PORSCHE 911 CARRERA 3.2 Club Sport
“The Club Sport is no longer the affordable orphan it once was”
The Club Sport you see here was sourced from the UK by a Queenslandbased Porsche collector and arrived in Australia in 2020. He says he bought it for driving ability first, collectability second, which we like! It has a Euro-spec engine, meaning 170kW/284Nm (or more when you take into account all the CS upgrades). Post-’86 Aussie 911s switched to 91RON unleaded and outputs fell to 152kW/262Nm at the same rev points.
that’s a substantial improvement. As for Australia’s 152kW unleaded Carrera, well… What the Club Sport’s multitude of changes amounts to is arguably the finest G-series (1974-89) to drive, as well as one of the best original 911 driving experiences there is. Without its steering polluted by power assistance and its air-cooled flat-six muffled by too much sound deadening, the Club Sport is everything that purists would want from a rear-engined Porsche. It’s much more of a challenge to drive hard than modern 911s, though its character (of which it has container loads!) stems from the reward in nailing the driving technique required to extract its best. More to the point, though, is that the Carrera Club Sport retains much of the rawness that makes a 2.7 RS such a scintillating driver’s car, while simultaneously revelling in the modernity of its superior gearchange and more intelligent gearing. Talking about both cars in the same sentence is far from sacrilege because the whole Rennsport (RS) engineering philosophy that spawned the original Carrera RS is exactly the same thinking behind the ’87-89 Club Sport. It’s just that it doesn’t wear an RS badge. The Club Sport is a throwback to the early 911’s golden years, yet it is also a celebration of the end of the 911’s completely analogue, unashamedly mechanical third phase before switching to the much more refined and sophisticated 964-generation. In terms of production volume, with just 340 built the Carrera 3.2 Club Sport is a much rarer car than the 2.7 RS (1580 built). And while its global worth remains far below that of its more exalted forebear (2.7 RS values are into the stratosphere), the Carrera Club Sport is no longer the affordable orphan it once was. Values in the UK have tripled over the past 10 years, to the point where the 911 Carrera 3.2 Club Sport commands way more than its period stablemates. And for good reason – it is an absolutely cracking 911, both in the way it looks and the way it drives. ‘Greater than the sum of its parts’ is a description that has lost its currency in modern motoring because these days it’s more about what you put in than what you take out. But it’s a line that perfectly sums up the 911 Carrera 3.2 Club Sport. It combines rarity with driving purity, and in the eyes of any 911 enthusiast that’s the finest Stuttgart gold in existence.