[AFJuvat]

This is all supposed to be satirical - nobody take it too personally.

356 – “Maintaining the Tradition” 356 owners can tell you, in painful detail every aspect about their car and when it was produced. 356 owners can recite from memory, the VIN, chassis, and engine numbers from their car, and if they are original. Due to years of practice scrounging obscure, hard to find, long out of production parts, 356 owners feel right at home in junkyards, old barns and other places old cars come to rest. Every 356 owner tooling along with his driving hat and gloves has a near sexual fantasy of finding a forgotten, original Carrera in some desolate place and picking it up for pennies on the dollar. 356 owners meticulously restore their cars to showroom condition to make a good showing at the next PCA meet. When the total restoration bill is added up, it usually exceeds the GNP of some small African countries. 356 Owners tend to be the friendliest of all the Porsche Owners – as they have been too busy trying to find the correct beehive taillight to get involved with inter-model squabbles.

911 - “Defenders of the Faith” Firmly believing that they own the one “true” Porsche (except when 356 owners are around), they look down on all others as inferior, overpriced Volkswagens or Audis. 911 owners will spend thousands converting their car to look/perform like a newer/faster model even if is costs more than if they had bought the actual car they are copying. 911 owners, amongst themselves will debate the virtues of their fuel system and/or tail and its superiority to another 911’s configuration. When driving another car, 911 owners get confused and suspect vehicle malfunction if the ass end of their car doesn’t slide out behind them in a curve. All other Porsche owners claim to loathe 911’s and their owner’s haughty attitudes, but secretly hope to own a 911 themselves.

914 – “The Red-Headed Step-Child” Long scarred by the stigma of not owning a “Real Porsche”, and subsequently being told that their car is, in fact, an overpriced Volkswagen, 914 owners are forced to overcompensate for their implied inferiority complex by having the ability to tell you anything and everything about their car – and if you own a 914 too, everything about your car. 914 owners will debate for days on end the pros/cons of: fuel injection vs. carb, hood badge vs. no hood badge, hydraulic vs. non-hydraulic lifters. Possessing an engineering ability rivaled only by “McGyver”, they can, with 2 tuna cans, some wire, and a few rubber hoses restore a non-running engine. 914 owners either spend, or aspire to spend countless man-hours and thousands of dollars improving the engine and suspension to something close to 911 standards – even if it costs more than what they could have bought a 911 for. A 914 owner is happiest at the track giggling manically as he passes a 911 – at that point, all is right with the world, and the only blots on the horizon are rust and the odd dropped valve seat.

928 – “The Money Pit” 928 owners feel themselves the luckiest individuals in the world, as they have found these very expensive sports cars and picked them up for pennies on the dollar. 928 owners can be identified by sound in most Porsche repair shops – they all tend to say something along the lines of “(insert large dollar amount here) to fix (insert relatively trivial part here)! You’ve got to be kidding me, I only paid (some number less than $10000 here) for the car.” All 928 owners secretly compare themselves to Tom Cruise in “Risky Business” and have at least once danced around their living room in a button-down shirt, briefs, and ray-ban sunglasses to “Old Time Rock and Roll”.

924/944/968 – “Sports car on a Budget” The “Wetheads” all unite in the “us vs. them” struggle with the 911 crowd. Wetheads are divided amongst themselves between the crowd that maintains the car to point of near obsession, even though the value of the car was exceeded long ago, and the crowd that firmly believes that the engineers didn’t know what they were doing and that several doctorates in engineering can be overcome by low-cost, bolt on performance modifications or quick DIY maintenance techniques. The end result is usually severe engine failure, after given the repair bill, said wethead gripes about shoddy engine design and bad engineering, and of course, then goes out looking for yet another wethead car.

AFJuvat