Rennsport Homecoming (This special 964 RS left a lasting impression)
09-23-2016, 11:13 AM
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Rennsport Homecoming (This special 964 RS left a lasting impression)
Fantastic story!
Rennsport Homecoming
This special 964 RS left a lasting impression on two Porsche designers.
Story and Photos by Ian Kuah (Excellence Magazine)
http://www.excellence-mag.com/issues/241/articles/rennsport-homecoming?page=6#.V-U1VsmwlG4
a portion of the story:
Now and then we hear about another so-called barn find; a rare car unearthed after being hidden away and lost for years. But it’s even better when we come across the story of a classic that has been used regularly and enjoyed just as its maker intended. One such car is this Guards Red 1992 911 (964) Carrera RS whose original owner was Ursula Piëch, the wife of Ferdinand Piëch, renowned grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, and former Chairman of the VW Group supervisory board.
Its present owner is British-born Stephen Murkett, who has run Porsche’s Cayenne and Panamera projects for many years. By an amazing stroke of coincidence, Murkett rode as a passenger in this very car when it was in the hands of its second owner, his colleague Matthias Kulla, another Royal College of Art graduate, who has been the director of sports car design management at Style Porsche since 2014. We picked up the story from the two friends.
Matthias Kulla
“For a young designer at Porsche, the most important thing in life besides work is which Porsche he drives,” Kulla explains. “After various 944s I got into 964s, a coupe first then a Cabriolet. By this time I was hooked on these cars and wondered how the experience could ever be topped.” Then one day a young man walked into the design studio and said, “Hi, my name is Achim. How can I get a Porsche lease car as quickly as possible?” He was Achim Anscheidt, who went on to be the Design Director at Bugatti.
Kulla had a solution! “One of the first things you do when you arrive at Porsche is find out if there is a lease car available for you to use,” Kulla recalls. “The guy in charge looked at his stock list, but there was nothing particularly interesting around apart from what he described as a racing Porsche, a 964 RS with just 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) on the clock.” Anscheidt did not like the idea of a racing Porsche, but Kulla did!
“‘It does not make sense for us to sell it now,’ the leasing guy told me,” recalls Kulla, “so I asked him if I could have it as my company lease car. I actually had a 964 Carrera 2 Cabriolet on order, and ended up doing a swap with the delighted Achim.”
Then, Kulla found out that the previous custodian of the RS was Ursula Piëch. “I had been wondering about the unusual registration ‘S-UP 999.’ UP stood for Ursula Piëch,” says Kulla. “Other unique features of this particular car were rear seats and a normal 911 passenger seat finished in three shades of grey leather, just like the 959 Comfort. It also had a short-throw gearshift linkage, but with a very tall gear lever. While the gear ratios were very close, first was so tall it was good for 60 mph.”
When Kulla took delivery of the RS, however, it didn’t have the appearance of a low-mileage car. “It had traces of straw inside, and the underbody was scratched in places,” he recalls. “But I realized it would be the most exciting car I had ever owned. On the other hand my wife, who had been expecting the Carrera 2 Cabriolet, was very disappointed and practically cried over this. Yet we used it often, even for long trips where we covered up to 600 miles in a day. Then the comfortable passenger seat proved to be a most welcome feature.”
Although this 964 was posh inside, it very much lived up to the “RS” name. “In the early ’90s the autobahns were pretty empty compared to today, and it was possible to average 140 mph for long stretches,” says Kulla. “I was literally nudging top speed all the time whenever the traffic allowed, but you had to watch out for bumps as the rear tires would lose traction, and then the engine would be right on the rev limiter. On one particularly bad stretch of motorway we were lifted right out of our seats a dozen times and banged our heads against the roof. We had tears running down our cheeks because we were laughing all the time—at over 160 mph!”
Kulla’s desire to experience all that the car had to give naturally led him to compete. “The Porsche Club of America had a chapter in Germany with the U.S. Forces guys, and I took part in their autocrosses with the RS, which was a noticeable improvement over the 964 Cabriolet I had entered before. After that, I was only beaten once, by a guy in a Rubystone Red 964 RS.” Kulla then got the itch to run the RS at track days.
“We once spent a whole afternoon at the Nürburgring and did 12 consecutive laps, with me in the RS, and Stephen Murkett in his 928 GTS,” says Kulla. “My best time was 8 minutes 40 seconds on street tires, which was about 20 seconds a lap slower than Walter Röhrl. It was through these trips that Stephen got to know the car nearly 20 years before it became his.”
Kulla kept the RS for almost a year, during which the car covered 34,000 km (21,127 miles). “I had never driven a car so much before, and definitely never as hard,” he says with obvious passion in his voice. Normal life in the form of an apartment and child caught up with Kulla, and so eventually it was time to say goodbye to the RS. He returned the car to Zuffenhausen, and as he was on the Weissach-bound shuttle he saw the RS going the other way on a the back of a trailer. That was in February 1995.
http://www.excellence-mag.com/issues...1#.V-U4wMmwlG4
Rennsport Homecoming
This special 964 RS left a lasting impression on two Porsche designers.
