GOLDEN WONDER
A retake with a difference: an impact bumper 2.7 fitted with SC engine and KW shocks. Have we got a crisp package? We bask in the golden glow on Dunstable Downs
Damn these wet leaves! The 911’s back-end twitches, making it hard to tell how the new suspension and steering are shaping up. That’s the penalty of taking the car to a picturesque location for the snaps, though at least up here on Dunstable Downs – Inkberrow Ridge to be precise – I have some tasty bends to ease the car into; just that it’s autumn, and they’re mostly under rapidly defoliating deciduous woods.
I’ve borrowed the car from Long Marston-based RPM Technik. It’s a client’s car – a Mrs Goldfrapp’s, perhaps (in my dreams) – an impact bumper 2.7 from 1976, that’s been endowed with a 3.0-litre flat-six from an SC, and they’ve done quite a lot of work on it. There’s a general trend to make it into a hot-rod outlaw car, witness the lightweight fibreglass bumpers (also featuring on a 911 in Jay Leno’s garage), replica Fuchs wheels, and plastic engine lid with black mesh grille. It puts its money where its mouth is, though, with lowered stance and revised steering and suspension mods. And that’s the main reason we’re on the case, to check out the very latest in KW dampers and steering ratio mods, and put them to the test on the Beds-bucks backroads.
Nothing radical about fitting a fresh set of dampers, you might think, but what’s special in this case is that KW have never produced a set for the Gseries 911s before, where the lower arms are integral with the front dampers. Sheathed in galvanised steel tubes, what you get with KW’S Variant 3 dampers is full compression and rebound adjustability, and they can be fitted to all G-model 911s built between 1973 and 1989. The KW kit comprises spindle housings and dampers, implying that complicated strut conversions with replacement cartridges are redundant, but also that the standard torsion bars can still be used. KW’S tech-speak advises that built-in compression and rebound click adjusters can be adapted from the basic setup, via the dampers’ 16-click notched-wheel settings, according to individual handling preference and driving circumstances. The low-speed compression valve has a 12-click adjustment for enhancing ride and handling characteristics, while a higher compression setting on the front dampers enables more direct steering, and when applied on the rear axle, higher compression damping counteracts oversteer. Automatic valve adjustment allows the individual dampers to adapt instantly in the event of a sudden change in road surface, and, by implication, maintain wheel-to
surface contact and enable more traction from the rear axle without increasing oversteer. That’s what we have here on Goldie and, seeing the shocks installed with the car aloft on the ramp, the advantage of having those adjustable rings for altering the settings located at the lower end of the damper units is obvious. The switch is just the dampers – no 964-style coil-overs; the torsion bars are retained, though they’ve been twisted to lower the ride height. ‘KW have never made a kit for the G-model 911 before,’ Ollie Preston explains, ‘and this is the first kit we’ve fitted.’
Ahead of the installation, all the running gear including anti-roll bars was removed, blasted clean, chromated and zinctreated, and this applied to all suspension nuts and bolts as well. All internals, including calipers, handbrake shoes, springs and brake-lines were cleaned or renewed, and the front arms and undertrays powder-coated. The technician who fitted the KW set is Stuart D’archambaud (…and if you’re going to have a name, at least have one like that!). Chatting in the RPM workshop, Stuart describes the upgrades to the latest KW dampers: ‘KW made them specially for this model, and they provide a bit of adjustment with the notched wheel at the bottom of the tubes. At the front, the dampers incorporate the stub axles, whereas normally most of the shock absorbers we fit are into the old stub axle, in most cases with the adjustment on the bottom of the main stub axle casing, so this is something slightly different, and with this particular one they come as a complete unit. It’s got the same adjusters on the back ones, too. We like to coat them in wax to help preserve them. Most shock absorbers we fit are fixed, so there’s no real adjustment, on some of the older stuff, certainly. It’s a little bit more track-orientated now, and the customer can use it on trackdays like Rockingham, which he’s done recently.’ In view of the attention paid to uprating the suspension and, given its trackday duties, I’m slightly surprised not to see a strut brace spanning the front compartment. Not that I particularly notice its absence on the road, and as Ollie says, ‘it’s just not something that we’ve gone for.’
