Leh Keen is a professional race car driver and expert on Porsches being that he drove them professionally for many years.
You may remember Keen from last year’s /DRIVE on NBC Sports season when he helped hosts Matt Farah, Chris Harris, and Mike Spinelli race in the ChumpCar VIR24 endurance race with their 1988 BMW 325is. Beyond thrashing Porsche’s on track, Keen has another hobby: Making some of the best off-road Porsches in the world.
Keen recently sat down with VINwiki to talk about his company, The Keen Project. Started in 2013, The Keen Project is where the Georgia native builds one-off Porsche 911 off-road Safari cars that have gained loads of praise across the interwebs. Keen says it was always about making a Porsche he wanted for himself, but one that may be interesting to other people too. He is a fan of Porsches reimagined by Singer and even has an Akira Nakai built Rauh-Welt Begriff Porsche to call his own. He sees those cars as works of art and strives to create his own versions of that with a completely different Porsche goal.
Keen’s cars cost in the ballpark of $90-100K and that includes the base car. He puts around $60K of work into the cars and those cars last through wear, tear, and plenty of abuse. Where other Porsche builds are sometimes just show projects, Keen’s cars are driven. He says he knows of a few cars which have 10,000 miles on them after being built. He even knows of one which is daily driven and parked at the airport for extended periods. Keen just delivered his eighth customer car, but has another 10 on backorder including /DRIVE on NBC Sports host Matt Farah’s.
“We are all about having fun. We don’t try to overthink anything or overbuild anything. Just the right ingredients to make the car happy and the driver happy,” Keen told The Drive. “Most of the donor cars we get have been sitting in a garage for a decade or more and need some rust fixed, chassis gone through, and the engine prepped. In the end, the cars get a new life and are far far away from that garage they were sitting in covered in dust.”
“You will get a thumbs up from the guy in the Jeep or Raptor just as many times as the guy in the GT3.”
Best way to follow Leh and The Keen Project is his Instagram. Check out VINwiki‘s ‘The Keen Project’ video below.