911 PAST PERFECT
Prefer your reborn coupes German? Then if your pockets are deep enough, LA-based Workshop 5001 could be the outfit to make your dreams come true. We drive its latest creation: a sublime restomodded 1972 911
LA based Workshop 5001’s restomodded 1972 911 driven in the US
IT PAYS TO FORGET REALITY SOMETIMES, AND today is one of those days. The surroundings make it easy enough. We’re meeting at Trancas Country Market in western Malibu, the sun has a bleached-out movieset quality and the aroma of the Pacific Ocean hangs in the air. Trancas is nothing more than a little shopping centre with barn-style buildings dotted around a central car park, but it became renowned for its Cars and Coffee events where you’d find 959s and F40s parked up next to Gullwings and Stratoses. Real life doesn’t really apply around these parts, but fantasy car culture is everywhere. Why Malibu? Well, if you’re going to drive a hotrodded, air-cooled 911 anywhere then the famous ‘canyon roads’ that climb the Santa Monica mountains are probably the location, conjuring up images of Hollywood icons howling around without a care in the world back in the ’60s and ’70s. Oh, and because the owner of this particular 911, based on a ’72 and created by Los Angeles-based Workshop 5001, lives nearby. Of course. Workshop 5001 is a small operation a world away from Singer, the behemoth of this obsessive, cultish and (is this OK to say?) slightly self-reverential air-cooled world. Workshop 5001’s owner, Marlon Goldberg, is a fascinating character who tells it like it is, has impossibly high standards and believes that each car should be bespoke, its character defined and developed as a cooperation between owner and his team. So there’s no such thing as a ‘Workshop 5001 911’ that can be easily recognised and understood. Bespoke builds have included a narrow-bodied ’72, a 356 B Cabriolet, a barely disguised racer based on a ’74 fitted with a seriously rude 3.8-litre engine, and there are two short-wheelbase cars in build alongside a 930 Turbo.
‘We facilitate people’s insanity,’ he says with a smile. ‘And to be honest, our own insanity.’ You know I said about forgetting reality? Here’s why: a Workshop 5001 bespoke project will likely cost you 1 million US dollar. A mark of 5001’s work is that it has one client already on his second build and who would love to do a few more. At least. ‘I have to keep saying no,’ explains Goldberg. ‘I don’t want to build cars just for one client. It’s not a great business model and it’s cool working with different people with different ideas, too.’ Anyway, this is the fourth full build, an evolution of ‘Number 1’, which was a gorgeous Nardo Grey ’72 with steel wheels, skinny tyres and a fiery 3.4-litre engine. ‘I guess if Number 1 was a GT3, this is a GT3 RS,’ says Goldberg with a grin. Sounds good to me.
The ’72 edges out onto the Pacific Coast Highway ahead. I’m in a 992 Carrera S fitted with ceramic brakes, rear-wheel steering and all the other trick options you might like. It’s painted Racing Yellow. Yet the sparkling new Porsche may as well be invisible. The Workshop 5001 cars don’t do overt drama or huge rims, but there’s something magnetic about the look and the sound, and the Fashion Grey paint might be subtle but somehow intensifies the innate charisma of this fierce little car. Goldberg brakes at a junction and the rear brake lights pulse like a modern car’s when ABS activates. I ponder whether it’s an electrical fault and then realise how stupid
I’m being. ‘Oh, we did that deliberately,’ Goldberg later confirms. ‘We really don’t want anyone rear-ending this car.’
No wonder. Like all Workshop 5001 creations, it’s a labour of love, and Goldberg built the engine himself. ‘I’m always on the lookout for donor cars,’ he explains. ‘I tend to buy them up first and find a customer later… You can’t hang around when the right thing comes up.’ He’s not kidding. Goldberg bought this car in San Francisco on New Year’s Day 2017 having seen an ad on Bring a Trailer. It was a non-runner but everything was complete. The engine came out of an ’86 Targa from Iowa and has been transformed from a sleepy 3.2-litre into a 3.4-litre twin-plug with titanium connecting rods, a straight-cut intermediate gear and a fuel-injection system codeveloped with Michigan-based Kinsler. It produces 318bhp and 380Nm of torque.
