DESERT STORM
Makellos builds a sand-surfing 911 SC.
Ocotillo, California, just north of the Mexican border. With just a few weeks to go before its debut at the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the team from boutique Porsche sales and service centre, Makellos Classics, is putting the finishing touches to a new build in its San Diego workshop. As restorers across the United States buff mirror finishes into custom paint jobs, niptuck hand-stitched interiors and load cars onto trailers, Makellos manager, Matt Kenyon, has other ideas.
In the distance, a forty-year-old 911 SC is kicking up rock-filled rooster tails and vast dust clouds to the thrap of a hard-revving flat six, the car’s retro-liveried body near permanently reined in by armfuls of opposite lock as it bounces across the desert landscape. With the clock ticking down to its unveiling at the show, Matt’s priority isn’t just making his air-cooled classic look like the rallybred 911s that inspired it. This car has to perform, too.
The smile on his face when he returns to Makellos says it all. “Shock tuning is never a chore,” he beams,
lifting himself out of the cabin, “but this? Taking this car off road is the most fun I’ve ever had in a 911!”
Of course, Porsche’s history away from asphalt is as prolific as its reputation on it, and not just as a result of its relatively recent forays into the world of sports utility vehicles. The 911 had been designed to cope with the demands of every owner’s life – this was, as Ferry Porsche once said, “the only car you could drive on an African safari or at Le Mans, then to the theatre or through New York City traffic.” With the right parts and knowledge at your disposal, a classic 911 can chase podiums wherever you point it.
At the hands of star drivers, Peter Falk and Herbert Linge, the 911’s fifth-place win at the 1965 Monte Carlo Rally kick-started an air-cooled off-road lineage which would go on to include the highly successful 1984 Parisdakar-winning 953. Six years earlier, when Matt’s 911 was rolling out of the main dealer showroom and onto the driveway of its first buyer, Porsche fielded a pair of SCS in the East African Safari Classic rally — all 3,000 miles of it. Both cars reached the finish line. Clearly, mud, dust and rocks are part of the flagship Porsche’s DNA.
These 911s might be familiar to Matt and the Makellos team, but as far as building one was concerned, a safarispec SC was a departure from what the company was used to. “We started the business in 2014,” he explains. “My father was collecting air-cooled Porsches and, when I graduated college, he wanted me to start selling them. Consequently, I did as he wished and, before long, we found ourselves buying more classic 911s. Eventually, this activity expanded to include restoration work and the occasional custom build. With this SC, however, we wanted to work on a project different in nature to a typical 911 recommissioning or restomod.”
THE SHOW MUST GO ON
The donor had been a lucky find. Taking the form of a straight and solid early European-market SC in Guards Red and wearing only mild scars to show for its 80,000 miles on the road, the car bypasses the usual body repairs — a useful shortcut when only four months stood between purchase and a star turn at the SEMA Show. “We’ve built it to safari rally specification,” Matt continues, “but in truth, it’s more of a tribute. I saw what
other Porsche specialists were building at the time, much of them turning out the same style of 911, and had my own ideas about the kind of car I wanted to see at the end of the project. My team were really excited about it and we had a lot of fun working on the car.”
Starting with a solid shell might have saved on restoration time but, with plans to build something that could actually be used off road, the chassis had to be heavily strengthened for rough terrain. The front shock towers are standard, but now braced, while Custom Fab welded a substantial half-cage into the cabin, further reinforcing the Rsr-style gusseted shock towers needed for the swap to coilovers. It’s a belt-and-braces way to get peace of mind, as Matt explains. “The idea was to take out the weak points, which we knew about from other builds. With what we wanted to do with the car, the shell needed to be as strong as possible. Ultimately, I wanted the driver to tackle inhospitable terrain and have as much fun as possible without having to worry about reliability or the ability of the chassis to cope with what was being asked of it.”
The body is lifted around four inches further from the surface than factory specification. This brings the Makellos build to a height similar to the aforementioned 953’s ground clearance, a characteristic achieved through the appointment of fully adjustable KW Clubsport coilovers with rally-spec valves. The front end features a 935-style setup lifted from the Tarett Engineering parts catalogue. It’s a bolt-in aluminium kit which replaces the entire cross-member, control arms, spring plates and anti-roll bars, offering flexibility needed for the unusually tall ride height.
