Why Should I Buy? A water-cooled Porsche!

Kevin Duffy - Founder for 924S944.com

After retiring from a career in Law Enforcement, Kevin Duffy turned his attention to one of his passions, Porsche 944's and 924S's. He owns 924S944.com LLC in DeLand, FL, rescuing and restoring forgotten Porsches, bringing them back to a useful life. He is especially interested in the rare-but-beautiful 924S Special Edition. He can be found at Porsche Club events, including track days, tours and shows, as well as other car-focused events around the southeastern United States. View all posts by Kevin Duffy, 924S944.com LLC, DeLand, FL

Contact: Kevin Duffy at krduffy@me.com | 386.547.9625 | Visit Online!

    

• Tell us about how you got into cars? What is your petrol-head origin story? What attracted you to the 924/944 vehicles? You started 924S944.com – what was the genesis?
• History of the 924 > 944 > 968
• Fact or Fiction : People often argue: Is it a VW or a Porsche, or both? Let’s set the record straight.
• Let’s talk about buying a 924/944 – buyers guide?
• The Variants (924, 924 Turbo, 924 S vs 944, 944 85.5+, 944 S, 944 S2 (16v), 944 Turbo, Cabriolet, etc) – Are some better than others?
• What to look for? Known issues? Items that should be revisited or fixed immediately? 
• What a fair market price for a 924/944 these days?
• Thoughts on the 928 as an alternative? 
• If someone were to visit 924S944.com – what would they expect to find there? Products & Services you offer, etc. 

and much, much more!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motor Sports Podcast Break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motor sports.

The last of the cheap Porsches, they were plentiful and some had aggressive jackknife fender flares and others were more demure. They don’t have the panache of the nine 11, but that’s okay because these amazingly well-balanced front mount rear drive vehicles are what many would consider a driver’s car.

Something you jump in, don’t think twice about, but puts a smile on your face when exiting a corner on a back road, autocross or racetrack. Tonight we’re chatting about the Porsche 9 24 9 44, the 9 24 being originally designed by Porsche for Volkswagen and is the predecessor to its more famous younger sibling, the nine 40.

These vehicles spanned a 16 year production run from 1976 through 1992 before we’re ultimately being replaced by the 9 68. And joining [00:01:00] us for an in-depth conversation into one of my favorite Porsches is Kevin Duffy. Noted 9 2 4 9 4 4. Expert from 9 2 4 s. Nine four four.com to explain to us why we should buy a water.

Cool Porsche. Thanks Brad. And with that, welcome to Break Fix, Kevin. Thanks. Great to be here. Like all good. Break fix stories. There’s always an origin. So tell us about how you got into cars, what attracted you to the 9 24 and nine 40 fours, how you started? 9 24 s. Nine 40 four.com. And what was the genesis of all this?

Well, back in the early eighties, my wife wanted a. They weren’t real expensive, but they were expensive enough. So I looked out, looked around, tried to find what I wanted, and I did find a really nice 78,924 bronze color, low miles on it. It was four or five years old time, and so I bought it. That car stayed in our family until our son actually started driving it.

When he turned 16, [00:02:00] we put 250,000 miles on that car, and that’s how I learned how to work on these because he really couldn’t afford to have the dealer do anything on ’em, and there weren’t a whole lot of mechanics around that would touch them. . So I had to learn myself. I had some background in mechanics anyway, but I just had to learn how these cars were the same and different, and that started the passion that still exists today.

When I started 9 24 s, nine 40 four.com, it was an effort to get the word out basically, and just start to write a little bit about how these cars work, what I’d learned over the decades about. As much as I’d like to say it’s a thriving business and all this, it really isn’t. It’s my passion and my hobby.

I’m a retired law enforcement officer and retired teacher from that. When I retired, it was, now I can spend full-time on doing what I really love to do, which is these cars. So the big question, how many nine 20 [00:03:00] fours or 40 fours have you had over the years? It’s in the several dozens, at least. Many of them have come and gone.

I had one that sold it about, oh, probably eight years ago. The fell that I sold it to about a year ago called me and said, I’m gonna sell the car. If you want it back, you can give me what I paid you for it. You can have it. , which I did immediately. And it turns out that that car was my first 9 24 s special edition.

And so I bought it back from him and on, I’m in the process now of restoring that one, but I had another one. The one that I drive daily is a, uh, 87,924 s. I bought it as a salvage title, total, bought it fixed, it took me a week to fix it because it was an engine fire, so it really wasn’t that badly damaged, but they totaled it.

I fixed it and drove it for a couple of months. The president of our local PCA region wanted to buy it, so I went ahead and sold it to him, and when I signed the title over, I knew [00:04:00] I was making a mistake. Two years later, he called me back and said, I’m gonna sell the car. Do you want it? He, uh, sold it back to me.

