Gina Purcell
Oxford, UK
It’s a miracle!
The spirit of Ferry Porsche himself gazed down benignly upon my humble SC and healed her ailments in a blinding flash of heavenly Stuttgart light! Of course, it didn’t quite happen that way, but a couple of things on my long list of jobs to be urgently sorted have ‘self healed’ – or have appeared to temporarily.
The simple solution has been some recent use of the car. The first thing that cleared was an annoying pull to the left under braking, which appeared after the restoration work. My presumption was some leftover problem from the brakes being off the car for four months, with some slight corrosion pushing the pads out – a common air-cooled 911 affliction. Some good use has put that right, with Steffi now pulling up nice and straight under deceleration. The temporarily cured ailment seems to be the idling speed. On start-up from cold, idle speed was 1,400rpm, only reducing to about 1,250rpm when warm, which was quite embarrassing when I was stuck in queues of traffic in towns. Any such goodwill shown to an old classic Porsche by fellow drivers and pedestrians can quickly evaporate when the motor is revving away at the traffic lights. It’s all seemingly fixed for now, so ‘use it more or lose it’ is my new mantra.
Other items on the list are a driver’s side headlight out of adjustment, a gearshift knob that wants to pop off the shaft during spirited driving and the air hoses that run over the engine have some small splits, so require replacement. I just missed out on a recent batch order for the Classic Retrofit air-con unit, but when that arrives it’ll be a good time to mop up all the odd jobs in one hit, plus a service as well.
Under the ‘any excuse to get the SC out’ banner, I hatched a plan to capture the farewell flypast of the recently retired RAF Tornado aircraft. After analysing the flight path I saw they were going to pass nearby my village, and I had planned to photograph the trio of Tornados passing over Steffi. Disappointingly they took a path almost a mile from my location flying fast and low, but I didn’t feel too bad; the chap who had selected the same vantage point as I had was an ex-tornado pilot, and he was clearly entitled to his profoundly deeper sense of disappointment. Anyway, after that bombshell I went for a long drive and took the accompanying photos for this column instead.