This weekend, the 11th edition of the immensely popular annual air-cooled Porsche show called Luftgekühlt took place at the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, North Carolina. It was the first East Coast execution of the event, giving some new cars and spectators a chance to get involved. If you weren’t able to see it in person or have only peeped a few uploads on Instagram, here’s a deeper tour of the more interesting vehicle features I saw at Luftgekühlt 11.
Since I’m sure there are plenty of galleries full of historical and technical context on various air-cooled Porsches, and you probably pretty much know what a 911 looks like by now, I’m going to focus on the visually interesting details here. Check out some of the most eye-catching car features I noticed, then swipe an image of the whole car.
I’m a total sucker for cool lights and analog gauges, and this old 912 had both. Make sure you swipe to see the vintage rally clocks! The wood-rimmed wheel has a somewhat bizarre spoke pattern, but it fits the vehicle.
We saw so many spectacularly deep-dish rear wheels at this show. It’s no surprise, since the setup looks perfect with the super-wide hip fenders on Turbo cars.
I love how whoever maintains this car wrote torque specs right on the metal with a paint pen. Clearly, somebody works on this car a lot. I just hope those little numbers don’t get worn off by road grime. Maybe hit it with some brush-on clear coat?
Look at how cute the rear fog light (near the exhaust tip) is on this whale-tailed car. This 911 also had my favorite style of shift boot: The ones that look like toilet plungers.
This 911’s rear quarter window had a little louver in it. The car also had a super nice-looking shift knob and pedal setup.
It brought me some joy to see rust on a car at a show as prestigious as Luft. A car doesn’t need to be objectively perfect to be admirable!
What do you think about these taillights? I’m conflicted. I feel like I’d have liked them as a kid.
Having just finished a few hundred miles in a new 911 Carerra T, I had a fresh appreciation for wooden shift knobs when I spotted this car. The new T is manual only, and like this car, and the Carerra GT, has a natural-looking wood shift knob as factory.
Somebody’s very serious about their Luft affiliation! And whoever made this emblem did a nice job.
Caged headlights are excellent, and interior-matched luggage is too.
This is the 1976 Holbert Racing 934. “Campaigned in ’76 and ’77 under the G.W. Dickinson banner, it found the podium at Pocono, Mosport, Trois-Rivières, and Gainesville with Al Holbert and Doc Bundy behind the wheel,” Porsche shop Zweck posted on Instagram as the car was heading to the show. To be honest, I just liked how the “turbo” script was painted into the grille.
Look at how cool this car’s gas cap is! And its fenders really make it look like a frog.
Neat seats, and unusual taillights.
Yeah, to me, the 993 GT2 is the ultimate 911. Just look at this thing—pure majesty.
Great decaling and Pasha-patterned interior on this one.
I’ve noticed more than a couple of modded cars with noses painted to contrast the rest. This one’s got a particularly interesting version of that, almost looking like a European fire/rescue vehicle. I like the idea, but I’m not sure I’m crazy about the execution.
More funny taillights.
Leather straps used in any functional capacity always look charming to me. But another thing I wanted to point out about this ancient Porsche—check out the wheel stance. Those wheels are tucked so deep you could almost double their size without getting flush to the fender! People certainly had different aesthetic sensibilities back then when it came to wheel fitment.
I really like it when cars have some kind of cartoon or creature mascot on their fenders. Not sure what this is supposed to be, though. A ghost? Whatever it is, it’s charming.
So, yeah, fenders, we got ’em here. This re-dang-diculous 1975 911 Carrera RSR won the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1977.
This car made me realize why these little circle-light conversions were popular. If they’re cool enough for a ’67 911R, they’re cool enough for anything.
Check out the skid plate on this thing. And indeed, you don’t need to go full-safari to want a little extra underbody protection.
For some reason, I felt compelled to take a picture of the “Carrera RS” script in the interior carpet of this mint-colored car. It looked super extra, but in a period-correct way that fit the car.
These bloated turbo-script fender decals remind me of my friend Jason Torchinsky, whose writing some of you may be familiar with on Jalopnik and The Autopian. I just know that he’d love this font.
These seats almost look like wicker—extremely classy in this application.
Finally, one more interior that caught my eye—blue flannel on grey. I wonder if I could pull something like this off in my Dove Grey-interior E46.
There were many other cars and cool features I wasn’t able to capture—I’m not sure there’s enough bandwidth on the internet to document everything at an event like Luft. But having scrolled and swiped through these, you’ve got a nice little download of Luftgekühlt 11.
Know about any other awesome shows that should be on my radar? Drop me a line at andrew.collins@thedrive.com.