It has a name, its name is. Sparky is my buddy. Barky will be with me forever because he was a reject. He was gonna go to the Crusher just because he had a bad repair. Somebody did on a fuel line, it spritzed into the spark. Plug holes fuel and sparks make fire. And that’s what happened. So that’s where he got the name Sparky and we saved it.

But Sparky is a really cool dude and he’s gonna be with me. He’s gone to a lot of shows, gone to a lot of events, and we’re planning on driving to 9 44 Fest next summer. No trailer. I’m driving the whole way. So let’s turn the pages backwards and talk about the history of the 9 24 44 and 9 68 lineage.

Let’s start off with the age old question before we dive into the really technical details here. People will often argue, [00:05:00] is it a Volkswagen or is it a Porsche? Or is it both? So let’s set the record straight. Kevin, you’re an expert on these cars, which is it. It’s an interesting historical issue, and unless you really know what happened in the seventies with these two companies, Volkswagen and Porsche, it’s hard to understand really what happened.

Porsche, even though they make lots of really cool cars, they’re actually an engineering company. For example, Harley Davidson hired Porsche to help them design a couple of motorcycles because they’re an engineering company. That’s what they do. Back then, you could buy a nine 14 from your local Volkswagen dealer, and so they wanted to replace the nine 14 with something that was liquid cool.

Reason being was that water cooled engines had better emissions than the air cooled engines. So Volkswagen had their beetle not being able to meet emissions. [00:06:00] Even the nine 11 was not able to meet emissions. They knew what they were up. So Volkswagen said, we don’t want the nine 14 with its air cooled engine.

We want a water cooled Porsche to sell at our dealerships to replace it with. So they signed a deal and they paid Porsche 50,000 marks to design what we know today as a 9 24. When the car was just about done, this could be legend, it could be true. The guy that’s heading it up died, had a heart attack, killed over.

The incoming folks who took his place said, we really don’t want that car. We want something a little different. We want a front wheel drive car. And so because of that difference, what happened was the Porsche said, yeah, but this is a really good car and we did what you wanted. We designed it with all the off the shelf parts we could use.

But we took your 75 horsepower, four sold two liter, and we made it into a hundred horsepower, or even in [00:07:00] Europe, 125 horsepower, that you could drive it. And it handled well and did all the things it was supposed to do. They gave them 40,000 marks back and bought the. With the idea that at the time VW Audi was going to keep supplying them with the two liter engine, which was an Audi engine and a Porsche head to make it better and off they went, Porsche bought it back from them and immediately started working on their own iteration that we know of today as the nine 40.

But building a brand new car from scratch is tough, and even modifying a car that you already have is tough, especially when we were talking about engines, drive trains and all that. That 10,000 engine limit was something that they really didn’t think that Porsche was gonna sell that many of them. , well, just the na, the naturally aspirated cars.

They sold 120 some thousand of them when they brought the 9 44 [00:08:00] out in North America as an 83 model. They were lined up around the building to buy item. It still had the VW suspension components and the Audi Transac and all that stuff was still there, but it had a Porsche engine and the engine was designed by the same group of engineers who designed the 9 28 engine.

So there is a urban legend that the 9 28 engine cut in half as an I 44 engine. It’s not true. There’s really no interchangeable parts, although some of the part numbers do match up. But the engineers who were building a five liter at the time, a 4.5 liter v8, next thing you know, they’re building a 2.5 liter four cylinder that now they over-engineered the hell out of it.

Unless you’ve ever had one of these engines apart, you don’t realize that drag racers with the 2,500 horsepower V8 S put a girdle on the bottom of the block in order to keep the bottom of the block together when they come off the line because there’s that much stress. The 9 44 [00:09:00] engine has a girdle to holds the crankshaft in place, and there’s 32 bolts that hold a four cylinder, 150 horsepower crank shaft in place.

The bottom ends never go bad, and that’s why, because it’s way over engineer. Porsche kept making the 9 24 for the European and the British market. After we got the 9 44, they quit sending the 9 24 here. Well, in 1985, they’re still making 9 24 s with two liter Audi engines in ’em. And Volkswagen came forward and said, listen, we’re cutting you off.

You can’t have anymore. We’re not selling you that motor anymore. I’m sorry, but we’re. The CEO at the time was Peter Schutz, Peter’s American. In fact, he was from Central Florida. Among other things, he saved the nine 11. They were gonna phase out the nine 11. He said, you can’t do that. But when they got the notification from VW and said, we’re not selling you anymore of these Audi engines, he said, fine.

