It’s finally time. From 8 -10 June 2018, Porsche is celebrating its 70th birthday with its first international Sportscar Together Day. Join Porsche, sports car drivers, friends and fans as we celebrate with events around the world.
We will see an amazing array of events throughout the Porsche world. For more information, we’ll continue to update the links below:
When Porsche brings the full quiver of RS models to the Isle of Man…we have to ask whether it can get any better? Add in a new Ducati Panigale to boot? Wow. Just wow. With any luck…our Vintage DE Days coming up at Thompson Speedway on 5/28 and Palmer Motorsports Park on Saturday, 6/16 – will get us all a little closer to remembering back to the great cars that have built the legend we love called Porsche. If you had the perfect set of cars in the perfect place, what would they be?
We had a great time and a great turnout at the tech session at Porsche of Warwick in Warwick, RI on April 21. Huge thanks to Dennis, David, Kirk, and the entire staff at Porsche of Warwick for what was clearly a well-thought-out and wonderfully hospitable event. Thank you! And thanks to the nearly sixty members who came out to enjoy some rare sunshine, great cars, and great conversation!
911 Targa on lift
991 GT3 RS PCCB brakes
1958 Porsche Speedster
1958 Porsche Speedster Interior
2018 Panamera e-Hybrid 2.9L engine is like something from Star Wars
Audrain’s 930 Turbo in a fetching green came out into the sunshine
Dennis Rochefort discusses Porsche’s electric future in our Tech Session at Porsche of Warwick
The lucky winner of a $1000 car detailing kit encased in custom Porsche travel kit luggage
Attention – high voltage ahead
964’s look great in green
Classic green and white
Paint-to-sample GT3
A unique way to show all the new features of the Porsche Macan
We had close to sixty members come to this tech session – thanks everyone!
Porsche Classic parts and fluids were on display and all three issues of Porsche Classic catalogs were given out – great swag!
Porsche’s LED lighting has a very unique shape
A RUF turbo is in for service
The 991 Targas are amazing looking cars
The X51 optional power kit turbo for the 991 Carrera S was on display – +30HP!
70 years!! Episode 6 of 9:11 Magazine shows the highlights from SEVENTY years of Porsche sports cars. On June 8, 1948, the first car bearing the name Porsche made its debut: the 356 “No. 1” Roadster. A journey in time through seven decades and into the future, from the forefather of the 911 to the Mission E. The best of “70 years of Porsche sports cars.”
What happens when you build a car that is so good that, within the rules, you dominate the field? That appears to be exactly what Porsche did with the 919. 20 Pole-Positions, 17 race victories, 6 World Championship titles, and three overall victories at Le Mans. When you’ve won big, what do you do for an encore?
You throw out the rule book and remake history, of course. Porsche appears to be gunning for the all-time record books now. Think Stefan Bellof’s virtually unassailable Nürburgring time of 6:11.13 in 1983 (also set in a Porsche, a 956). Think of the 1:05.786 set at Laguna Seca by veteran scuderia test driver and Le Mans winner Marc Gené, behind the wheel of the Ferrari F2003-GA in 2012 (site of this year’s upcoming Rennsport Reunion V…).
What can the 919 do when it’s let completely off the chain, given better ground effects, and a wing that would be illegal in normal WEC spec? I don’t know about you, but I’m eager to find out.
UPDATE 4/9/18: the first record to fall – Spa Francorchamps
“Porsche works driver Neel Jani lapped the 7.004 kilometre long Belgian Grand Prix Circuit in the Ardennes mountains in 1:41.770 minutes. The 34 year old Swiss has beaten the previous record by 0.783 seconds that was set by Lewis Hamilton (GB) at the wheel of a Mercedes F1 W07 Hybrid. Hamilton’s lap of 1:42.553 minutes dates back to August 26 in 2017 and secured him pole position for last year’s F1 race. Jani achieved a top speed of 359 km/h and an average speed of 245.61 km/h on his record lap that he started at 10:23 hrs. Ambient temperature was 11° Celsius, track temperature was 13° Celsius.”
“Neel Jani: ‘The 919 Evo is brutally impressive. It is definitely the fastest car I ever drove. The grip level is at a fully new dimension for me, I couldn’t imagine this amount beforehand. The speed on which everything happens on a single lap with the 919 Evo is that fast that the demand on reaction speed is very different to what I was used to in the WEC. We are not only faster than the F1 pole from 2017. Today’s lap was twelve seconds faster compared to our WEC pole position from last year! We have had three very intense days at Spa. Today I knew on the very first lap in the morning that the car’s performance was super. The race engineers did a great job setting up the car and the Michelin tyres are sensational. A big thank you to Porsche for this experience.’”
Who else would even think to do this other than Porsche? There will be more to come…
As if you needed further proof of the fact that interest in old Porsches is very high still, look no further than the fact that the prime parking spots for the next Luftgekühlt event – one that doesn’t even have an official location beyond the city of Torrance, CA – sold out in 15 hours! General admission tickets are still available, luckily. But I’d bet even those will get scarce. One of our very own covered last year’s event and he’s on track to cover it again for us this year, too. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for us this year!
[ by Sterling Vernon ]
Cryptocurrency, blockchain, digital currency – other than the wild value swings that could theoretically fund auto purchases, why would Porsche be integrating blockchain into their products? I think it all comes down to trust. You trust all of the folks involved in car transactions, yes? Not usually. Used car salespeople have gained a pretty negative reputation. I’ve been swindled a few times, I’m not proud to say. How can blockchain help?
At it’s core, blockchain is really just a way to document a chain of information such that you can’t modify any of that information after the fact. You can’t lose things. You can’t fake a record. And you can quickly get the entire history of whatever is being documented. This might be a record of a piece of currency passing through many hands via transactions. It might be a car part traveling from the original OEM manufacturer through distributors and suppliers before it gets installed on your new GT3. All of these parts, the cars themselves, and, yes, the currency we use to buy the car – all have a rich history that is usually nearly impossible to know. And even harder to trust.
If you’ve ever bought or received a CarFax report, you know that it tries to create a sense of trust that you know a car’s history. You also know that it can be wildly inaccurate. They miss many things – the mileage records are often incorrect. They report only the incidents that have been reported through insurance, et cetera, et cetera. Now imagine your car had a magic book in the glove compartment in which everything about your car was recorded and stored. Every oil change. Every repair. Maybe even ever time you started it. And none of that info could be altered. Someone wanting to buy your car would have a perfect record of the use of your car on which to make an informed purchasing decision. It’s a huge change to how things are currently done.
It’s not perfectly clear how Porsche will be rolling out and using this new blockchain (or DLT – distributed ledger technology), but I think they would be crazy not to include the service history of the car in the record. It will be interesting how much driver-related history gets stored in there, too. Privacy has been dead and buried for a long time, folks. I’m sorry to say that it isn’t coming back anytime soon. We might as well get ready to embrace the new normal and try to share in the benefits. Porsche is clearly trying to do just that.
Don’t really get blockchain yet? Here’s a quick primer on bitcoin written by one of my favorite content writers (Dan and I used to work together at Sapient Corporation in Cambridge)
“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.