stars of their day who were vilified when they took the national anthem off piste. His podcast gets right to the heart of it.
“There are three kinds of people in every community: three kinds of people in every area of interest: at every event. One kind of person doesn’t want things to change. They’ve been sitting in the same seat at Yankee Stadium since it was built. They go to the baseball game because baseball doesn’t change.
“The second kind of person – the masses – they want to do what everybody else is doing. And the third kind of person is the early adopter: the neophyte, the neophiliac. They’re looking for something that’s new. One way we can define a cultural touchstone – a place, an event – is by the percentage of the three that are in the room.
“So, if you go to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it is filled to the top with people who want to know what’s new. But if you listen to America’s Top 40 on the radio, or watch CBS, you’re probably going to see a programme director who is obsessed with the masses. The reason you are listening or watching is to see what everybody else is seeing.
“And then you’ve got events and organisations and moments where most of the people there are laggards: they want it to stay the same. And it turns out that anthems and pledges are a really good place to find this sort of person.”
Anthems and pledges play a big part in American society, and in mainstream Porsche culture. The fear that what one is doing will be regarded by so-called peers as freakish or culturally unacceptable is what paralyses so many potential cultural shifts. Things that are initially mould breaking are often later paralysed by rampant conservatism as the masses move in.
Control of the Narrative
When Aretha Franklin was scorned for her rendition of the American national anthem, it was laggard-linked masses dictating the narrative. Those people did not want change. A fearful percentage wanted the status quo to prevail, their noise via letters and phone calls was interpreted as a majority and fear of destruction within media platforms dictated the coverage.
The same thing playa out on a grand scale in mass media coverage of social upheavals. Fearful masses swing towards the way it has always been and the mass media coverage follows accordingly. Defence against all discourse that might force social change begins with control of the narrative: look at 1930s Germany, what is happening in Turkey or the tone of mainstream British media in recent years. Look at how racism or oppression in parts of a country can be perpetuated by parents and grandparents: control of the narrative is key.
The interesting thing I see in Singer ten years ago – and I think a large part of how it turned the Porsche world on its head – was not its philosophy or styling, but the founder’s awareness of narrative. This was before he ever had media professionals involved. Nowadays, Singer feels carefully manicured, but this was just Rob on his own.
An early career in creativity – writing and recording music – and an understanding of how his work had been reported and reviewed gave Rob a valuable media consciousness. He placed his first product where he felt the change would be received impartially and given a chance. Starting at the fringes, it worked towards the centre. Building support amongst neophytes first, it infiltrated modified consciousness and became the masses’ gold standard.
At the core of the “we do it like this – we have always done it like this” Porsche sensibility, the arrival of Singer was controversial. Ten years later, it’s still a bit thorny. A lengthy disclaimer at the foot of the Singer home page testifies to some of the grief it went through at launch. But, as with anything that fights to exist for a decade, the brand has become a default.
For some, it is the default aesthetic for a hot rod Porsche: not amongst diehard enthusiasts, but without doubt for swathes of the masses. The cultural energy unleashed by Singer proved more than enough to power a movement and turned a culture on its head, shifting the way people looked at air-cooled 911s.
Singer: the catalyst
In 2009, the idea that Porsche would wrap its arms around a backstreet hot rodder like Magnus was highly unlikely. Thoughts that an £8k 911 SC would one day be worth five or six times that would have been ludicrous. When the 4-litre RS was launched in 2009, a tripling in price after launch was something that no one could imagine. Certainly I couldn’t see it and I was up to my neck in this stuff.
An awful lot changed in a short space of time. The bank crash put asset investment back on the map and classic Porsches were interesting. They were increasingly marketed as hand-built, time-warp artefacts. Now part of Volkswagen, Porsche was selling mostly SUVs, but the marketing value of the origin story and passion amongst grassroots enthusiasts began to materialise. If you had an interesting origin story, the media wanted to hear it and masses began to lean into it. Porsche began to lever grassroots passions to remind SUV buyers of sports car traditions and associated characters reinforcing that story became more important.
If one looks back at how this trend developed, it is impossible to discount Singer as a significant part of the catalyst. As the cultural shift began to take hold, partly centred on what Singer was doing, people who came to the brand with some media experience took over its origin story, designers amped up the style, the builders eventually sorted the dynamics. All these combined to deliver a compelling narrative. The confluence of its ingredients told a unique story and so it remains.