He told his engineers, figure out a way to put that four cylinder 9 44 engine [00:10:00] into the old 9 24. Shell keep the interior the same. The old what they say, square dash 9 24 interior. Take all that. Leave it as it is, slap the motor in it and call it a day and we’ll call it a nine twenty four s. And the Americans will buy the hell out, which we did.

And that’s where the 9 24 s came from. Now, curiously, in 89, the 9 44 was a 2.7 engine. They board it from a hundred millimeter to 104 millimeter, and that made it a two seven. And then the next iteration was to stroke it and then, and then make it into the three liter. The 89 9 44 engine, they said was 165 horsepower, I think, but it was a lot more torque.

People tend to believe that the horsepower ratings were even higher than that. Porsche built 25 pre-production, 9 24 S’s with the 9 44 oval dash interiors [00:11:00] and the 27, and that would have been a hell of a car, but the exchange rate got all screwed up. They canceled the 9 24 s program in mid-year. In 88 and the 89,924 s never made it to production and they made 25 of ’em.

They crash, tested half of ’em and sold the rest of ’em to employees at the factory. And we don’t think any of them survived till today. And that’s a real shame when you look at the entire history of the 9 44, how many they made over the years, all the improvements in developments that they made over the years, the fact that they made many more nine 40 fours than they ever made nine elevens in that same period of time.

The 9 44 took a financially troubled company and not only brought it into the eighties and nineties with a liquid cooled engine and the front engine rear transmission layout, but also taught [00:12:00] Porsche how to do liquid cooling. And then we end up with the boxer in the 9 96. So it is a huge piece of development history.

For Porsche, when people say, eh, it’s not really a Porsche. Yeah, it’s, it may not have started as a Porsche, but it sure ended up as one. As a side note, when VW had decided not to take this car, they instead built a Chico. A good car on its own, but how many of ’em do you see today? That’s actually brings up a really good point in that it’s an interesting decision making process when you look at VW and Porsche together, because you’re right, the Shareco was the replacement for the 9 24 concept.

But when you think about it from a dollars and cents perspective, it was cheaper for them to produce the Chico because it was built on top of the Mark one golf chassis, which already existed, and they already had Juro on the books designing the golf. He had done the launch of Delta, which is a [00:13:00] very similar car that predates it as well, and then you go, well, here, I’ll pen the Chico really quick.

We’re gonna take the golf and kind of stretch it out and make it into a lift back. It sort of made sense, but then it kind of diverges because that Audi two liter only ended up in a handful of Audi eighties before it was almost immediately replaced by the five cylinder, which is closer to the 9 44 engineering wise.

Again, it’s so sort of intertwined and intermixed in all of this. When you look at it kind of further down the. VW graduated away from that Audi two liter when they developed finally the 1.8 because the golfs and theracos came with the one 16, the one seven. Then finally the one eight, and then the one eight was replaced by the 16 valve, which it took the 9 44 evolution.

How many years to catch up with VW in the 16 valve realm up to 87? Yeah. It sort of feels like this leapfrogging between the two companies. In reality, they were probably sharing the technology back and forth. You would think that they did [00:14:00] share, and at least they were on the same development lines the whole time.

Actually, when they were working on the 9 44, they were trying to figure out what engine to put in it, and they tried, and I don’t remember the brand could have been a Reno or some European V6 that they wanted to put in it. They’re trying to decide if it was gonna be a four cylinder or a six cylinder.

They put a six cylinder in the body of a 9 24. and it was a wonderful performer. However, when they got down to Brass Tack, they couldn’t assemble the car in the factory the way they wanted to because the engine had to come in through the bottom and it wouldn’t fit between the sub-frame rails and there was no way around it.

They had also worked with some bigger four cylinders. I think they had a 2.4 rover or something, and that’s when they decided to go with the 2.54 cylinder and then designed up their engines. But in early development, they really wanted a v6 would’ve been a hell of a car with a v6, but they just [00:15:00] couldn’t shoehorn it in.

That said, you have the VR six that would have fixed, so you know, you kinda look and see how things develop and maybe it was Porsche’s experience in the late seven. where they said, yeah, we can’t shoehorn a V6 in the way we wanna do it. And Volkswagen said, wait a minute, if we close it up a little bit, maybe we can make one that will work.

There’s some interesting stuff. I mean, you, you start looking at the history of these things when you look at 75 to about 90, the engineering is absolutely fabulous during that time period, but the question is, are the sales numbers commiserate to all of that engineering? And, and I would say, yeah, we didn’t get the 9 24 until the 77 model from 76 to 91, which 91 was the last year for the S two, the 9 24 S two Porsche built worldwide, just over 325,009 20 fours, 9 24 s is in nine 40 fours.