As 911 buffs know, the basic suspension layout consists of Macpherson strut design, allied to torsion bars at the front, with the telescopic dampers mounted on the lower wishbones, with trailing arms, transverse torsion bar and dampers at the rear – with anti-roil bars both ends. The 2.7-litre cars post ’74 got a 20mm anti-roll bar at the front and an 18mm one at the rear, with Bilstein gas dampers, and stiffer, lighter forged-aluminium trailing-arms at the back replaced fabricated steel ones, while from ’76 – like this car – the front struts were angled more inwards to improve camber adjustment. So that’s all basically the
same. Stuart takes up the case: ‘It has also got new top mount shock turrets, which are fully adjusted, plus a set of standard brake pipes, because once you disturb a copper brake pipe you generally don’t use it again. The sub-frame we take off and blast by hand before powdercoating. It’s got Polybush polyurethane bushings and in front it has stiffer front control arm bushes. With these particular strut legs the stub axle was configured as part of the original leg and the adjuster wheel sits in the bottom, so engineeringwise it’s quite an awkward thing to be doing, adjusting the damping at the bottom. ‘It’s very sensible to go the whole hog if you’re stripping these things back, and it’s a relatively simple job on the torsion bar cars, and it’s generally quite cheap to do the suspension and brake refresh, compared with the modern cars. So, a bit of a no-brainer, especially bearing in mind how expensive it is to strip and paint the body. You only have to consider the vastly reduced number of links down there on a classic 911, compared with the number of parts you have to buy for a 996.
‘All that glisters is not gold,’ as the Bard put it (or, if you must know, the Prince of Morocco said it in The Merchant of Venice), but this nugget is beginning to glow on me. When it first came to RPM a couple of years ago this 2.7 had its original bumpers and Minilite wheels. ‘We got these bumpers through Mark at EB Motorsport, who’s fitted the same ones on another gold car that was for sale at another Porsche specialist a while ago. The rear lid also came from EB, and we supplied the mesh and bonded it on the inside.’ There won’t be a polished grille over the top of it: that’s the “less is more look”. However, the window surrounds are all still chromed, which would excuse or justify similar embellishment on the engine lid grille. When raised, both front and rear lids are supported by an aluminium rod, Rs-fashion, rather than the normal springs that would keep them pointing vertically. The EB Motorsportsourced fibreglass bumpers foster an intriguing look, though Ollie says that they were a bit of a challenge to fit, ‘to make it look right, so the panel gap is decent; it wasn’t as easy as a normal bumper.’ It’s a narrow-bodied car, being a 2.7 rather than a flared-arched Carrera 3, and the stance proclaims that it’s lowered, endowed with these EB fibreglass bumpers, which remind me of similar items encountered in the dim-and-distant from add-on specialist Strosek, which replace the impact beams and shed some 25kg from both ends in the process. In fact, there’s rather more to them than that. According to EB, they’re one-piece reproductions, moulded from the factory’s original 911 SC RS front and rear bumpers. They don’t use standard mounts on account of the smooth external finish, and instead they’re fitted directly onto the body. They cost £860 the pair. Whether they endorse the golden glow depends on how much of a purist you are. More specifically, it is unusual to see the front number plate fixed below the actual bumper and not stuck on the front of it, while the rear number plate lights are little LEDS cunningly housed within the screws that attach it to the bumper. This is tricky stuff: there’s a carbon plate backing
the number plate and attached to the bumper and the two lights are attached to that. There’s more to that than meets the eye. In the event you wish to swap plates, you can un-stick the number plate and pull off the lights and change the number plate without ruining the light installation.
The wheels are known, aptly, as Replica Fuchs Deep-6, acquired from Group 4 Wheels, and finished in the style of the ’67–’68 911R, so they’re unlacquered and don’t have the polished spokes. Ollie delivers a homily on tyre pressures, which is rather overlooked: the Fuchs reps are 6in and 7in x 15s, shod with Toyo 205/55 and 225/50, and pressures are important. ‘Heat from the engine and brakes, and friction when you’re on the track makes the tyres expand, and with all the weight at the back and the drive going via the rear wheels, that makes them awfully warm and increases the pressure, so you then adjust them to the pressure you want while they’re hot, especially because they’re quite tall profiles with a lot of air in them, and when they cool down again, suddenly you’ve got nothing like as much pressure and they’re very soft, which is why you should always measure the pressures when the tyres are warm.’
The quick (shortened) rack replaces the old system, incorporating Turbo arms, in order to improve the steering feel, so it’s about half a turn less from lock to lock compared with the standard rack. All suspension joints and linkages are Polybushed, Next stage will be to install a low ratio crownwheel and pinion in a bid to improve acceleration times. Top speed is relatively academic now, unless you travel regularly on the German Autobahn; performance goals for this 911 are focused on improved acceleration.