If you want to own a Singer (or, as legals prefer to call it, a Porsche 911 reimagined by Singer), you can’t build one in your shed: either you buy one or have something else. Only Aretha could sing the anthem like that and only Singer can build you a Singer. Today, that sounds obvious, but it took ten years to get here. Where will we be in another ten years?
I got into a conversation with a friend today about scattering ashes. I’ve written about what led up to the chat and what’s happened since, but it may be too deep for a Thursday. I’ll share it another time.
It was a fun conversation. He was talking about how they scattered his dad’s ashes in a river: a strange will request, as his dad hated water and couldn’t swim. When they shook the ashes over the surface of the water, they did not float off on the current but sank straight to the bottom. “That’s aquaphobia at DNA level,” I said. “Even as ashes, he still couldn’t swim.”
Just as it’s impossible for us to sidestep our genetic building blocks, a new and interesting video on the GT3 Touring shows how closely the latest 911s remain tied to the old. The Touring is a spoilerless GT3 with a manual gearbox and all who have driven it have raved about its engine and its energy. A 9,000 redline gives it aural appeal, while the unspoilered tail brings us back in time to the first of the flared-arch, flat-tailed impact bumper cars. How it behaves under duress on track could not be more impact bumper.
Driving the Porsche is Andy Pilgrim. Born in Britain, Andy studied computer programming in the UK and then moved off to Michigan for a job with GM in Detroit. Arriving in the US with just one hundred bucks in his pocket (sounds pretty familiar), he programmed software for $12,000 a year before moving down south for better money and racing.
Working hard, he eventually saved enough cash to do a bit of racing and ended up making a name for himself. His career developed through Formula Renault into GT cars. He has raced many Porsches: at Le Mans alongside Stephane Ortelli and Sebring and Pikes Peak with Alan McNish, amongst others. He now runs a road safety school to make up for the below-par American driving test and teach kids how to drive safely, has driven with Patrick Long and Tim Pappas at Black Swan Racing and also instructs at NCM Motorsport Park in Bowling Green, Kentucky: not too far from my family in Lexington.
Andy also works with Automobile Magazine, and his latest video for their Youtube channel takes a GT3 Touring in beautiful Sapphire Blue Metallic on track in Kentucky. The run down the half-mile straight perfectly illustrates the Touring’s main selling point – the 4-litre engine – but the hot laps show how a Touring can bite. Scroll down for the video.
Physics: Modern v Classic
“It’s a very cold day here at NCM Motorsport Park and I’m trying to warm the tyres up as I wanted to give it a shot at a hot lap.” As the Pilgrim ploughs down the main straight and turns right into turn one, the rear of the car drifts left and Andy corrects, catches it, corrects again and catches that before the third swing kicks in. The behaviour will be familiar to anyone who has ever experienced an old 911 on track: it’s the laws of physics at work. The age of the thing trying to wrap up the physics doesn’t matter so much.
Porsche let Andy keep the car for a few more days until the weather warmed up and he did set a hot lap. Deciding not to change up ahead of some corners to hold on to the gear for the exit, he hits rev range one several times on the lap, but that Florida-registered demo has seen some action on Youtube and in print. No doubt the next owner will get a full warranty.
“Have to use all the road on this one. You’re going to see quite a lot of oversteer correction,” says Andy on his lap. “The Touring does not have all the downforce of the regular GT3: the regular GT3 has 150 lbs of downforce at 124 mph and the Touring has about 50 lbs of downforce.” The car sets a 2:11.8 in the cold: seven-tenths slower than a PDK GT3 over a fairly long lap, which I think is pretty good going.
“The GT3 Touring is kind of a split personality,” concludes Andy. “On track, it took all of my skill to get a really good laptime out of the car and it actually reminded me in a throwback way to the Porsche 911s I drove on track twenty years ago. They let you know there was a lot of weight back there and you used to not have a lot of downforce to help you.
“Well, welcome to the Touring: it doesn’t have a whole lot of downforce. But, on the street? I tell ya, it’s just such a joy to drive any GT3, but this one without the wing is a little more understated. If it’s not the best 911 you can buy today, it’s gotta be one of the top three.
