“If you start listening to other people, then you wind up building something like other people would do. so if you just start with a clean place on the floor and do it the way you think it should be done; if it works it’s all yours, if it doesn’t you only have one person to blame.”
It’s easy to dismiss replicas as “not real Porsches” – they’re not! But Chuck Beck has been building his “fake cars”, as he calls them, for over 35 years now. And he’s built for OEMs. And he’s raced cars. And his son races. He’s the real deal. And he knows how to build a car – from scratch. The fact that you can get one of his 904’s for less than a “real” 993 right now – what an amazing value! And he’ll put any motor you’d like into it – from the original four cam four cylinder motor up through a water-cooled GT3 engine. He often “engineers for overkill” – evidenced by his Lister replicas that occasionally have 800bhp!
In an era of disposability and easy-as-bitcoin here today, gone tomorrow…Chuck Beck’s work is a reminder that genius is still around us. And he is still building amazing cars. By hand.