It’s a narrow-bodied 2.7, so no flared arches, and it’s fitted with a 3.0 SC engine. Looking inside the engine bay, the engine itself hasn’t received any special attention. However, RPM Technik have fitted an air-ducting system to the fan, as opposed to having a big part for the heater; all that plastic housing normally in evidence has been replaced by the two induction tubes. As Ollie says, ‘it tidies up the engine bay quite nicely, still in the older style, and we’ve done that to two or three 3.2 Carreras as well.’ The seats tend to be relatively high on some of the early cars, so inside the cabin a new pair of classic bucket seats dominate the proceedings. The brief was to lower the actual seating position – golden slumbers alert – and to reduce the height of the seats, the original runners were cut down, welded back together and the new buckets bolted onto them and re-installed in the cabin. The rest of the upholstery is in tan leather, with the pores visible in the hide, and tan nylon velour carpeting. The car comes from the era of opening rear quarter light windows, the thinking man’s through-draught ventilation system before air conditioning.
The detail shots underneath the car’s wheelarches are done, and it’s time for an outing. After all, that is what we’re here for – to see what difference the new shocks make in practice, plus a bit of tweakery in the steering box. So, here I am, sitting in one of the new bucket seats, clutching the brand-new Momo Prototipo wheel. The dashboard is spick-and-span black, and the carpet looks reasonably new. Conversely, there’s a vintage feel to the seatbelt, befitting the car’s classic aspect and its genuine antecedents. As for the comfort of these new seats, there’s
nothing radical about their contours, but they are supportive in the appropriate places, and they’re comfortable, too. I just need a cat on my lap and I’m Goldfinger. Pussy Galore! They aren’t body-hugging, though, more a classic seat with corduroy centres and leather surrounds and corduroy upholstered headrests, and they rather suit the aspirational outlaw image. The rest of the tan-and-beige upholstery doesn’t match the gold body colour, but this is a work in progress and that could change as radically as the damper switch. I juggle – make that “jiggle” – with the aftermarket immobiliser peg (why are these things so infuriatingly awkward?). This one is clearly something that was done a long time ago, and he’s probably got to have it for insurance purposes. Once the little red light is out I turn the key and it fires up easily.
A jaunty wave from the gateman in the small industrial estate office, and off we go, heading for the Chilterns’ up scape of Dunstable Downs. There are enough lengthy straights before we get there to open it up a bit, and it has brilliant acceleration in second and third, and it’s loving to rev around the clock. In timehonoured 911 tradition, it’s being very sensitive to steering input and road contours, and I’m making slow, deliberate movements as I work my way through the 915 gear-shift. Unlike some, this 915 shift is actually very smooth, especially as it hasn’t been rebuilt, with no graunching in the gate, and slots easy to find. I slow right down for a bridge over the Grand Union Canal, and at lower speeds it seems to relish wandering a little, but the quicker it goes the firmer the steering becomes, and it refutes the jiggling effect. It’s a firm ride, too, and the steering is well weighted. On the more major roads, we’re positively scorching, and it pulls mightily well up around 3000, 3500, 4000, 4500rpm, and I have to remind myself that of course we’ve got the SC engine here, in a slightly lighter chassis. The steering is very nicely balanced, responding to deft inputs, and it darts where I want it to go with pinpoint accuracy, although I’m being slightly circumspect on some of these damper corners especially, in the beech woods up on Inkberrow Ridge and snaking through the Dunstable Ups-and-downs. Here, it moves around quite a bit, probably because of the leaves, but also because the tyres have quite tall sidewalls and are relatively soft. It is confidence inspiring, though, and the more vigorously I apply the controls the more I’m getting the golden glow, so, yeah, it likes to be handled positively, with no shilly-shallying diffidence. It evokes a feeling of invulnerability that’s unavailable with standard suspension. As Spandau Ballet put it, “you’re indestructible…” That’ll be down to the Gold, then. It still feels like I’m driving a classic, given its lightness of feel, its dainty fickleness, but it’s reassuring when I lean on it. Sharp turn-in, too: there’s something of the go-kart about it. So, the verdict is that the mods that have been carried out definitely improve it, both in terms of the steering and the ride and handling. It’s quick, it’s lively, a pleasure to drive. Does the Golden Wonder deliver crisp handling? It sure does: couch potatoes need not apply.