None of my first 911s had spoilers and I can vividly remember my first high-speed drive in a friend’s ’86 3.2 Carrera with rear spoiler down the A43 near Silverstone. Hitting 130 mph in that car was completely different to my no spoiler SC Cabriolet at the same speed. I changed to a Carrera 3.0 Coupe soon after, fitted an early Turbo rear tail and have never taken it off.
Days of 120-130 mph as a regular thing on UK roads are well behind us now so spoilers may be once again irrelevant. A no-spoiler GT3 Touring would be on my list if I had the money to spend. From roughly £200k in their honeymoon period after launch, the cars are now showing somewhere around the £165k mark as used sales versus a base cost new of about £115k.
Expect to see them getting cheaper still. 991 GT3s with a few miles now start around £100k or so and, while Tourings won’t get quite that cheap anytime soon, there are always more cars for buyers to chase. Tourings will keep coming back to the market and get a little cheaper as new models supersede them. Nevertheless, they are emotional. I envy anyone who gets to drive one of these cars every day.
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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:
Two red Porsche 911s caught my eye in the catalogue for the upcoming Aguttes sale in Lyon, France on November 9th. Values for both models soared when the Porsche market exploded but, as Orwell said, some pigs are more equal than others. Their potential selling prices are poles apart.
1966 Porsche 911 2-litre
Estimated at €180-200,000, this Polo Red SWB Porsche 911 – chassis number 304392 – was supplied through Sweden in May 1966 to a racer from Trollhättan. Built with triple Weber carburettors instead of the usual Solex, it lived in Sweden right up to the turn of the century, until it turned up in Germany.
Porsche 911 2.0 auction – photo by Aguttes
The car then sold to a museum in Austria and, when that closed, it passed through keepers in Switzerland and on to Normandy in France. By this stage it needed some money spent: the 2L market was buoyant in 2014 so it was fully repainted in the factory colour and restored to period spec.
Prettied up, it sold to another French collector and was sent to the racing mechanic, Pierre Modas, for an engine and transmission rebuild. Porsche dealers changed a few other bits and in total over €30,000 was spent on the mechanical restoration. The same work in the UK would probably cost a bit more, which perhaps suggests there was not much to do at the start or there may be a bit more to do now. Webers take less restoration than Solex, for sure.
1966 Porsche 911 2.0 interior – photo by Aguttes
The auctioneers claim this is an authentic example, but who can know without inspecting. A lot of 2-litres passed through various specialists while the market was freaking out and some work is better than others. The history is certainly interesting: particularly the Swedish angle.
1976 Porsche 911 Carrera 3.0 at auction
The other car in the catalogue that caught my eye was a 1976 Porsche 911 Carrera 3.0 Coupe. Estimated at €45-65,000, chassis number 9116600485 is a matching numbers example, first supplied by Dieteren in Belgium, that has been refinished in Guards Red/Indian Red from its original grey.
1976 Porsche 911 Carrera 3.0 – photo by Aguttes
Restoration or replacement of bits including half-floors, front crossmember (likely front pan) and the bumper mounts suggest the car was used well from new, or perhaps even caught a bit of damage somewhere, so the speedo reading of fairly low kms for the year may not be verifiable.
It has also had a new fuel tank (pretty standard for impact bumper cars of this era) and the suspension, brakes and steering have apparently been refurbished. The gearbox is also said to have been overhauled, though there is no mention of the engine or K-Jet being stripped. The car comes with bills for over €40k and plenty of photos for bidders to check.
1976 Porsche 911 Carrera 3.0 interior – photo by Aguttes
Owned by the current owner since 2010, this car was entered in the Hotel de Ventes sale at Monaco in July 2017 with an estimate of €60-80k at the time. It failed to sell for whatever reason and so returns to the sale rooms with a lower price tag attached. The drop of €15k on low estimate is where I see the market for a nice C3 right now: if I owned a car like this (assuming it is all as described) and if it didn’t fetch €45k, I would probably keep it. In a market as tough as this one has been through 2019, they could have done better pics to get interest going.
