Weekly Motor Fix: air-cooled madness

4 April, 2016

I’m not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, to make a song and dance about the price of air-cooled Turbo Porsches, but something extraordinary has just happened.

Yesterday, I searched 911 Turbos for sale in New Zealand by highest price. Sitting atop this list was a very tidy-looking 1997 993 911 Turbo listed earlier that day — for $299,990.

Yep, $300,000 for a 19-year-old car. Next car down, for the same price, was a 2013 991 Turbo S. Faster, newer, and, quite simply, better.

I logged back on this morning just to make sure my eyes didn’t deceive me, but the car was gone — no longer listed. Maybe I’d dreamt that the asking price of these fabled air-cooled Porshes had popped up to this simply ridiculous level? Luckily, I’d taken a screenshot of the listing to post on Facebook.

Check out the comments in the post we published on New Zealand Classic Car‘s Facebook page here: 

Ummm, wow.

So I figured the dealer must have made a mistake and listed the car for $150,000 too much. I scrolled down through cheaper cars until I hit a purple Boxster trying to convince people it had something in common with a 911 Turbo. Still nothing.

So I called the dealer. The. Car. Had. Sold. For very close to asking price, within 12 hours of being listed.

I’m off to have a lie down.

A second dose of Dash

When the car arrived in Wellington in December 2018 it was duly taken along for entry certification. Vehicle Inspection NZ (VINZ) found some wrongly wired lamps and switches — not too bad — but, much more significantly, some poor welding repairs. As the structural problems were probed more thoroughly, we realized the previous owner’s restoration would not do and we needed an upgrade. Dash had made it into the country but it would take some time and money before he would be free to explore any of New Zealand’s scenic highways.
We took the car to our new home in Johnsonville in the northern suburbs of Wellington and I pored over the car in detail to figure out what was next. There were lots of new parts on the car and a very perky reconditioned drivetrain but the chassis needed serious work.

Lunch with… Jim Palmer

In the 1960s, Hamilton’s Jim Palmer won the prestigious ‘Gold Star’ four times and was the first resident New Zealander home in the New Zealand Grand Prix on five consecutive occasions. He shared the podium with Stirling Moss, Jack Brabham, Bruce McLaren, Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Denny Hulme, Jackie Stewart, and Chris Amon. The extent of his domination of the open-wheeler scene in New Zealand will probably never be matched or exceeded. Yet he’s always been modest about his achievements.