The bodywork is all as fitted to a ’73 RS and direct from Porsche Classic (it recently reissued the panels) but with the oil filler from a ’72 grafted in to keep that distinctive feature. Early RS prototypes didn’t have the ducktail spoiler, so the look is faithful to those progenitors, only finished to an altogether higher standard. The chassis is seam-welded and has been strengthened wherever possible. ‘OCD-spec’, as the team would have it.
Beneath all the glossy, shiny things is serious motorsport-spec hardware. Suspension is by three-way adjustable KW Motorsport coilovers, just like you’d find on a Cup car, and the car is controlled by two Motec ECUs. There’s so much more it’s impossible to list and, frankly, rather dull. What I love about the Workshop 5001 guys is that they are obsessed with the small details but don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. They know that all of this stuff means nothing if the driving experience isn’t as perfectly honed as the shell preparation.
So it’s precious and meticulously built. But dropping into the driver’s seat this tiny machine has the timeless simplicity and sense of assured purpose that makes all air-cooled 911s so immediately beguiling. I adore the immaculate pale green interior and the sheer perfection on display everywhere, but mostly I’m just excited to be in a compact, simple early 911. After the nagging sense that the 992’s retro-futuristic interior has a whiff of cheesy pastiche about it, the snug, intimate surroundings are like breathing pure oxygen. My senses feel sharper before the car has turned a wheel.
We’ve left the multiple lanes of the PCH behind us when I finally get to feel what getting on for a million bucks’ worth of hot-rodded 911 feels like. Yerba Buena Road is one of the many that climb and criss-cross the mountains and it’s tight and technical, scorched to a yellowy hue by the sun and absolutely deserted. It really does feel like it was made for an early 911. But there are signs of the raging forest fires that devastated Malibu recently, the hills
‘THE WAY YOU CAN TWEAK AND PLAY WITH THE CAR’S BALANCE AT WILL REMINDS ME OF A 997 GT3 RS 4.0’
charred and apocalyptic and the road surface absolutely ravaged in places. It’s definitely not a road a modern GT3 RS would enjoy, so I’m guessing this car – I’d like to call it Number 4 but the owner is of Asian heritage and so this 911 is maybe better described as ‘The Car with No Number’ – might be out of its comfort zone, too.
Even so, twisting the key and hearing the 3.4-litre flat-six boom into life is an exciting moment. It sets the whole car tingling and buzzing, and the deep, unreconstructed noise is utterly authentic and almost painfully evocative. The first few hundred metres are the usual slightly awkward handshake with an air-cooled 911. Muscle-memory recalling the technique for the floor-hinged pedals, grappling with high steering effort at low speeds and, in the case of this highly tuned engine, trying to be smooth and fast enough with the gearbox to make sense of the lack of flywheel effect and the way revs rise and die so quickly. Even so, there’s immediately a sense of the toughness and integrity suggested to back up the hunkered-down stance and the work I know has been poured into this car.
The structure feels tangibly stiffer than those of other early 911s I’ve tried. Maybe not as immutable as on a modern GT3 RS, but it doesn’t creak or judder and the precision of steering response and the wonderful polish to the damping speak volumes for the attention paid to the basic architecture. It’s like a little billet of aggression and fast-twitch muscle. It’s funny: despite the lavish attention to detail, this car’s personality is rabid and angry and has the focus of a little race car.
It’s an impression backed up by Goldberg’s 3.4-litre masterpiece, which has the classic hard-edged flat-six howl of something like an RSR, dialled back just enough to prevent ear bleeding and underscored by a deranged whine from the straight-cut intermediate gear, and possessing an incredible ability to fling this little car along with almost shocking intensity. The engine is the car, infecting everything it does and seeping into every control, helping you to pick open the road and creating a sensation that you’re able to dictate to the car and, soon enough, that it can almost pre-empt what you want to achieve. It’s not just that a snorting 318bhp rips 954kg to shreds, it’s that the engine, chassis and controls come together in perfect harmony.
