James Mcgrath
Model 996.2 CARRERA Year 2002 Acquired 2020
Only several months after the majority of the rest of the United States, the snow and ice has finally left Minnesota. This means it’s driving season!
I get a lot of replies to social media posts when I talk about winter ending and driving season starting. Friends in Florida and southern California can’t imagine life as a car enthusiast where the weather prevents you from enjoying your prized ride year round. I’m forever being told to move further south, east or west. Just anywhere but the frigid north that I now call home.
Yet I actually enjoy the four distinct seasons we have here in the American Midwest and in many respects, I get more excited about this time of year than I do for the traditional holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas. When winter recedes and spring arrives, it’s really exciting here. Friends start flooding social media with shots of their first drives of the new season. Some friends surprise their peers by revealing new cars they purchased during the winter months.
Meanwhile, Facebook starts exploding with dozens of car events, for every kind of enthusiast’s taste – Cars & Coffee, Caffeine and Octane, Supercar Saturday, Nord Stern Socials, to name but a few. Naturally, all Porsche car owners are welcome to our little but rapidly growing Porsches and Pancakes group from the Twin Cities metro area.
For the next six months, every Saturday and Sunday morning we have the pick of half a dozen different car shows and meets. Every couple of weeks there’s a craft brewery or other socially magnetic venue that hosts a cars and brews evening to break up the monotony of the nine to five (just one pint per Porsche driver though, no more!). Suffice to say, it’s a pretty exciting time of year.
So with this in mind, I’ve been busy getting Bluey ready over the past couple of weeks for its first day out on the road. Interior mods fully dialled in and the cabin detailed, exterior cleaned and coated. Even my rims are spotless at the moment which, as those locals who know me can attest, is a very rare event. Where some of my friends clean and fully detail their P-cars after every drive, I probably get around to a semi-solid clean maybe once every hundred miles.
Let’s not dwell on that, though. As I hope you can tell from the photo, Bluey was looking might fine on her maiden spin of 2023. Over the next six months she’s going to need more than her fair share of cleaning with the sequence of events I’ve got lined up. Tail of the Dragon and the Smoky Mountains in
July. Check23 (Checked It Out Chicago) in August and then Rennsport Reunion at Leguna Seca CA in late September. That’s roughly 5,000 healthy touring miles right there, before thinking about all of the local car meets and drives with friends. Bring it on!