HOT ROD CULTURE
For a lot of people, Porsches are for tuning – customising, as they used to call it in the post-war Californian hot rod fraternity of the 1950s – and if you own a Porsche of a certain age it’s always been fair game to modify it. As Hot Rod magazine defined the craze in a ’50s editorial, ‘a real hot rod is a car that’s lending itself to experimental development for the betterment of safety, operation and performance.' Check! Whilst my 3.2 Carrera merely blasted the sound waves with a bespoke Hayward & Scott exhaust, the Peppermint Pig 964 was perfectly set up by its purveyors, Roock Racing, and only molested cosmetically thereafter by me. Same with my low-rider 996 Pig Energy, though Porscheshop gave it a minor tweaking when I took delivery. The current ride – a 986 Boxster S – has had the most work done: M030 springs, Cargraphic exhaust, Clive Atthowe ECU remap, Scratch-&-peel spray-wrap and, most recently, a set of Group4 Fuchs repro wheels. Pretty much fits the hot rod bill. But will all that mucking around affect its worth? Rebel without a cause, I don’t much care, and I’m not interested in selling anyway.
Now, though, with values of standard cars gone through the glass ceiling it’s made many folk think twice about personalising their Porsche and, in one or two cases, revert to stock. Because transformations do seem to affect value, unfairly in my book, because if mods are kosher and done right they enhance the driving experience, and in fact everything that fits Hot Rod magazine’s definition. My snapping colleague is a case in point (and hopefully he won’t read this as it would reduce him to a gibbering wreck) but he’d had a number of upgrades carried out on his gen 1 996 GT3, a very wonderful car that he once let me loose with on Zandvoort racetrack. Power was raised, dampers upgraded, including a nose-lift kit, and he used it as it was intended. And that meant it had done 80K-miles by the time ‘a domestic’ obliged him to part company. He got half what it was worth. And that’s a shame because, at 80K, it was barely run in, and given the disparity of spec between all GT3S – from Comfort to Club Sport to RS, a few homegrown adjustments shouldn’t have counted against it. Hot rodding is a personal thing, though, and one man’s embellishment is another’s excrescence. The Beach Boys had the perfect answer to anyone who didn’t dig it: ‘tach it up, tach it up, Buddy gonna shut you down!’