Sadly, you’ll need a socket set to get a glimpse of many of the car’s most interesting engineering tweaks — the underside is shielded from rocks and ruts using front and rear undertrays and skid plates, not only to protect
the engine and transmission, but also the suspension reservoirs at the back. What’s more obvious is the Magnus Walker series Fifteen52 Outlaw 003 wheel in each corner — a homage to the centre-lock five-spokes carrying the 917 sports-prototype and 911 RSR 3.0. In Matt’s application, the fantastic five-spokes are wrapped in safari-friendly Pirelli Scorpion K-gravel tyres.
“The Tarett kit was fairly straightforward to set up,” says Matt. “Thankfully, we didn’t experience alignment issues from the raised ride height. Moreover, while this particular Porsche is configured for off-road use, it’s proved to be a blast on-road. Plus, the serious suspension upgrades mean the car out-handles most 911s on the public highway!”
Being a European SC offered a power advantage from the get-go, and the three-litre boxer was in good enough shape to keep. It’s pretty much in a factory state of tune, though now runs billet 964 camshafts to broaden the power band right up to the redline. Additionally ,the fiery flat-six breathes through a rorty Custom Fab centreexit exhaust. Matt kept the stock 915 transmission, but swapped to short-ratio second, third and fourth gears better suited to low-speed dust-churning, then added a Wavetrac limited-slip differential. Sharp responses and long-distance rally-ready durability were the priority, rather than overstressing the drivetrain with the kind of large power increases most tuners chase.
AIR METAL
“During testing, we found the factory intake system wasn’t up to par,” he tells us. “We’ll be replacing it with a unit from Unique Metal Products, a company known for producing filtration systems with supreme dirt-sifting abilities. That’ll mean the car can breathe easier and will allow us to do the same every time the car goes out!”
Instead of mimicking one of the oft-aped factory liveries, this SC’S bodywork is loosely based on the distinctive red-on-white design Team Belga and Robert ‘The Droog’ Droogmans campaigned on a 911 SC RS in the mid-1980s. The distinctive graphics of that car, however, serve as a starting point, rather than forging the template for a replica, mixed as it is with an early ducktail, a roof rack and updated with Raven S LED headlights manufactured by Porsche exterior lighting
specialist, 9Eleven. After all, if you want to make it out of the desert in one piece, good lighting is something of a necessity.
You’d get a comfortable drive home afterwards, too. Reckoning this bespoke SC would work best if drivers weren’t having to rely on a trailer once they’d finished carving up the nearest dust bowl, the car’s cabin is relatively luxurious for a 911 seemingly built for rally stages. Indeed, the Makellos team managed to find a roll of fabric with a micro version of the famous Porsche Pasha pattern — colour-matched to the red of the bodywork — and applied it to Recaro seats (loaded with PRP safety harnesses) and 964 RS America-style door cards. Yep, despite the roll cage, Sparco quick-release two-spoke steering wheel, Rothsport Racing quickrelease boss and 917-style wood knob atop the Wevo short-shifter, this SC is still compliant enough to use as a commuter car — as long as you’re okay with off-road tyres and the attention of other drivers, of course.
Having made its debut at the SEMA Show still caked in mud and dust, and with the finishing touches underway, Matt promptly advertised the car for sale. For those who missed out, Makellos announced its plan to offer safari-style conversions as a 911 tuning package based on what the team learned putting this example together. “Safari 911s are becoming popular in North America. It’s important for us to offer an option for our customers,” he says. “We’re dialling in the suspension and looking at what we’ll do with the next build. This one has resulted in an astonishingly good car and has generated good exposure for the business. Best of all, it’s perfectly suited to drivers who like to pilot their 911 aggressively, but fear doing damage to an air-cooled classic in stock trim. There are plenty of these owners out there, many not realising the true performance potential of their Porsches through fear of generating a large repair bill.”
Our favourite manufacturer put down strong foundations when it made all-weather, all-terrain capability a part of the 911’s design brief. Almost sixty years later, this particular grin-inducing coupe’s ability to run rings around modern SUVS shows, perhaps, we haven’t seen its limits just yet.