There are limits, though. Yerba Buena’s surface only gets worse as we climb; the tarmac has literally boiled and reformed in painfully corrugated sections in places and flows like a petrified waterfall over into the scorched landscape in others. Here the uncompromising race-car-for-the-road set-up is simply too aggressive and the 911’s light-footed accuracy dissolves into real harshness. It’s not really a criticism because even a Phantom would struggle to deal with this stuff on regular roads.
Fortunately, you’re never far from the next pass in this part of the world and we head a little north to Deer Creek. It’s slightly wider, quite a lot smoother (although still broken up in places from sun and fire) and much better sighted. The Car with No Number really comes alive. The steering is simply mind-blowing, the level of detail it provides painting a picture of the available grip in absolute clarity. Now factor in that every last trace of slack has been chased out of the chassis, plus the instant and abundant power from the engine, and you have the pure essence of 911 crystallised into something pretty darn extraordinary.
The way you can tweak and play with the car’s balance at will reminds me of a 997 GT3 RS 4.0. There’s the same connection between throttle and every fibre of how the car responds but in
a more compact, lighter old-school package. The limits, though still pretty high, are more accessible, too. That means you find yourself within that magical zone more frequently. Full immersion isn’t a matter of removing your brain but engaging it – feeling for the limits of front tyre grip, trail-braking to loosen the tail, and acting precisely on the throttle to steer the car through any given corner right on the edge of oversteer but not slipping away. All the while that engine howling and shrieking behind you and the car seeming to exist in this state of permanent optimum slip angle. You know when you watch an old racer float around at the Goodwood Revival, front wheels jinking left and right to maintain the perfect line and rears elegantly scribing a slightly wider arc? That’s this car on a canyon road. On the edge but so composed it feels like slow motion.
Of course, to expect anything less seems ludicrous. This is – and I repeat – a 1 million US dollar car. It should be utterly intoxicating, it should exude a sense that it’ll keep on performing in this way for years and years, it should purify and intensify all the things that make old 911s great. Otherwise… it’s just a very beautifully wrought object. The fact that Workshop 5001 appreciates that the driving experience is so important and spends weeks dialling in the set-up really warms my heart. Even since I drove the Car with No Number, Workshop 5001 has been working on the set-up, the gearbox is being rebuilt with shorter ratios for even more fury and it’s further refining the new fuel injection system. It’s like it can’t quite let it go… Perfection is an elusive goal.
Pulling back onto the Pacific Coast Highway after a day of howling up and down the Santa Monica mountains, ocean shimmering in the afternoon sun and huge pickups mingling with SUVs and the odd Porsche, Ferrari or Aston Martin, reality still seems a distant nightmare. The air is hot and the car doesn’t have air conditioning, so I’m slowly wilting into the seats, but that seems a small price to pay for the memories of this fierce, hard-edged little 911 howling and dancing from one corner to the next, sometimes on three wheels, sometimes sideways, but always in sync both with the surface and whatever I was asking of it behind the steering wheel.
However, a reality check is perhaps in order. Any older 911 in good mechanical shape captivates with detailed steering, the unique sensations of a flat-six hanging out beyond the rear axle and all the challenges and rewards that brings, plus the ever more enticing qualities of low mass and modest dimensions. Would a sweetly sorted early SC on skinny cookie-cutter alloys deliver the same thrills? Would a genuine 2.7 RS blow it into the weeds as a driving experience?
They’d certainly get you some of the way there. Maybe even closer than is strictly comfortable if you’ve just lavished many hundreds of thousands of dollars on a creation such as this. But cars such as this aren’t really about logic. They’re about passion and obsession, about the fever and madness that all of us as car enthusiasts possess to a certain extent. So the question of ‘value’ is almost null and void. I’m sure the owner realises it’s not value in the traditional sense. But as an expression of love for the 911, of seeking out the purest Porsche driving experience, of simply refusing to compromise, it’s a machine we can all admire. This might be the Car with No Number, but for the owner it’s simply The One. I can understand that. I’m sure we all can. ⌧