Imagine if cars were kids. There are playground-roustabout Porsches and there are classroom-dutiful Porsches. One group is in your face, the other keeps a low profile. This unmolested 944 S2 belongs in the second category and has probably left an apple on teacher’s desk. Butter wouldn’t melt. None of which is to denigrate an extremely capable car – the S2, some say, is best of breed.
We’ve come to rural North Norfolk to see Oli Tappin at his tidy Bure Valley Classics showroom, a stone’s throw from the Broads. A recent addition to his sales inventory is this low-miles – just 87,000 of them – 944 S2, a standout Porsche resplendent in its Maritime Blue hue. It’s worth remembering, the 944 was cast into the 1980s, the decade of the yuppie. ‘Greed is good’ sums up the period for that coterie of dealers and traders. Red socks, red braces and Guards Red Porsches. No self-regarding breadhead would show up at the Stock Exchange without them. But what attracted city traders to Porsches, rather than something truly representational of wealth, such as a Bentley or Rolls-Royce? Quite clearly, the amount of cash involved was an irrelevance, there just had to be lots of it.
The answer is almost certainly an appetite for flash, rather than sobriety. Any awareness of the marque’s excellence in endurance racing didn’t matter a hoot. Stigmatised as the yuppie car of a decadent decade – and a lifestyle aptly exemplified by – Guards Red