Story and Photos by Ian Kuah (Excellence Magazine)
http://www.excellence-mag.com/issues/241/articles/rennsport-homecoming?page=6#.V-U1VsmwlG4
a portion of the story:
Now and then we hear about another so-called barn find; a rare car unearthed after being hidden away and lost for years. But it’s even better when we come across the story of a classic that has been used regularly and enjoyed just as its maker intended. One such car is this Guards Red 1992 911 (964) Carrera RS whose original owner was Ursula Piëch, the wife of Ferdinand Piëch, renowned grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, and former Chairman of the VW Group supervisory board.
Its present owner is British-born Stephen Murkett, who has run Porsche’s Cayenne and Panamera projects for many years. By an amazing stroke of coincidence, Murkett rode as a passenger in this very car when it was in the hands of its second owner, his colleague Matthias Kulla, another Royal College of Art graduate, who has been the director of sports car design management at Style Porsche since 2014. We picked up the story from the two friends.
Matthias Kulla
“For a young designer at Porsche, the most important thing in life besides work is which Porsche he drives,” Kulla explains. “After various 944s I got into 964s, a coupe first then a Cabriolet. By this time I was hooked on these cars and wondered how the experience could ever be topped.” Then one day a young man walked into the design studio and said, “Hi, my name is Achim. How can I get a Porsche lease car as quickly as possible?” He was Achim Anscheidt, who went on to be the Design Director at Bugatti.
Kulla had a solution! “One of the first things you do when you arrive at Porsche is find out if there is a lease car available for you to use,” Kulla recalls. “The guy in charge looked at his stock list, but there was nothing particularly interesting around apart from what he described as a racing Porsche, a 964 RS with just 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) on the clock.” Anscheidt did not like the idea of a racing Porsche, but Kulla did!
“‘It does not make sense for us to sell it now,’ the leasing guy told me,” recalls Kulla, “so I asked him if I could have it as my company lease car. I actually had a 964 Carrera 2 Cabriolet on order, and ended up doing a swap with the delighted Achim.”
Then, Kulla found out that the previous custodian of the RS was Ursula Piëch. “I had been wondering about the unusual registration ‘S-UP 999.’ UP stood for Ursula Piëch,” says Kulla. “Other unique features of this particular car were rear seats and a normal 911 passenger seat finished in three shades of grey leather, just like the 959 Comfort. It also had a short-throw gearshift linkage, but with a very tall gear lever. While the gear ratios were very close, first was so tall it was good for 60 mph.”
When Kulla took delivery of the RS, however, it didn’t have the appearance of a low-mileage car. “It had traces of straw inside, and the underbody was scratched in places,” he recalls. “But I realized it would be the most exciting car I had ever owned. On the other hand my wife, who had been expecting the Carrera 2 Cabriolet, was very disappointed and practically cried over this. Yet we used it often, even for long trips where we covered up to 600 miles in a day. Then the comfortable passenger seat proved to be a most welcome feature.”
Although this 964 was posh inside, it very much lived up to the “RS” name. “In the early ’90s the autobahns were pretty empty compared to today, and it was possible to average 140 mph for long stretches,” says Kulla. “I was literally nudging top speed all the time whenever the traffic allowed, but you had to watch out for bumps as the rear tires would lose traction, and then the engine would be right on the rev limiter. On one particularly bad stretch of motorway we were lifted right out of our seats a dozen times and banged our heads against the roof. We had tears running down our cheeks because we were laughing all the time—at over 160 mph!”
Kulla’s desire to experience all that the car had to give naturally led him to compete. “The Porsche Club of America had a chapter in Germany with the U.S. Forces guys, and I took part in their autocrosses with the RS, which was a noticeable improvement over the 964 Cabriolet I had entered before. After that, I was only beaten once, by a guy in a Rubystone Red 964 RS.” Kulla then got the itch to run the RS at track days.
“We once spent a whole afternoon at the Nürburgring and did 12 consecutive laps, with me in the RS, and Stephen Murkett in his 928 GTS,” says Kulla. “My best time was 8 minutes 40 seconds on street tires, which was about 20 seconds a lap slower than Walter Röhrl. It was through these trips that Stephen got to know the car nearly 20 years before it became his.”
Kulla kept the RS for almost a year, during which the car covered 34,000 km (21,127 miles). “I had never driven a car so much before, and definitely never as hard,” he says with obvious passion in his voice. Normal life in the form of an apartment and child caught up with Kulla, and so eventually it was time to say goodbye to the RS. He returned the car to Zuffenhausen, and as he was on the Weissach-bound shuttle he saw the RS going the other way on a the back of a trailer. That was in February 1995.
http://www.excellence-mag.com/issues...1#.V-U4wMmwlG4
