My friend Paul in that there Essex has decided to offer his Porsche 911 3.2 Carrera for sale. I know the car quite well and it is a great example of a modified 3.2 finished to a very strong level. This car is worth your attention if you’re in the market.
He’s just sent me a slightly ‘Friday night’ description, which I will attempt to decipher. Let us begin:
I bought this car over ten years ago with 75,000 miles on it. It came from a well known independent dealer and was my first 911. Straight after my purchase, I fell in with the impactbumpers.com crowd, which led to many road trips and track days all over Europe and the UK.
The most recent of these road trips was in September, to the Race de Remparts in Angouleme in south west France. The classic race weekend in the sunshine reminded me that there are still many classics to own and enjoy, so I have decided to offer the Carrera for sale and see whether it might find a new home.
I have developed and upgraded the car throughout my ownership, so it is now a superb example of an air-cooled Porsche 911 prepared for track days, fast road and touring use. It had a detailed restoration in 2012, when a highly respected Porsche bodyshop (Sportwagen in Great Wakering) took many monies from me and handed me back a beautiful car in near perfect condition.
The complete restoration was documented in detailed photographs. During the restoration, the sunroof, side repeaters, fog lights and headlamp washers were deleted, with the usual rust removal from the kidney bowls and other rust traps. The driver’s seat rails were removed and a lower set fitted to accommodate a taller driver. All rubber trim (except bumperettes) was replaced during the rebuild. We also fitted a new windscreen. All of the car is steel, save for the ducktail and Ruf 935 mirrors. It weighs in 1120 kilograms with a quarter of a tank of fuel.
Soon after purchase, the top end was rebuilt by Autowerke in Norwich at approx 76k miles. It now shows 122k miles and runs better than ever. It has a custom Steve Wong chip, stainless steel Cargraphic silencer with stainless steel Dansk heat exchangers and crossover pipe. I keep it well maintained and the engine power figures show just how strong this particular flat six is, with the most recent dyno run showing 278.5 bhp (LSV in Wellingborough).
Everyone who rides in this car comments on how quick it is. It revs freely to the 6.8k limit, and the low weight of less than 1100 kilograms means it can easily match more modern machinery on track. Being a 1987 model year 911, the transmission is the sought-after Getrag G50. I have fitted poly mounts for even slicker shifting and the clutch is less than 5k miles old.
Handling is super important to me, so the dampers have been upgraded to Bilstein Club Sport spec. Anti roll bar and rear arm bushes are poly, while the torsion bars and anti-roll bars themselves are stock. The car benefits from an expensive Centre of Gravity suspension setup and corner balance. It is fitted with a set of genuine 7 and 8 x 16″ Fuchs alloy wheels, with a set of replica 7″ and 9″ Fuchs with track tyres available as an option. Brakes are standard with upgraded pads. There is no issue with standard brakes and bars on a lightened 911.
The cabin is a nice place to be. I went for a mix of light weight while retaining some comfort for touring, so it has Recaro SPG XL race seats, custom trimmed in leather and Pascha. There is also a rear seat delete and Club Sport carpet setup, but you could reinstate rear seats for kids if you needed to. RS style door cards, a Momo 07 steering wheel and genuine Cocomats add to the ambience. It has an AVO bluetooth stereo, and the main fuseboard has been replaced with a Classic Retrofit blade fuse board incorporating upgraded headlamp relays.
Most of the original lead weight soundproofing has been removed and replaced with Dynamat. The car makes a noise, but in a very good way. Earplugs are not required for long drives! It has a full MOT, immobiliser, loads of paperwork and is ready to go.
I may end up with the car here at mine for viewings and inspections, but there is no room for the minute. Interested parties may contact me and I will put you in touch directly. It will also be up for sale on my Porsche 911 forum at impactbumpers.com and on a few other platforms.
Considering the money invested and recent sales of similarly modified cars, this one is priced at £49,995 for a quick sale – the body restoration alone was a £25k bill so there is value here. Consistently impressive dyno results over the last ten years suggest there is more to this engine than a standard 3.2. Serious buyers are welcome to arrange a pre-purchase inspection.
Ferdinand blogs my freelance adventure with Porsche at the centre. To support the blog or engage with me in other ways, you can:
Original 1967 Porsche 911Rs are few and far between, but a 911R is exactly what Classic Retrofit was asked to look at for its latest “special projects” creation. Having already been brought in to create a period ignition for the exceptional 911R replica being built at EB Motorsport in the UK, the firm was well placed to help the owner of a genuine 911R who sought to remove CDI boxes fitted to the R prototype sometime in the 1970s and replace them with proper spark boxes, as would have been on the car from new.
“CDI technology was not introduced until 1969,” notes Jonny Hart at Classic Retrofit, “so all factory cars prior to this date used earlier ignition systems. In the case of the 911R, the car relied on a Transistor Controlled Ignition (TCI) circuit to manage the ignition coils, running signals from the high-revving distributor through a circuit that stretched the ignition pulse, forcing the ignition coils to charge for longer. This system has a few shortcomings when compared to CDI, which is why most racers switched to CDI soon after it was introduced. However, for an original 911R, TCI amplifiers are correct.
“To recreate the original system, a genuine 911R ignition box was 3D printed and sent to us for reference. We scanned the printed replica and set about having new boxes created. While that was in progress, we created a modern TCI module to fit in the 911R units. Two original Bosch blue coils were sourced to complete the package.
“The finished product is an impeccable recreation of the original Porsche equipment and a perfect example of what our special projects section has been creating for the rarest Porsche factory race cars over our three years in business to date.
“More than 200 CDI+ units are now in circulation and everyone who uses them is wonderfully impressed,” enthuses the Classic Retrofit MD. “Working on unobtanium ignition units for rare race cars, including several Le Mans winners, has been an illuminating spin-off from the exhaustive R&D programme that led to the continued success of CDI+. It’s a special service that we are delighted to offer clients and collectors all over the world.”
Ferdinand blogs my freelance adventure with Porsche at the centre. To support the blog or engage with me in other ways, you can:
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.
Ferdinand blogs my freelance adventure with Porsche at the centre. To support the blog or engage with me in other ways, you can:
EB Motorsport is now offering a full body preparation and paint service for classic Porsche restorations. With a highly experienced spray painter employed to handle car builds and restorations on its own fleet of classic 911s, the Yorkshire-based classic Porsche parts specialist has the capacity to add paintwork for other Porsche enthusiasts to its list of capabilities.
“With so many Porsche projects in progress and quite a bit of paintwork generated by our engineering services and manufacturing plant, we decided to bring refinishing in-house last year,” says James at EB. “Only the best will do for our cars, so we installed an excellent UK-manufactured Dalby spray booth and use the same Glasurit 22-line paint system specified by Porsche. The results on our latest R build have been stunning and we will use the same materials on our RSR Turbo build when it is ready for paint later this year.”
“With the motorsport season in full swing, we are spending a lot of time out racing, so the EB paint shop has the capacity to take on some work for serious customers looking for the best finish,” notes EB’s Mark. “This might include fitting EB body panels as part of a road or race build, or repainting standard cars. Our painter has a huge amount of experience and of course there is plenty of his work here for potential clients to inspect. Workshop slots are available at very short notice.”
Interested parties can contact EB via their website. I have seen the R up close and it is a very special creation – no complaints on the paintwork either.
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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