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8 Feb 2011

PATRICK'S CAR


This is or was my friend Patrick's Porsche . I met Patrick in 2003 via this Porsche which is a 1971 911T with the now unloved but very novel Sportomatic clutchless manual gearbox . At the time my 2.7 911 was also a sporto and I read about Patrick's car in the Porsche enthusiast's bible Excellence magazine . I contacted him by email -he lived in San Francisco at the time- and we soon started corresponding . Six months later although he had not ever met me he loaned me the car for a weekend when my wife and I were passing through San Francisco . An amazingly generous act .
Thereafter whenever I was coming to the US --which was pretty often at the time-- I made sure I entered or exited via San Francisco to catch up with Patrick and we had some great runs in the Porsche . The car was most certainly not a garage queen -- it was a daily driver . Patrick used it every weekday to commute to work  right into the centre of the city . He  picked me up at the airport in it and he and his wife did the shopping in it . It had a great patina and a few knocks and scratches but it just kept going -- quickly- when Patrick was driving it . One weekend in 2005 I put my foot down and insisted that we spent a morning cleaning it . Patrick did not own much car cleaning gear beyond the absolute basics so we made a trip to the local auto supermarket and after a few hours hard labour this is how it came up .

Patrick and his wife moved to Europe a few years back and sadly they had to sell the car -- although they made sure it went to a good home where it would be appreciated . We still correspond very regularly and now I travel to Belgium to catch up with him .He's looking to buy another Porsche but it will almost certainly be a more modern model as it will have to stand being parked on the street through European winters .We are off to this year's Le Mans 24 hours in June -our fourth Le Mans together . Amazing what happens when you read Excellence on a plane .

1 comment:

  1. aww, thanks for the nice note. miss the car and even more miss seeing such cars on the road. financially our TCO in running the porsche was less than almost any modern car when you consider the lack of depreciation. and the number of smiles per gallon (don't ask about the fuel mileage of a 200k untouched engine with webers driven hard) was way up there. To work, the grocery store, with a group or on our own barnstorming up and down the Pacific Coast driving is an old porsche is pure pleasure. why would you drive anything else if you have one? (unless you need AC) over here there is salt on the roads and anticorrosion is a must for year-round driving, too bad ... (oh, and polishing an old car too often will strip the paint down to primer in no time, that patina of oxidation is a _protective_ coat ;-)

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