Porsche Colour Change vs Market Price
The factory colour is always what people get hooked on, but it is hard to say whether this 1976 Carrera 3.0 Coupe would offer a better sales prospect in original ‘grey’. Red is rare and looks good on early impact bumpers. The car also retains its original 5-bladed fan and has the 15″ Fuchs, which are more correct than 16s on a ’76. It’s starting pretty cheap for a C3 at €45k, so we’ll see how it goes on the day.
1976 Porsche 911 Carrera 3.0 engine – photo by Aguttes
My interest in this one is obvious – the effect of colour change on a Carrera 3.0 Coupe. My ’76 C3 was repainted in Continental Orange from the original Copper Bronze Metallic and, while I like the colour a lot, it will have to be redone at some stage. The option to refinish in the original or something completely different will therefore be mine somewhere down the road and more information may help make a ‘better’ decision.
Prices only matter when you sell and that is not something on my radar right now. Never say never, though. The clock is ticking and my kids won’t want it.
Ferdinand blogs my freelance adventure with Porsche at the centre. To support the blog or engage with me in other ways, you can:
“I suppose the German side wants to keep everything in control, and the Irish side wants to wreak havoc,” claims Michael Fassbender. I’m not so sure about that. When I am with Germans, I’m generally the one keeping things under control, while the rest run amok. I guess it depends on the Germans you know.
Weg mit ihren Köpfen
The Irish missionary Kilian went to Germany in 689 AD. It was a big mistake. When Kilian suggested that a local lady was not the most suitable bride for a newly-baptised duke, on the basis that she had once been married to the duke’s now-dead brother, the Germans chopped off Kilian’s head, and those of both his companions.
But times have changed. When Fassbender smashes his GT3 Cup nose-first into the Hockenheim pit wall right in front of the Porsche crew, they run through what went wrong and roll out a spare car. A few weeks later, he has another sizeable accident and another spare car is wheeled out. German-Irish relations have definitely evolved.
Anyway, this story is all about an actor en route to Le Mans. Yes, that old chestnut is back, except this time it is rather more interesting (for us Irish, at least). After a two-year learning curve racing Ferraris, Michael Fassbender is training with Porsche for a shot at the 24-Heures. His teacher, Felipe Fernandez Laser, is a VLN winner with Frikadelli Racing and should be capable of helping a decent amateur find their way up to the level of a quick GTE-AM driver.
So far, Fassbender appears to show decent potential. A ninth place finish in a Porsche Sports Cup race is no mean feat for a rookie and there are flashes of speed all the way through Porsche’s latest Youtube series, following Fassbender’s Road to Le Mans. The biggest test will be whether he can put it all together, but this is man knows what it’s like to do 10,000 hours.
Heidelberg to Aghadoe
Fassbender arrived into the world just 100 kms north of Stuttgart in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemburg on April 2, 1977. His German father, Josef, was a chef and his Irish mother, Adele, raised the kids. The pair had met while working in London but ended up moving to Germany. Adamant that the Republic would be a better environment for their kids to grow up in, Adele convinced Josef to move the family to Ireland. So, when Michael was two, they settled just outside Killarney, in County Kerry.
Killarney was rally central in the 1980s, so young Michael got into Group B. Then followed the age of Michael Schumacher and, as a young German who spoke the mother tongue fluently, Fassy followed Schumi: he’s often now found on F1 grids with Crazy Liam Cunningham and the pair met Schumi at one such weekend.
The youngster struggled to find some direction until he discovered drama in school. He immersed himself in acting and staged Tarantino’s ‘Reservoir Dogs’ over two nights for the craic. He eventually moved to London to study the craft. Things were tough in the smoke and Fassbender was living on a few quid a week, working two minimum wage jobs and battling exhaustion to do as many auditions as possible. It all took its toll and Michael quit drama school to go it alone. It would not be the smoothest path to success.
When he quit his bar job after landing a part in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Band of Brothers’, the boss advised him to keep in touch, as the work might come in handy again. Fassbender laughed it off, feeling he had hit the big time, but, after a spell in LA trying to crack Hollywood, he ended up back in the bar.
Bit parts on British TV followed, leading to more and more screen time and the emergence of a fan base amongst critics. Eventually, things took off: he delivered an exceptional performance as IRA hunger striker, Bobby Sands, in the film Hunger and then Tarantino came back into his life, casting the German speaker as a British spy in Inglourious Basterds.
