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I am very intrigued by this 911. The whole of it: the color is one of my favorites. Why is the mileage so incredibly low? And what will it sell for given that it’s a Sportomatic? There’s just a lot going on here and a lot for us to attend to.
So what do we have? A Signal Orange 1970 Porsche 911E Coupe with the 4-speed Sportomatic transmission and a reported 12,881 original miles. We aren’t told whether the paint and interior are also completely original so that might be question 1. After which documentation of the mileage will be paramount. From there we can begin to think about value. But, first, just look at it. It’s so beautiful!
I’ve featured a decent number of 996TTs lately, but they’ve all been of a different sort than what is typical for us. They’ve all been shifted toward the pricier end of the spectrum and more collector quality for those who want to speculate on the possibility of that market moving upward. In most cases these have been the one-year-only Turbo S. Here I’m going to hope to move back toward the performance value side of the equation. This is the reason we’re typically here in the first place after all. But that movement toward value doesn’t mean we have to make sacrifices in performance. While the Turbo S may wear a different moniker and command more attention and value it’s not really fundamentally different from a standard Turbo equipped with the X50 performance package. And what do you know, look what we have here: a Midnight Blue Metallic 2003 Porsche 911 Turbo, located in Knoxville, with Cinnamon leather interior, 79,700 miles on it, and that highly desirable X50 package. It is the higher mileage that will keep this Turbo’s price in reasonable territory, but the condition shows us a very nice 911 that could compete with those lower-mileage examples and their higher prices.
The ’70s and ’80s certainly possessed their own sense of style and few things make that more clear than when we look at tuners who were popular during those eras. Not all were so crazy. Looking at a few RUF models we can see that they were content to retain the general style of Porsche themselves, though in fairness a 930 isn’t exactly a shrinking violet. But here our attention will be on the other tuners; the tuners who delighted in bringing their own sense of audacity to the automobile market. Koenig Specials is one such tuner and though they’ve been around for four decades now I think most of us would be familiar with them from their earlier years when they produced complete packages to transform both the appearance and the performance of many cars. On these pages we’re most familiar with them for their work with Mercedes-Benz, but there are a few rare Porsches floating around as well. One of those is the one we see here: a Koenig Specials modified 1991 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 Coupe with a mere 19K kilometers on it. It is said that only eight such examples were built, making this a very rare commodity on the 911 market.
As Rob mentioned in his Jade Green Targa piece the other day, we’re entering in quickly to auction season. Mecum, typically the purveyors of more muscle cars than European rides, nonetheless had quite an impressive lineup of signification Porsche race models that cover a few decades and many changes in the company’s history, so I thought it would be pretty neat to take a look at them. It’s very interesting to see over a relatively short period of time the many changes that Porsche’s motorsports programs have gone through.
Not too surprisingly, the German car market has quite a lot of Porsches running around. Looking through the listings shows us all kinds of rare models or interesting colors and option packages. In some of the best cases, I’ll come across configurations that I’m completely unfamiliar with and this will lead down a long rabbit-hole of reading and history. Those are a lot of fun and generally involve cars that never made it Stateside. However, most searches just show us cool versions of cars we’re used to seeing. Here, I’ve stuck with that theme as this is a standard 3.2 Carrera, but I was really taken by the color combination and the condition does look quite good. I’m not sure this asking price would make sense for anyone in the U.S. given the additional costs of bringing it here, but who knows. Here we have a Meteor Gray Metallic 1985 Porsche 911 Carrera Coupe with Burgundy leather interior and around 39K kilometers on it.
