MEETING THE MASTER
Former Porsche Technician of the Year, Russell Lewis of RSR Engineering
‘Iwent to Isleworth as a general apprentice and went straight into the engine department. Essentially that was George Sneath. He went back well into Frazer Nash days, but he was probably over seventy at that point and the company decided he needed an assistant, someone to learn the ropes. So I became an engine specialist.’
Russell describes how in those days you were expected to learn by watching the qualified practitioners, paying strict attention, ‘absolutely no hands in pockets!’ In the early seventies, AFN was the only dedicated Porsche workshop in Britain so any dealership with a problematic engine would send it to Isleworth: Russell’s experience of the workings and frailties of Porsche’s flat engines advanced steadily. ‘We worked the 356, the four-cam, the 2.7 RS and the RSR, the 917’s flat-12 as well as the turbo 934s and 935s. One of the Middle East potentates used to send his RSR over to us for servicing, but as RSRS ran without air filters, we practically had to rebuild the engine every year because of sand ingress.’ Other memories include some of George Sneath’s unorthodox techniques: ‘He used to tune the wet sump 356 engine on the ground, standing over it with his feet on the exhaust: I can see the thing vibrating laterally across the floor with him on it as he revved it up. Initially we couldn’t test engines we’d repaired so we built a rig so that we could run them up before returning them to the dealers.’ Another memory from the late 1970s is when the 935 racer Moby
Dick came to Britain: ‘The transporter was parked outside the workshop and literally everyone downed tools to go and look at this thing!’
An apprenticeship was five years and for Russell culminated in full City & Guilds and IMI qualifications as a certified motor technician, accreditation by the Technical Engineers Registration Board and by the Chartered Institute of Engineers. ‘After a period shadowing workshop foreman Ken Tolfrey, I was given a ramp and then I was a fully fledged mechanic. It’s very different now.’
In the early 1980s, Russell moved on from AFN, working first for a garage in Kensington which offered ‘much better money and a more concentrated workshop,’ he recalls. This was followed by a brief stint at a BMW dealer, ‘not the same, I didn’t stay long.’ From there he went to Motortune, a Porsche official dealership in Brompton Road where he
stayed until 1990. Whilst at Motortune, he became a grade one Porsche technician (able to work on any fault except body repair) of whom there were only ten nationally at that time, and this enabled him to compete for Technician of the Year, which he won from 1988 to 1990.
Winning the national competition admitted Russell to Porsche’s worldwide Technician of the Year, which he sat at Zuffenhausen. After a fairly gruelling series of tests – six written papers and three practical examinations – he was classed as one of Porsche’s top five technicians worldwide.
That year, Motortune was taken over by Porsche to become a fully owned OPC, though an arcane disagreement between Porsche Cars at Reading, the owners of Motortune’s site, led Motortune being taken over by AFN which by then had the original Isleworth branch and what is now Porsche Guildford. However, Russell did not stay long with the new owners: ‘I had started doing private work under the name RSR in 1982, and my contract with Motortune permitted this as long as I didn’t poach customers. However, AFN would not allow employees to undertake private work, but they had taken on the Motortune workforce on the basis of their existing contracts. We had long discussions and clearly they weren’t going to be able to pay me a salary which matched what I was making additionally from my RSR activity work, so I took redundancy and became RSR full time.’
Initially he had premises at Bagshot before finding a workshop at Hindhead where RSR operated until 2015 when Russell joined forces with South African Dave Barr Saunders
and helped him establish his 911 restoration and service business at Droxford in deepest Hampshire. Approaching official retirement age, Russell has drawn in his horns this year, working on client cars from his workshop in Camberley, but continuing to help out with Barr Saunders on a consultancy basis.
A typical RSR job these days, a yellow 2.7 which appeared well on the way to completion sat in the workshop. The owner did not blanch when Russell told him what full rehabilitation might cost as he had bought the RS years before when tatty 911s were relatively cheap. On the other hand, RSR has never been about body work – that is always subcontracted to a coachwork specialist.
Russell Lewis is the engine man par excellence. For example he compares the modern PMO carburettor set up for 911s with electronic control: ‘PMOS are a great solution: you tell the factory exactly what you are running and the carbs arrive all configured and jetted. All you have to do is adjust idle mixtures and air flows. But for ultimate performance you have to look at a specific ECU. That’s a lot more expensive than PMOS, but it is a much more accurate way of doing it. Take the 3.0-litre RSR with a sprint (high lift) cam: with something like a Motec ECU, with well over 300bhp it can still be driveable right through the range – it just transforms the way the car behaves.’
