YOU & YOURS
There are hand-me-downs and there are hand-medowns. Forget having to wear your elder sibling’s discarded clothes — what we have here are passed-on Porsches. Ownership has transferred from father to son to son, charting not only successive generations of a family obsessed with sports cars, but also the generational shift in automotive design and development, as well as boardroom thinking, at Porsche headquarters in Zuffenhausen.
The story starts with Cowling family patriarch, Tony, whose first experience of owning a Stuttgartcrested sports car occurred with the purchase of an early 944 Turbo. “It was one of the first examples of the model to land in the UK,” he remembers. “My daily driver was a BMW 325i, which produced approximately 170bhp and 164lb-ft torque. By contrast, the Porsche, which I used as a weekend plaything during summer months, developed near 220bhp and 245lb-ft in standard trim, producing well over 250bhp after an ECU chip upgrade, fuelling and ignition changes.”
After many miles and many smiles, the turbocharged transaxle was sold (and subsequently written-off by its next owner), but as many marque enthusiasts with experience behind the wheel of a 944 Turbo will attest, shaking the bug is easier said than done. Needless to say, Tony found himself yearning for another 944, and although the car he ended up with offered the same 2.5 litres of displacement as the Turbo, it was an altogether different beast.
First registered in 1985 (coincidentally, the year of the 944 Turbo’s launch), the 944 he bought was a Lux, complete with ‘square’ dashboard, carried over from the earlier 924. Extensively developed throughout its production run, the 924 yielded high-performance Turbo and Carrera GT variants, as well as the 245bhp Carrera GTS. Sadly, despite the big power and impressive specification offered by these models, the 924 failed to shake off the image of being a Porsche with a borrowed VW/Audi engine. In contrast, its successor, the 944, was embraced as a purely Porsche product.
The 944 was revealed at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 1981. Looking as though the 924 had spent every waking moment in the gym after being picked on by the motoring press, the new Porsche inherited its muscular, wide-arched styling from the 924 Carrera GT. The wedge had a familiarity about it, but there was no wheezy VW/Audi engine for purists to complain about. This time, a new 2.5-litre four-cylinder powerplant designed and developed by Porsche was used. It was essentially the same unit proven under the bonnet of the 1981 924 Carrera GTP Le Mans racer. A development of a single cylinder bank from the 928’s V8 (and equipped with twin counter-rotating balancer shafts to suppress vibration), the base 944 engine pumped out 163bhp, just
