James May: Raising a glass to Dr Porsche

[Don Plumley]

From the telegraph:

Owning a Porsche 911 is an excuse to drink more beer, says James May

Ever since beer was invented, men have been forming clubs and societies around supposedly common interests as a way of drinking it among sympathetic company. The evidence is all around us and undeniable. Golf clubs are for drinking in and all theatres have bars. The seat of government has several, and I believe the Royal Society has a drinks cabinet, probably in the shape of a globe or the nucleus of a hydrogen atom.

Light aviation, motor racing, tennis, mountaineering, watercolour painting - all these secondary interests are pursued within arm's reach of a foaming flagon. Poetry readings take place in pubs, and the choir of my local church can often be found in the Cross Keys before exhorting the flock to greater piety from scores of Bach adorned with the damning circular stigmata left by a pint pot. Even supposedly insular pastimes such as needlecraft, stamp collecting and building model aeroplanes are celebrated at exhibitions and symposia where everyone gets a bit clattered.

I offer all this by way of explanation. Between last Friday evening and Sunday afternoon I attended something called the Bring a 911 Weekend with a group of mates at the large country house of one of them. Sounds terrible, doesn't it? However, these are all blokes I've known since long before any of us owned a Porsche, and the fact that we now all do was merely the spur to our drinking indentations. I don't get to see them very often, and if running what PJ O'Rourke once called the ass-engined Nazi slot car is what it takes, then that's fine.

So there were no paddock jackets, no Porsche hats, no Nomex and no racing booties in sight: just five old Porkers - a 1970 2.4, a 1972 shell rebuilt almost as a road-legal racing car, a 1980s SC converted to RS spec, my bog-standard 3.2 and a 993-series Carrera 2. We lined them up in front of the house, acknowledged that they looked quite good and then set off on foot through the starless and bible-black rural night to the local juicer. One of our number was seen to be wielding a Porsche Design torch accessory, but we were all too polite to mention it.

Unfortunately, the ventilation blower in my car had packed up, and replacing it is a tricky plumbing job. But since I was among experts I thought I might as well sort out the problem there and then, so on Saturday morning I rolled up my sleeves and dived under the bonnet to ribald encouragement from my old muckers. It took several hours, but this helped me build up a thirst for the day's main attraction, which was lunch.

Before that, though, we thought we might as well go for a drive and compare notes. Why wouldn't you? Within half an hour we were in Wales and thrapping through the hills and valleys, which I enjoyed hugely -despite a certain nervousness brought on by the rearward weight distribution and the knowledge that I have been both sentenced to death in my absence by the Welsh Nationalists (for making fun of their road signs) and threatened with enforced conversion to druidism.

I rather liked the RS conversion, but there's no denying how much more civilised the 911 became as the 993 series, while not losing any of its air-cooled quirks or its essential 911 character, or something like that.

After lunch and a snooze in the garden, it was time to start thinking about the dinner. This had been made the responsibility of the women, so we chaps cracked open a few and decided to clean the cars, as they were covered in dead flies and looking less good than they did on our arrival. This is also a good way of making sure nothing has seized, fallen off or started to corrode.

And so to table, where we could properly reaffirm the great and unspoken bond that has existed between us for more than half of our lives so far. In that time we had all altered greatly - reproduced, changed careers, moved away, gone bust, lost hair. Inevitably, within minutes the talk had turned to the subject of the Porsche 911, and remained there for the rest of the evening, until we all fell over.

On Sunday, I took stock. In fact I wrote down the minutes of the extraordinary meeting of the committee of the Bring a 911 Society. It was decided by majority, but with one abstention, that liquid cooling is unacceptable in a rear-engined Porsche. Members were unanimous in their view that none of them would ever have become good friends with the sort of man who would one day own a convertible 911.

Or one with a Tiptronic transmission.

[tchanson]

Very nice bit from Captain Slow.

Thanks for posting that, Don.








Tim

[onewhippedpuppy]

One of the many things I like about Top Gear, all three of them also have quite the knack for writing.

"Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy" - Benjamin Franklin

[UconnTim97]

Great article, thanks.

[Embraer]

I was going through an issue of Thoroughbred and Classic Cars from 1997 a couple of nights ago (I'm a pack rat)...and I found an interesting/nicely written Porsche spread written by James May.