My Porsche story: the Turbo Obsessive

After leaving Ford, I started to build funds mostly on the back of house price inflation and kids getting older, and on the back of a growing obsession with Wheeler Dealers, I purchased a knackered old E38 BMW 728i and did her up. It was the start of something: a new passion for all things automotive. I started to become a serial car doer-upper, a thinking man’s Mat Armstrong perhaps. Across the following eight years I went through 12 project cars with varying success, all absolute sheds and all of which lost me money but helped me appreciate the motor car more and more.

It was in 2016 when things started to change. A career gamble opened up opportunities I never had before. My serial car-buying obsession turned from simply doing them up to being able to own cars I actually wanted, and after a dalliance with a Golf R (just for a bit of fun), I found myself thinking about the sports cars I’d seen all those years ago on the front cover of Autocar. The car that stuck with me (for its best arse in the business) was the Carrera 4S of 996 vintage – affordable (to me), and to my untrained brain, a proper 911. I still had limited knowledge of the Porsche brand and in typical fashion bought the first car I found, a Slate Grey 2004 C4S. Did I care it had been through 10 former keepers? That I hadn’t bothered to have it inspected? That it made a funny noise? Well I should have, but you live and learn. After some bore scoring and a few gremlins, I was in a position to get something else anyway. Besides, my Porsche obsession had started.

The opportunity to get back into a Porsche presented itself in 2019 when I bought an Approved Used 991.2 Carrera from OPC Portsmouth – still not being a Porsche aficionado, I didn’t appreciate how well-specced this car was with RS Spyder wheels, nose lift and lots of nice leather. However, Covid and extended working from home meant I decided to sell, and using a well-known (but at the time fledgling) online car auction site with their hard-sell ‘no reserve’ tactics, I lost £20k and someone got a very cheap car. Never again.

As Covid restrictions eased and my Porsche knowledge grew, one car kept standing out to me. In October 2020 I took a train up to Macclesfield and picked up a 997 Turbo, again in Slate Grey but described by Sport & Classic, who did the pre-purchase inspection, as the best example they’d ever seen. It was magnificent, and the one car above all else I regret selling just nine months later, when Portsmouth offered me a new 718 Spyder. I was actually getting new tyres put on the 997 when I got the call, and I had that very second to say yes and pay the deposit, so I did. 

They say you should never look back and have any regrets, but the day Steve drove across from Wales and picked up my 997 Turbo is forever etched in my mind. Watching him drive away was one of the saddest days I can remember, and even when the Sypder arrived a few weeks later, I couldn’t shake the feeling of what I’d lost. The Spyder lasted four months, but I made a nice profit (which was actually the first and only time that’s happened on a car) and I took a break from Porsche for a while. Steve wouldn’t sell the 997 back to me and I was in a strop – every other 997 Turbo I looked at just didn’t compare and the prices were going up, which annoyed me, so I bought an E92 M3 instead and ragged that around for six months. 

In the summer of 2022 I added a 981 Boxster GTS to the stable but swapped that for a new 718 Cayman GTS 4.0 in December 2022, and then added a 997.1 GT3 in Feb 2023 because, well, having two cars was the thing to do in my logic. I was like a divorced dad on Tinder, constantly trying to find happiness but ultimately feeling a bit empty. The GT3 was nice but it was a bit hardcore for me, and it still wasn’t a Turbo. After running it for the summer, I decided I HAD to get back into the 997 Turbo world.

After Steve, who still had ‘my’ old car, told me to stop messaging him or he would report me for harassment (or maybe he politely told me he won’t sell it and to stop asking, I can’t remember), I resigned myself to never being reacquainted with my old car and started the weary job of finding another.

Harbour Cars came up trumps a month later, when (and this no joke) a Slate Grey 997 Turbo appeared in stock. I jumped on the phone, didn’t even bother to do any checks, and picked it up a week later. While it wasn’t as high spec or unique as the old one I sold three years earlier, it was still a lovely example. It is now adorned with 9WERKS stickers and is Porsche Classic registered.

I recently decided that having two cars is pointless. I don’t even need one, let alone two, and with all the hardship in the world I feel such frivolity is unnecessary and, when my wife reminded me where we’d come from, it made sense to do better things with the money, so I decided to sell the Cayman.

The 997 Turbo remains in the garage: I have never kept a car for longer than a year, and am hoping the Turbo breaks that record, and by some margin. It is truly a magnificent machine. I expect to bring her out a few times for car meets – there’s nothing like a bunch of middle-aged blokes standing around looking at cars to bring the enjoyment to a summer weekend, and driving to and from them in the Turbo is going to be a pleasure. I can’t wait.