A Second Life by Ryan Partin, GCR member If you were a kid growing up in the late 80s and early 90s and crazy about cars you had a poster of one of the three iconic cars at the time. Surprisingly, mine was a red Italian. I would laugh later in life about that childhood decision. My mother’s car would be my first experience with a Porsche. I was so young when she had that 1972 red 914, but I can still remember every spot of rust on it like it was yesterday. Being a blue collar family, my parents couldn’t afford the “nice Porsche” but my father, being a mechanic, did his best to get her a Porsche. Over the years her Porsches would evolve from that red 914 to a bronze 1977 924 that always smelled like gas, to a yellow 944, which was made from two cars welded together and spun out every time it rained. Let’s just say none of these cars would win a concours show but she loved them as if they could. Fast forward twenty-plus years and a lot had changed. My parents divorced and I followed my father’s footsteps into auto racing. My mother also followed her passions, building a career and finally buying
2002 Porsche just purchased that “Nice Porsche”: a two-year-old 2002 986 Boxster. I was proud of her never giving up on her dreams and on owning that Porsche. The purchase of that car marked an important achievement in the second chapter of her life. In late 2020, I got a call from my mom asking what she should do with her beloved Boxster. For the last 16 years the car lived outside in the South Florida weather and time had taken its toll—seriously taken its toll. The car was at a local German auto repair shop for the third time in a year; it wouldn’t start, and none of the electronics worked. The estimate would start around $5,000 to diagnose and repair some but maybe not all the issues. My mother didn’t want to part with the car but asked me if she should sell it;
944
14
Die Porsche Kassette
| Jan 2022
sensibly, was it worth repairing again? I told her I would come get the car and dig into it as I wasn’t racing with Covid going on and had the time. I knew my mom didn’t want to part with her Boxster, for it symbolized so much of what she had been able to achieve in the second chapter of her life. So I hooked up the race car hauler and headed south to see if I could be my mom’s hero. Boy; I had no idea what I was getting myself into! I’ve worked on a lot of different types of race cars, but nothing of the German sort. I didn’t even know what a “Frunk” was or how to get the thing open. After a couple weeks and learning what a Frunk was, I figured out that the Boxster suffered from the dreaded convertible top drains being clogged. This had led to some serious corrosion. After about 45 days I sent my mom
Boxster in car hauler
