Bringing a 1970s turbocharged icon back from the dead
An unlucky choice of engine builder left this ’79 Turbo as an abandoned garage ornament for more than a decade – but, with the insight of Ninemeister and an injection of modern technology, this race-bred monster is back and better than ever
Motorsport has long been the breeding ground for some of the most important innovations in new cars; not only performance related, but improvements in durability and fuel economy as well, all cutting their teeth in professional racing. It’s a link manufacturers are only too keen to point out when the opportunity arises, but that relationship is rarely as tangible as it was with the 930 Turbo.
This was, and is, revered as a turning point for the 911 – a sizeable step up in performance, ferocious in its power delivery and born out of the development programme for the equally unhinged 934 and 935. If you remember it from its launch, that fearsome reputation as an adrenaline-pumping road car tends to leave a lasting impression.
For Colin Belton, managing director of Warrington-based Porsche specialist Ninemeister, the 930 has become something of a recurring theme. Not only because he’s been working on track-focused builds since the early 1990s, but because this was what first piqued his interest in the brand and eventually became a career, too. It’s an influence that runs deeper than most.
‘Back in 1975 I went fishing with my dad, and on the way back we called in at a service area,’ he recalls. ‘I bought a copy of Autosport magazine, which had a silver 911 Turbo on the cover, leaving two straight black lines of rubber behind as it accelerated down the road. The magazine raved about it, and that was my first association with Porsche. I really remember it.’
Long-running relationships with a marque tend to form exactly the sort of network that puts interesting projects your way, but this car was a fortunate find. The previous owner was an electronics specialist based in Northamptonshire with a taste for pan-european road trips. He’d tracked down a lefthand drive import to make it easier once he got to the other side of the Channel, and wound up with an unrestored Grand Prix White, non-sunroof ’79 coupé, complete with period Martini stripes.
Unfortunately, he’d also run out of luck in spectacular fashion. ‘I found the car in March 2016, via a friend of a friend. The owner lived in a detached property with a small barn at the back, converted to a garage, and this car had been sat inside for 12 years,’ says Colin.
‘He had taken it to a local specialist, who had diagnosed a damaged cylinder head and got as far as removing and dismantling the engine. Then he disappeared. The first the owner knew of any of this was someone phoning to say he needed to collect his car because the liquidators were coming in. He couldn’t afford to replace everything that was missing, so the car languished in his garage until the time came to get rid of it.’
The Turbo had more potential than the outgoing owner really appreciated. Colin admits paying £4000 over the asking price to secure the car, before hauling it back to the Ninemeister workshop to assess the scale of the build. The body was structurally solid beneath the dust but had been separated from its wheels and brakes and came with only a handful of dismantled engine parts – the crankcase, intake system, alternator and fan. It also had some questionable and outdated bolt-ons, including a CB radio and extensive audio system with additional speakers and an equaliser cut into the interior panels.
‘We specialise in the difficult jobs, but the problem with an old car like this is dealing with something that’s a pile of parts. You never know which bits are going to work, and which bits won’t. So we didn’t really know what we were going to do with it at first. We left it covered in dust for a while,’ he tells us.
Finding a new owner turned out to be as convenient as uncovering the car in the first place. The Ninemeister team posted a few snapshots of the grubby 930 on the company social media channels and got a bite straight away. Serhad
Koro, famed for his work with the video game industry, happened to be searching for a Turbo in exactly this spec. So much so that he offered to take on the project without first seeing it in the metal. First impressions go a long way.
Like all good builds, plans shifted as the work got moving. ‘The job really defines mission creep,’ says Colin, chuckling. ‘Our original idea was to sympathetically restore the car and try to keep some of the patina, but it quickly became evident that there was enough rot on the car that we’d have to paint three or four panels. If we’d carried out local repairs then we’d have been forced to remove the
Martini stripes and replicate them, but you’ll never replicate the ageing of the stripes and it could just look awful. We tried not to fully re-paint the car, but in the end we just had to do it.’
