It's Too Late, Baby, It's Too Late
I woke up this morning to an email from my pal, John Marks, about an utterly splendid car with a splendid provenance that, of course, is going for more money than I could possibly afford.
With several hours left, bidding is already over $150,000 for this early 911 for which a respected architect paid just under six grand back in 1966.
It's a no-stories, no-excuses short-wheelbase car --- absolutely unpleasant and slow to drive by modern standards, and best thought of as a hot-tempered take on a VW Beetle. Yet no variant of the 911 since has shown the purity and perfection of Butzi's original design the way these early cars do.
Sure, $175,000 or whatever it will eventually fetch (I was almost bang-on at $175,100! I SO SMART! S-M-R-T! --- jb) is a lot of money, but that doesn't even put you into a perfect 993 Turbo nowadays. It would be the perfect car for lazy afternoons in Laurel Canyon or Napa. Think of that obnoxious Nicholas Cage quote: "I've been in L.A. for three months now. I have money, I have taste. But I'm not on anybody's "A" list, and Saturday night is the loneliest night for the week for me." God only knows if a SWB 911 could fix that --- but it couldn't hurt.
The annoyance for me is that I deliberately passed up the chance to buy a dozen air-cooled Porsches when I was younger. Stuff like very solid 3.2 Carreras for fifteen grand. Now the rising tide has lifted all the boats beyond my reach. How about thirty-grand plus for a fright-pig 1976 911S Targa, probably the worst air-cooled 911 ever made? I paid just a touch under thirty grand for my 993 Carrera 15 years ago; cars like it are fetching sixty Gs now. Guess that's what happens when the market decides that two things are valueless: the current Porsche lineup, and the US dollar.