RUF TRADING
An ebay purchase proves to be a desirable Ruf-tuned 911SC
Intuition goes a long way when you’re sizing up a prospective project. This is a decision-making process always steered in part by emotion, and a sense that what you’re looking at is an honest car regardless of surfacelevel faults or historical ambiguity. It can, of course, be a route to some unplanned difficulties later on, but filling in those missing links occasionally offers some unexpected bonuses, too. Even if, as Stuart Sargeant found out, the clue is in plain sight.
‘I wanted a bit of a project and this one, randomly, was on ebay with one little picture and a description which only really said it was for sale,’ he tells us. ‘It had no paperwork, but the seller said he’d try to find it afterwards. A couple of days after I’d bought the car, he called to say he had found the service book, which was fully stamped up, and the third stamp was at RUF in Germany. Which I thought was interesting.
‘When I spoke to RUF, they said it would have had a 3.1litre conversion. The seller told me he’d driven the car and it pulled like no other SC he’d driven – and it made sense with the number plate, too.’
Stuart wasn’t going into this unprepared. An oil trader by day, he’s been lucky enough to live out a childhood love of cars through scores of classic performance machinery, but
Porsche ownership came relatively recently. Having owned and restored numerous Lancias, Alfa Romeos and Ferraris, raced an Opel Manta and Hillman Imps, and even counted an Alpine A110 amongst his previous projects, his first 911 rolled into the garage in the mid-2000s. That track-tuned ’68 was as rough as it was influential – he’s owned most of the marque’s early model lines since.
‘Having worked on so many old Italian cars, it was nice to work on a German car and be able to take it apart without everything being corroded together,’ he continues. ‘The engineering behind them is fantastic, and it makes life so much easier. If you have a decent workshop manual, most people can do most things on these cars.’
This car seemed fated to find its way into his hands. Having recently parted ways with a mint condition 968 Sport in 2010, Stuart found himself with the cash to fund a new project and a desire to fill that gap with something air-cooled. Despite the lack of detail in the listing, this ’79 SC was local enough to be worth taking an afternoon out to view. As first impressions go, it got off to a good start.
‘The owner had dementia and couldn’t drive it, so his wife was getting a friend to sell it for them. It was covered in dirt and hadn’t turned a wheel in four years, but I could see it
was really solid underneath. We charged the battery and put some fresh fuel in it and it fired up with the first turn of the key. I put it in gear and it rolled away perfectly, so the brakes hadn’t seized and the clutch was fine. Then I thought I’d really try my luck and put all the lights on, but everything worked. It was just amazing. I had a good feeling about the car, so I made an offer.’
RUF’S engineering input was only part of its deviation from factory spec. The most recent of its three previous owners had kept up his predecessor’s meticulous servicing, but also carried out track-friendly upgrades during his seven-year tenure. Its heater boxes had been backdated to save weight, the brakes were uprated to 3.2 Carrera spec, while the half cage and cheap bucket seats and harnesses suggested that its unusual drivetrain had been put to good use.
It wasn’t only the mechanical and electrical side that spared Stuart from the usual Italian classic car temperament. Most of the bodywork had survived long-term exposure to the British climate, with rot only setting in in familiar spots such as the kidney bowls, around the windscreen and on the B pillars. These were repairs minor enough for him to take on himself, stripping the car back to a rolling shell and fabricating replacement panels before sending the coupé to a friend’s bodyshop in Northampton to renew the factory Guards Red paint.
‘The only complete panel I replaced was the nearside front wing, as it was starting to go around the fuel filler flap and that would have been so difficult to patch,’ he says. ‘The quality of the metal on German cars is like night and day. With old Alfas and Lancias it’s like trying to weld lace, with this one once you’ve cut back any little bits of rot you’ve got great metal to weld onto, and it’s so easy to work with.’
Importantly, the unusual drivetrain was in good shape. Porsche built a handful of upgraded 3.1-litre SCS, to order, before moving to the 3.2-litre unit in 1984 and the process here is similar; larger-bore barrels and pistons, with metering head modifications to account for the extra capacity.
Gearshifts were smooth enough to imply the 915 gearbox had been rebuilt at some point during its 145,000 miles, paired with an as-new Sachs clutch and what appears to be a lightened flywheel. Aiming to avoid issues later, Stuart bit the bullet and took on the hard task of replacing the internal fuel lines himself.
This was no quick process: ‘It was about two years before I properly got it on the road, as a sort of ’75 Carrera replica with glassfibre impact bumpers. Parts on 911s are so interchangeable and I like the way you can either have every nut and bolt from the correct year, or build them how you want and make it personal. This had been chopped around for track day use, so I decided to build it how I wanted it.’
“IMPORTANTLY, THE UNUSUAL DRIVETRAIN WAS IN GOOD SHAPE”
The plan was similar when he came to reinvent it for a second time. Seven years after he’d revived the 911 for a first time, Stuart managed to find a full set of Getty Design lightweight Rs-style panels from another owner who was reverting his backdated SC to original spec. The kit comprises a full set of glassfibre front end panels, front and rear bumpers and is held in place with aluminium or titanium bolts to chip away at its kerb weight. Better yet, they fitted just like genuine panels.
Lightweight fasteners are only the tip of the iceberg. There’s no sound deadening beneath its thinner carpets, the audio system is gone, and the door panels are inspired by the RS. A nod to earlier projects, the 380mm Momo steering wheel was lifted from a Ferrari 308, while the Cobra RS replica seats tie in with the backdated bodywork. Fibreglass air horns and the removal of its electric mirrors and the heavy washer fluid tanks bring the weight down to 950kg – that’s not much heavier than a genuine RS.
The knock-on effect of aggressive weight-saving was a need to re-think the suspension to suit. Everything behind the gold Pag/campagnolo wheels was new or rebuilt at the same time, comprising Bilstein shocks with a mix of stiffer and standard-spec bushes from Proflex. The front end features Turbo tie-rods, bump-steer spacers and a 22mm anti-roll bar, while the rear end has been upgraded to 27mm torsion bars and a 20mm anti-roll bar with adjustable drolinks. Having carefully selected the hardware, Northampton Motorsport set the corner weights and adjusted the alignment to Stuart’s taste.
‘I spent a lot of time researching, making sure it wouldn’t be undriveable and tramline everywhere on the road. So I didn’t go down the route of Rose jointing everything, because it just makes it less pleasurable to drive. On track it’s fantastic but on B roads they can be a nightmare, as there’s no compliance in the suspension. It’s got a nice balance with what’s been uprated, it just feels a lot more planted.’
It’s also perfectly suited to its locality. Follow the compass in any direction from Stuart’s home, and he says he’s found Sunday drive routes from A to B without using any major roads. Firing up flawlessly on the key every time, the SC’S unending lust for life has made it a well-used weekend toy as well as a rewarding project to build.
But it’s also made it less of a leap of faith for a new owner than it was ten years ago. Now with some history to its name, the 911 has recently changed hands and, while Stuart still has some input into the project, it’s a few months into life with a new owner. Subsequent fine-tuning of the driving experience, including the short-shifter he says it always needed, are aimed at readying it for track days and hill climbs in the future. With a tractable chassis, low weight and that shot of extra performance on tap, our gut feeling is it ought to do rather well, too.