While the actor-turned-racer premise may initially feel like Fassbender is buying his way into racing and walking in footsteps we’ve all seen before (not that there’s owt wrong with that), there is more to this story than the same old thing and Porsche has scored big with Youtube viewers. Part 1 alone has 700k views and Porsche’s channel has 800k subscribers, so that should tell you all about the reach of this.
I am also a fan of the documentary: the way this is shot is just perfect. Fassbender is given the full expression of his Irish upbringing with no bleeps or edits and we see things exactly as his driver coach sees them. “I’m so bummed about the fuckin’ smash there behind the safety car,” is Fassbender’s first line in part 1. It’s hard to resist parts two and three after that.
Ferdinand blogs my freelance adventure with Porsche at the centre. To support the blog or engage with me in other ways, you can:
I caught the first Porsche Supercup race of the Mexico Grand Prix weekend tonight. While I haven’t missed a Grand Prix in over ten years, it’s been a while since I watched a Supercup race. Unsurprisingly, not much has changed since last time.
Michael Ammermüller has been a smooth operator since coming to Supercup in 2012. A former Red Bull Racing test driver, he raced single seaters before Porsches, so, when he does not start on pole, he has a way of getting to the front without inflicting too much collateral damage en route. This is not the Supercup norm.
The first race in Mexico exemplified the contrast between the man from Passau in Bavaria and most of the rest, when the championship leader took an early lead and wasted no time building a gap. Meanwhile, the young hot shots who have vied for Weissach’s attention and championship honours all year were dropping bodywork and running miles beyond track limits to ultimately slow each other down and finish well off the pace.
Holding on to positions by cutting corners and chicanes is amateur stuff: they could all do with watching how the champion brought his third title home. It was a surprise that the race director did not pull them up a bit harder. I guess that is probably fair enough in the title decider for a one-make championship but, if drivers knew they would be penalised for running off track and gaining an advantage, then they might drive accordingly.
Ammermüller is now just two races off a new record of wins in the series and has matched René Rast for total championships won. Four would match Patrick Huismann and five would set a new benchmark. Onwards and upwards, Michael.
Porsche Supercup renews F1® contract to 2022
Porsche recently renewed its contract to run Supercup races as part of Grand Prix weekends up to and including 2022. “We’re proud to forge ahead with this close and long-established partnership,” said Fritz Enzinger. “Formula 1® offers an exclusive setting with a unique flair. This fascination and high media importance represent an ideal overall package for our racing series.”
Supercup has been part of F1’s support programme since its debut season in 1993. Famous and fashionable circuits such as Spa-Francorchamps, Monza and Monte Carlo are regular fixtures on the racing calendar of the international one-make cup. Drivers compete in 485 hp Porsche 911 GT3 Cup cars: the racing vehicles are technically identical, as are the tyres and the fuel, guaranteeing equal chances for all.
“We are pleased to extend our long-standing partnership with Porsche for a further three years,” said Ross Brawn, F1’s Motorsport Director. “This one-make series provides some of the most spectacular racing of any series and contributes significantly to the show that’s on offer over a Grand Prix weekend. Furthermore, in the thirty years during which it has run alongside Formula 1, the Porsche Supercup has provided an excellent launch pad for many drivers who have also made their mark in international races at all levels.”
Porsche works driver, Earl Bamber, is so far the only Supercup champion (2015) who has gone on to win a World Endurance Driver’s Championship title (2017), although 2014 champ, Nicki Thiim, did win a World Endurance GT Driver’s Championship title with Aston in 2016.
René Rast was one of the most thrilling Supercup champions to watch. He has gone on to win the 24 Hours of both Spa and the Nürburgring, as well as DTM titles in 2017 and 2019. Double champion, Richard Westbrook (2006/7) went on to win the 2009 FIA GT2 championship, while 2001 champion Jorg Bergmeister won the 2003 Daytona 24 Hours and the 2006 Rolex Grand-Am championship.
In recent years, the Supercup series has become a bit of a proving ground for Porsche Juniors, with Sven Muller winning the 2016 title and Dennis Olsen running Ammermüller hard in 2017. I like to see cut of the Juniors in Supercup, but it does give me a thrill to see a proper gentleman-racer-with a-day-job like Ammermüller take the title. His trademark speed and class is what Supercup is all about. What a great job.
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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