The car I'd love to own again | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

I’ve only owned two cars that have departed for reasons not of my choosing, one being my very first Caterham which I destroyed at the exit of the Goodwood chicane during my first ever track day while showing off to my mates watching close by. And I’ve driven, raced, owned and built many other Caterhams since and own one today in a very close specification to that which I binned nearly 40 years ago. So I don’t miss that. 

Which leaves just my beautiful late Mk1 VW Golf GTI as the only car I really do miss. It was also a car I owned in the mid-1980s and one upon which I lavished all the attention and what few funds I had. I put Bilstein struts on it, Tarox discs, Italtune pads and shod it with Yokohama HFR rubber, which I think were the very first road legal track day tyres. What I loved was the fact it looked completely standard and now I’d got it to handle and stop, I was next going to turn my attention to providing the engine with the power to properly exploit the newfound abilities of the chassis.

I never got the chance. I was on the telephone in my flat one evening when I heard an enormous crash followed by the sound of a rather familiar car alarm. Someone had come the wrong way out the one way side street next to the flat, hit an entirely innocent Ford which lost control and buried itself in the back of the large Mercedes parked next to my car which then rammed the poor Golf into the equally large BMW parked in the next space up. Seriously abbreviated as it had been – and at both ends – its next and final journey was on the back of a truck to the nearest scrapyard. Strange thing is, I’ve driven other Mk1 Golf GTIs since and, while pleasant enough, I tend to regard them as rather over-rated. But it is still the only car I’ve owned that I really want back, I guess because in my head it still ranks as unfinished business.

But there is another I am just beginning to wish was still here. I sold it for very good reasons – work meant I wasn’t using it and my brother really wanted it – but its absence these many years is only now starting gnaw away at me. Perhaps it will help if I explain what it was and, I hope, still is.

It started life as a common-or-garden late-ish Porsche 911SC which the owner prior to me had decided to turn into a 2.7 Carrera RS replica. He’d got most of the way through the process and car looked brilliant, but he’d run out of money and asked Richard Tuthill to sell the car for him. Richard, knowing I was in the market, rang up, I went and drove it and that was that. The car was still standard SC in most regards, but had been fitted with twin triple choke Weber carburettors in place of the fuel injection system, and it had SSI stainless steel exhausts which together I’m told raised power a standard 204bhp to around 225bhp. I then put little K&N filter packs atop each carb, not because they gained more power, but because with those pipes out the back it made the car sound like an only slightly silenced RSR race car.

It had done nearly 200,000 miles when I bought it and I did another 30-40,000 miles in it. I rarely drove it anything less than as fast as I thought I could get away with and yet despite the engine never having had more than a minor top end refresh, it never got hot, nor burned any oil and always held terrific pressure. I adored that car, even though it was a complete fraud. I even did a twin test with an original Carrera RS costing many times as much and struggled to tell which I preferred.

But I got to a stage in my working life when on any long journey I’d almost always have to be in something else, so off it went to my brother who enjoyed it as much as I did.

And in my usual way I’d not thought much about it since until last week I found myself driving a 1988 Carrera Club Sport, so not quite the same car – quite a lot nicer, in fact – but very similar in feel. Only then did I realise how much I loved the sound of that air-cooled engine, the lucidity of the steering, the slight frisson of mild jeopardy because you know it can bite and that ergonomically disastrous, gloriously redolent interior. And it reinforced what I have always known to be true: there are many brilliant and wonderful cars out there, some of which it has been my privilege to drive and, just a few of them, to own too. But there wasn’t then, isn’t now and never will be anything quite like an air-cooled Porsche 911. But you probably knew that already...