The Porsche He Wanted Wasn’t Sold in US So He Built One.

When I was young, my mother said to me, “Hey, did you know your birthday is the same as Mario Andretti’s?" I did not know who that was, so I went to find out. I soon became fascinated with him and with motorsports. All my childhood, I followed racing and the Andretti family, and I got really into cars and modifying cars. In high school and college, I started buying Japanese cars that I could afford and modifying them.

When I got my first job, I could afford my first real sports car, a 1999 BMW M3. Then I got a 2001 BMW M3, then a BMW M5. Ultimately, I decided to switch over to Porsche in the early 2000s. I bought a 2002 911 Turbo, and started learning about the Porsche platform and history. That is when I started hearing so much about air-cooled Porsches.

There is a whole lineage of fantastic Porsches that everyone talks about, driven by air-cooled engines, before the company switched over to water-cooled engines, toward the end of the 1990s. So many people told me I needed to own an air-cooled Porsche to really experience what it meant to be a Porsche enthusiast.

In 2017, I sold my 2002 Porsche and bought a 1995 Porsche 911 Carrera, from the last generation of air-cooled Porsches. The amazing thing about the 911 is that Porsche launched this model in the 1960s, and ever since, the company kept refining this single flagship model. So I felt like the last generation of the air-cooled 911 was the most refined, and the most beautiful air-cooled 911 of all.

For me, the joy is about chasing an experience. I asked myself: What else was out there? I came to find out that there was another version of this generation of 911, called the 911 Carrera RS. Very few were made and it was never offered new in the United States. I came to believe that this was the ultimate air-cooled 911 driving experience—more raw, more sporty. Going back to my childhood love for modifying cars, I decided to build my car into a 911 Carrera RS tribute.

I began buying and collecting all the parts I needed—aerodynamic exterior parts, wheels, a number of suspension upgrades. I spent $10,000 on the suspension alone, and added the rear wing. I modified the interior, and I lightened the car, attempting to recreate this 911 Carrera RS.

At this point, I am three-and-a-half years into this journey, and there is a lot left to do. I think of it as a continued pursuit of the perfect, raw, analog driving experience.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text