Tuning at this level does not come cheap: according to Russell, ‘full house’ modifications to the flat-six can cost up to £40,000. He will also work on your gearbox: ‘I always have: the problem with 915s now, though, is that they are all getting old. It’s not just the wear on the synchros, but the cases themselves need replacing, so that can be expensive, too. Most parts are recoverable if you know the right people to ask, which is one way out; a 915 ’box when it’s been rebuilt properly is stunningly good. The trouble is drivers don’t know how to use them: the worst thing you can do is ease the shift as you do with a G50. The 915 with Porsche Synchromesh was designed for racing and the faster you can shift the better it is. Depress the clutch right to the floor and push the lever through. The quicker you can do that, the better it will work. It’s the opposite of the G50. Pedro Rodriguez was one of the greatest exponents – they used to say you could measure his shift time in nanoseconds: Jörg Austin told me that at Le Mans in the 917 he was on full throttle seventy seconds a race longer than anyone else.’
As usual, Russell tends to know what he is talking about. In this case his source is the late Jörg Austin, a Zuffenhausen engineer involved in the later development of Porsche Synchro. ‘He was a lovely fellow. At one time Porsche even sent him over to British Leyland to see whether they could use a
Porsche Synchro gearbox in the Mini. Jörg ended up in the training department at Porsche and we used to have quite long chats with him.’ And adds Russell confidentially, ‘we learned a lot about the 915 and other things which people generally don’t know.’ He opens a file of Porsche engineering memos:
‘These were technical bulletins that never appeared anywhere else either in manuals or in the technical quality information system because they dealt with changes and modifications Porsche had made that they did not want to publicise. Here’s an example: a bulletin on front brake squeal on the 924S: initial advice is shims for which a part number is given. If this fails to eliminate the squeak, it further recommends changing the pad material and if that still does not resolve it, then to fit Turbo pads. Then here is the best part – the bulletin says that if none of these steps works, then the problem can’t be solved: now you’re not going to tell that to a customer are you!’
Russell is not much involved with the (post-1997) watercooled engines. It is a question of price, he says, adding that early evidence of cost reducing design was first apparent on the 993: ‘Porsche had the Japanese time and motion people in and they recommended 10-spot instead of 12-spot welding on the body. That’s why the body flexes: it breaks the glue bonding
the windscreen which is why the windscreen creaks. That was the start of it. On the air-cooled cars I could put my hand up inside the door – no sharp edges, but with the 996, I always managed to cut myself. That said, things did improve: the 997 is better made than the 996.’
One of RSR’S strong points has always been its connections in racing and Russell’s involvement with private teams. When world endurance sports car racing was revived by the BPR series in 1994, he prepared and managed a 968 for a client: ‘We’d tried to get a 964 RSR but Porsche had stopped building them so we took a 968 instead. It was the first of four Turbo RSS made. We had an engine failure at Paul Ricard, and initially Porsche said it was not their fault. However, we were dubious and eventually proved that indeed there was a flaw.
‘When presented with incontrovertible evidence, Porsche did the decent thing and gave us a replacement engine. The company was always fair if you argued your case logically. A rival Porsche client team was going through turbo after turbo. When Porsche carried out an inspection, it discovered the team had systematically removed the cones from the exhausts despite Weissach’s express instruction not to: these controlled back pressure and stopped the turbos going supersonic and so expiring.
‘Motorsport at Weissach refused to have anything further to do with that team. That’s the penalty if you ignore Porsche.
‘Because we’d persevered with the 968, Motorsport even offered us the very first 993 GT2 – we were the first people anywhere outside the company to hear about the GT2. Alas the team owner turned them down.’
In the 1995-6 seasons RSR managed the team which won the Porsche Cup for Historics, competing with a 3.5-engined 1973 RS and a 993 RS. During the 2000s Russell was principal mechanic with another well-heeled Porsche fan who raced a significant team of historic 911s, from 2.7 RSS to a 993 RS plus a Carrera Abarth and a four-cam 356. This fellow was also keen on historic competitions like the Tour d’espaòa or the Tour Auto, and Russell Lewis would accompany him to these events, resulting in some great memories.
He has not done much client racing in the last few years, preferring to concentrate on a handful of air-cooled 911 restoration projects. With family commitments he is also in demand elsewhere. Russell Lewis knows he can always be as busy as he chooses to be: never a man to advertise his services – to find him in Hindhead you used to have to poke into the deeper recesses of Google – RSR’S reputation ensured serious punters kept coming. Today interest in air-cooled Porsches has never been greater: clients might have to fit in occasionally with other things, but they will keep coming.