The upshot was a reduction in repair work. Serhad opted to have both wings replaced to cure rust issues in the headlight bowls, and the sills and one of the doors are also new. With no sunroof, the cabin had never suffered from leaks and damp carpets, so the floorpan was solid and the
“THE JOB REALLY DEFINES MISSION CREEP, SAYS COLIN…”
corrosion was relatively minor for a near 40-year-old car in a year-round wet climate. But there’s no sense not going the extra mile on a full build like this.
Of course, it snowballed. Having restored the car back to solid metal and laid down the first coat of white on the floorpan, Serhad decided to throw a curveball into the process. Catching it just before most of the bodwork was complete, he opted to fully align the spec with the 930 he’d always aspired to and change the colour to Continental Orange. It’s neither the original hue, nor would it have been an option in 1979, but this is a personalised build rather than an all-numbersmatching museum piece.
‘In my view you don’t go into a project like this with your eyes closed,’ says Colin. ‘Continental Orange is one of my favourite colours, so I knew it would look fantastic. It would have been great if we could have kept that lived-in look, but there was too much that wasn't quite right. If you’re commissioning the restoration of a car that you’re determined never, ever to sell as long as you live then you might as well have it as you want it.’
Artistic licence didn’t extend a welcome to the aftermarket add-ons. Keen to keep the car reliable and usable, Ninemeister built a new wiring loom and fuse board, then codeveloped an efficient electric air-conditioning system using the original decklid evaporator mounts and switchgear. The seats are original, but the leather has been reconnolised to match the new headliner, carpets and replacement interior sections where the audio system had once been. Some of the repair pieces had to be made from scratch.
‘The previous owner had cut a section out of the dashboard for the CB radio, and left-hand drive sections are hard to come by. Everyone wants them to convert later cars to early spec. We had a right-hand drive ’79 in the workshop,
“YOU DON’T GO INTO A PROJECT WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED…”
which we were building as a 935. We fabricated a full lower section for that in steel, to get rid of the holes, and we managed to transpose that work from the right to left-hand drive. That car also donated the glovebox lid, CDI box and some of its fuel system.’
In the background, the team had been steadily sourcing parts to reassemble the drivetrain. One of Colin’s friends happened to have a spare crank and con rods in storage but, with so many of the original parts missing and only a small price-walk to upgrade to something tougher, there was never much appetite to rebuild the 930 to factory spec. Particularly as, being a post-’78 car, it had the intercooler needed to safely extract some extra power.
New pistons and cylinders are par for the course for a project like this, and uprated parts weren’t significantly more expensive than Porsche original equipment. The engine now displaces 3.4-litres using higher-compression Mahle pistons and Nikasil cylinders, and machined heads running 964 camshafts and a ported intake. In turn, it’s set out the groundwork for a K27 turbo, safely nudging the power output up to 964 Turbo levels, put down through the factory fourspeed ’box and limited-slip differential.
‘These decisions are easy to make,’ explains Colin. ‘The K27 is of its day – there are better turbos available nowadays
– but it’s a period tuning item and a perfect combination for a 911 Turbo. We’re running around 0.95 bar of boost, instead of 0.7, with a better wastegate for more accurate control. This car will make 380- to 400bhp all day long, and the K-jet fuel system will support it because it runs so rich.
‘The limiting factor in these cars is the size of the intercooler, so for 3.3 Turbos there’s no point trying to go beyond 400hp. You won’t achieve it. With all 930 Turbos I say take them to 400bhp and leave them there. Put a big intercooler on it if you want to take it on track, but leave it at 400bhp because it will do that all day long, every day.’
Otherwise, it’s pretty much factory spec, though faithfully restored down to the last nut-and-bolt. Having spent most of the last 30 years building 930s, Colin equips them with a slightly stiffer suspension setup to go with the new Bilstein shocks. Anti-roll bars, torsion bars and the 3.3-litre brake setup (upgraded in 1978) are all as Porsche intended. Sevenand nine-inch wide, 16-inch Fuchs wrapped in Michelin rubber are the final components for an authentic – albeit slightly reinterpreted – driving experience for its new owner.
In doing so, it’s keeping a little bit of that hedonistic, flamespitting Seventies motorsport DNA alive and well. A tangible, barely-tamed link to some heroic race-bred machinery that needs little or no explaining.