Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
I love this one. This is a 2001 Mercedes-Benz S500 that has been modified by Brabus with their B11 package and is also armored to a B4 level. I suppose the extra power is needed given the weight. It is finished in the wonderful color of Mystic Blue Designo Metallic and the interior? Oh, wait until you see what they did. I was not prepared for this.
It certainly feels like the Porsche 968 Club Sport is having its moment in the US despite them never being sold here. I’ve seen well over a dozen come up for sale with varying prices, and you can see they aren’t exactly cheap compared to the little brother 968 coupe. Back in February, Carter did a nice deep dive into what makes them so special, and now another one has popped up, with this being a Speed Yellow example in New Hampshire of all places. The good news is that it is not $95,000 like the car back in February.
I’m curious what the legacy of the 911 generation Porsche 911 Speedster will be. Naturally, it is just a tribute in name only to the original 356 Speedsters, and towers over the tiny G-Body and 964 Speedsters. It does have a bit in common with the 997 Speedster, but make no mistake, this is a big, wide car. I give Porsche a ton of credit for building it, but it is much more of a 911 GT3 Touring convertible rather than what you would call a Speedster.
Now with a 992 Speedster rumored to be in the works, does this go down as an iconic model that will also sell for over MSRP? Well …
Let’s say for a moment that you came into an extraordinary amount of money and wanted to go vintage automobile racing. Of course, to prove your worth as an enthusiast, you’ll want to buy a historically significant car that will impress all the long bottom jaws, and few raise more eyebrows in the German realm right now than the 911. Truth told, the 911 is really the ‘new money’ of the vintage world – go try racing antique Bugattis or Ferraris, for example, and you’ll soon laugh at the budgets of Porsche racers…but I digress.
Even if you do have 911 money, buying a real factory race car is far from cheap. Real RSRs sell in the millions, and if you really want to race one competitively you’ll need to have that much in your slush fund. Smarter, than, is to buy one of these cars that’s been made to look like a more famous model. In this case, someone took what’s claimed to be a ’75 Carrera and made it into a tribute of the ’74 RSRs run by the likes of Brumos.
Volkswagen of America’s new “Fahrvergnügen” sales campaign in the early 1990s was, while a marketing ploy and a totally made up neologism, underscoring sporty changes at Volkswagen. The more serious 2.0 16V GTI I’ve already covered recently, but the same motor was available in the more fun-to-drive Passat here, too. Then there was the Corrado, which while it only had 8 valves sported a supercharger. You could get that G60 in the Passat in Europe and even Canada, too.
Volkswagen’s popular smaller sedan had a healthy dose of upgrades though, too. In ’89, the Jetta GLI 16V had a special Wolfsburg Edition which had added the deeply bolstered Recaro Trophy seats and BBS RA alloys. These were color-matched to the Helios Blue Metallic paint outside. The seats and BBS wheels would carry over for the 1990 model year, but like the GTI the Jetta received the new 9A 2.0 16V and revised bumper/trim of all the A2s. Brakes were updated to 10.1? and dual tailpipes emerged from the new ‘big bumper’ A2 refresh. Central locking and a cassette player were standard, while you could opt for many power options including windows, mirror, anti-lock brakes, trip computer, cruise control, and of course a sunroof.
Although the package was essentially quite similar to the GTI, I’ve never quite taken to the 2.0 GLI 16V in the same way. But it’s still very nice to see a clean example hit the market:
