Part I: The Pilgrimage
Photos: Gavin Sullivan
The Brauhaus Schönbuch lager is cold enough to make your teeth ache and that's precisely the point. Exactly one year ago, I was sitting on a patio at the top of a mountain in Heidelberg, somewhere between jet-lagged and delirious, watching condensation run down the outside of the glass like it had somewhere important to be. Trees filtered the afternoon light above us. Gavin was across from me, halfway through a schnitzel the size of a hubcap and neither of us had slept in what feels like two continental lifetimes. Below us, the old city unfolded across the valley, rooftops and church spires giving way to rolling hills that disappeared into a haze at the horizon, patient and unbothered, the way things are when they've already survived everything history could throw at them.
There's a particular kind of grief that comes with building a life around something you love. I've been chasing cars my whole adult life, importing parts from this very country in my twenties when I was running Tuning Zubehör, dragging myself across the Atlantic a half-dozen times a year to track down pieces of a culture I was so hungry to understand. Somewhere along the way I became the person who makes the thing instead of the person who feels the thing. The beautiful moment you're standing inside of is already, at the same instant, becoming the past and if you're not careful, you miss it entirely. You're always building toward the next thing instead of being in the thing you're in. That's a battle I fight constantly, the intention to slow down, to be present, to let something land. That grief sits quiet as the beer sweat on the table and you don't always notice it until you stop.
There's a family thread I've been following without always knowing it. My grandfather drove a '59 Corvette off the lot brand new, all chrome and American optimism. My father bought his '73 Camaro new and still has it, which tells you everything you need to know about how our family holds onto things that matter. I'm 43 years old and I had never bought a new car. Not once. That's not neglect, that's patience, or maybe just the right thing not having arrived yet. When it was my turn, it had to be something worth the wait. Something with enough soul to carry forward, to hand down to someone who shares my blood and with any luck, my affliction.
The story starts, as the best ones do, with a phone call to my friends at Porsche Palm Springs and a blank configuration screen. White. Non-Weissach. Black interior, black deviated stitching. Nothing loud, nothing trying too hard. PCCB brakes, but black calipers, specced the way Porsche has always done it best. The subtleties become the easter eggs that in the long run create a timeless package and what eventually makes that package special. Leather dash, leather wheel, leather gaiter. A nod to the Porsche Spyders of the past. Just because you can choose more exposed carbon fiber, doesn't mean you should.
I've owned air-cooled Porsches and water-cooled ones. I've spent the better part of my adult life inside this marque. Buying one new felt significant in a way I couldn't fully articulate until I was on the redeye to Frankfurt, somewhere over the Atlantic, unable to sleep. My wife was supposed to be here. Plans changed, as plans do and instead I brought my business partner Gavin Sullivan, a man I trust with most things including, apparently, my taste in German lager.
We landed tired and wired and immediately picked up an Opel Corsa from the rental desk, the cosmic joke of arriving in Germany to collect a 500-horsepower mid-engine Porsche and leaving the airport in something that makes a Toyota Yaris feel exotic. But the Corsa had a purpose. It got us to the autobahn, where I clicked it up to 220 kph just to remember what unrestricted feels like and then it got us here, to Heidelberg, to this beer, to this moment.
The castle above the city is a ruin on purpose. The Germans decided centuries ago not to rebuild it, to let it stand exactly as history left it, broken and honest. There's something in that I keep turning over. We finish our drinks, eat more schnitzel than two men should and point the Corsa south toward Stuttgart, where a car is waiting under a black cover with my name on the paperwork.
Dinner in Stuttgart is Döner Kebab eaten standing up on a sidewalk, which is the correct way, followed by a Negroni that arrives in a glass that belongs in a museum. The EmiLu Design Hotel is small and art-forward and our beds are approximately the width of my ambition at age nineteen, narrow but you make it work. From the window, you can watch the street below: good cars, interesting people, a particular energy of a city that builds things. I fall asleep thinking about white paint.
Morning comes fast. Porsche Werk 4 is already awake when we arrive, already warm, already waiting with breakfast and cappuccinos so precise they feel engineered. Our friend Ralf from Sonderwunsch appears like a benevolent ghost, we exchange the handshake of people who only see each other when something extraordinary is happening. We hit the gift shop and then move through rooms full of special-order cars in various states of becoming. There is no word in English for the particular feeling of being in a space where the thing you love is being made. German probably has one. It's probably sixteen syllables.
We cross the street. The Spyder RS sits under a black cover with white Porsche script stretched across it, the shape beneath it unmistakable, the haunch, the low roofline, the suggestion of speed even at rest. Someone asks if I'm ready. The cover lifts.
This article first appeared in speedarticle Post 003
