Living the Legend
Ian Harris
Shoreham, UK
@harrisclassics
Model 3.2 CARRERA COMMEMORATIVE EDITION
Year 1988
Acquired DECEMBER 2020
Model 964 ANNIVERSARY
Year 1993
Acquired FEBRUARY 2022
Model 964CARRERA
Year 1993
Acquired JULY 2021
Model 996.2GT3
Year 2004
Acquired JANUARY 2022
Many years ago I came across one of the most amazing Porsche barn finds in the UK, and recently posted some images on my Instagram page. Many people have asked how I found the car and ended up buying it.
Let’s go back to December 2014. My wife’s friend was a Brighton estate agent where we lived, who’d gone to value a house. In the garden was a rusty Porsche. He said it was pretty far gone and past restoration. I didn’t think too much about it, assuming it would be an old transaxle car or basket case that was well past repair. The estate agent told me the rough location of the car and left it at that.
Some three months later I started to think about the car again, because it was located within a stone’s throw of where I was living the time. Each day when I walked to the shops or took the dog out, I’d stick my head over the fences in the areas where I knew the car was. And one day I hit the jackpot. In front of me was a right-hand drive 3.0-litre Turbo. Even better, it was a Martini Turbo with Dr Ferdinand’s orthopaedic seats!
I knocked on the door and made contact with the owner. The story was that he had the Martini Turbo as a company car and was the second owner. He’d done 70,000-plus miles on the car and ended up buying it, storing the Porsche in his garage. Ill health and early retirement meant the owner moved to Cyprus to his holiday home. Some 16 years later, and his son had been looking after the family home. When the owner returned to the UK he found that his son had pushed the car out from the garage into the garden, to make room for his motorbikes and gym equipment. The Porsche had been left outside for years, until I found it.
A few months and lots of negotiations later, I managed to secure the car late on a Friday night, with the stipulation that the car had to be gone by Monday morning. I talked my father into helping and we loaded up a trailer with shovels and winches to pull/dig the car out. It had been sat on a slope and the tyres were flat – the bottom of the engine and gearbox were in the mud. Furthermore, the back footwells of the car were full of water because the doors hadn’t been shut properly. We had to cut down a couple of trees that had grown around the car and take down some fence panels, just to drag it out from the garden. It was a mission to say the least, but we managed to get it on the trailer – and the car was mine.
I spent the next few weeks trying to get as much information as I could on the Martini Turbo. It was an unofficial limited edition model: anyone could order a 930 Turbo with the Martini stripes. According to my research there were three 3-litre Turbos and six 3.3-litre versions; the stripes, Grand Prix white paint, and red and blue Dr Ferdinand Orthopaedic pad seats gave it the Martini edition moniker.
