When I first laid eyes on my 996 Turbo two years ago today, it was in a bit of a sad state. This car has lived a hard life of 90,000 miles, serving as a demo car for a drift racer, and a friend’s track day machine for years after that. By the time I’d determined I wanted to buy it, it had been sitting outside at a Porsche shop in Oakland, California for several months. It was all intact, and the price was right (cheap) so I signed on the dotted line. The 996 Turbo, after all, is the best 911 you can buy.
For most of its life this car has been a modified tuner machine with the front differential deleted, big turbos, big intercoolers, and big injectors. The 19-inch wheels had rubbed through the fender liners at all four corners, the underbody trays and rocker covers were smoked from too-low and too-stiff suspension. The interior’s soft-touch plastics were worn through, and despite the seats looking pretty new, they’d become somehow both rock hard and unsupportive. The touch-screen double-DIN stereo was top-of-the-line in 2008, but laggy and unresponsive in 2024. It was fucking perfect.
I was reminded this morning on Mark Zuckerberg’s The Facebook that I’d purchased the car two years ago today. That app’s “Memories” function is usually reserved for showing me pictures of dead pets that make me sad, but today it provided a happy memory. I’d flown to San Francisco, paid the money, and driven off in the car that I’ll gladly keep for the rest of my days.
Damn near everything went wrong on that cross-country drive home in the car, including a trio of flat tires, a spare set of wheels purchased from Craigslist, and a lot of prayers. I always say you don’t make memories when you ship a car, so I’m still glad I drove it home.
In the last two years I’ve fixed a lot of the things wrong with the car. I drove it for about a year and a half looking like crap, but fun as hell. There’s something to be said for a car with some patina. But last fall I decided it was time to give the car a paint job and get it looking a bit better. I’ve already told the stories of installing the carbon fiber roof, shaving the rear wing, and deleting the bumperettes from the back. It’s looking so much nicer these days, and I couldn’t be happier.
This project still isn’t done. I’m not sure it will ever be truly done, as I love to fiddle with stuff. The interior is a work-in-progress, and I still need to sort out the suspension and replace the fender liners, but it definitely makes me happier to look at these days.
So, if you’re in the middle of a project, don’t fret. Someday you’ll get it to a point that will make you happy, and you just have to keep endeavoring toward that end. All it takes is time, effort, and money, after all. Press on.