Now, that doesn’t include the special race models and all that, which only adds [00:16:00] about all total less than a thousand cars. But we can say 325,000 is pretty close. In the same period from 76 to 91, they sold 217,009 elevens. They bested the nine 11 sales by 50%. Like I say, a friend of mine was a salesman here in Orlando.

When the 9 44 came out, they had a waiting list here for a. For a 9 44. That’s how popular they were. When you look at how the production went with the 9 24, which we look back at the 9 24 here in the United States, at first it was 95 horsepower and then went to a hundred horsepower. They sent 36,009 20 fours to North America between 76 and 82.

That doesn’t include the turbos. The 9 31, the turbo in the US was almost 7,000 turbos. When you look at those numbers, you, you’re approaching 50,000 cars [00:17:00] that we look back at today and say they’re junk. They were really something back then. If you look and see how that worked out. . The 9 44 came out for us in 83.

That was a big deal because the 9 44, let’s face it was a much better car handling wise. The looks were more aggressive and people were really, really, really fired up about, so yeah, it was a big deal. What was the price point back then and, but can we convert that to today’s dollars? The 9 24 in today’s dollars was about 30.

The 9 44 at the time was in the mid twenties in 19, say like 1984, you can get a nicely appointed 9 44 for about 25, 20 $7,000, but at the same time, you could buy a Toyota Corolla for 10. You know, you look and see what the difference was. Yeah, it was in pricey car at the time. What happened with the 9 44 was that as it progressed through the eighties, it got [00:18:00] more and more and more and more expensive to the point where in 89, 90, 91, getting, uh, like an S two, that could be in 19 $90, that could be 70 or $80,000.

That was a lot of money. The nine 60 eights were even more, you could buy a hundred thousand dollars, 9 68 in 19 93, 94. That’s a lot of money. But the nine elevens had. Earlier surpassed a hundred thousand dollars. So it still was cheaper than a nine 11, but the sales figures dropped off. I think because of pricing.

They had a lot of cool stuff. They had a lot of options. They had a lot of good technology in ’em. My feeling is they should have just kept it simple and gone from there. And of course, then the boxer came out with a $40,000 price point. When that happened, it was immediately snapped up because people wanted that kind of a price point to buy a Porsche.

I think they kind of priced their way out over the years, which is why when the [00:19:00] 9 24 s came out in the US in 87, it was 19 9 99, realistically with. The options and all 25,000 in 19 87, 19 88, you can get a 9 24 s with air conditioning and radio and the power stuff you want. But 25 grand was still a lot of money.

I say that Toyota was still 10, $12,000 . Yeah, it was a lot of money. I actually looked at buying a new 180 7 and we’ll get more into buying nine 20 fours and nine 40 fours here in a minute. But a couple more factor fiction questions for you in the history of, of both cars, I remember vividly a lot of magazines saying, especially when the 9 44 Turbo came out, that it was faster than the nine 11, all things being equal.

Was that mostly because of the aerodynamics and how slippery the 9 44 was or was there some sort of other magic to it that it was quicker than the nine 11? The 9 44 Turbo, 9 51 did have a little bit more power. It was better balance, it had better arrow [00:20:00] and it was about a hundred pounds lighter than a nine 11 at the time.

but if you wanna look at and compare like an 86 turbo to an 86 9 11 3 0.2 Carrera, top speed for the 9 44 was 152. The nine 11 was 152. They were dead equal horsepower for the 9 44 was about two 20. The nine 11 Carrera was 2 0 7. The 9 44 went zero to 60 and 5.9, the 9 11 6 0.1, if you look at the published figures, yeah, it was faster.

But the difference between the two cars is night and day because you’re in a 9 44 turbo, especially a new one in 1986. The 9 44 Turbo was more of a luxury car than the 86. 86 Carrera was like a driver’s car. You know, you got in it and it made noises and it was skiddish and it’s handling. I mean, you had to learn how to [00:21:00] drive a nine 11 cause of the weight distribution and all that.

A 9 44, you got in it, it was fairly quiet, had very, very comfortable seats. Although they were the same as nine 11. The cabin was well appointed. It had nice air conditioning, which nine elevens until they went to liquid cooled were not really known for their air conditioning. So, you know, the AC side was, uh, you know, was better.

So you start looking at all those, and they’re just different cars, but to the person who didn’t have a stopwatch, yeah, the nine 11 probably felt a little bit slower. The 9 44 was more competent maybe, but they’re just different cars and the, the a hundred pounds difference in weight is huge. In racing. We talk about one horsepower is 10 pounds.

So if you can eliminate a hundred pounds, it’s like adding 10 horsepower, which makes the 9 44 even a better choice. That’s why they sold a zillion of them, because it was a much, much nicer car. Let’s talk about Mazda versus Porsche. [00:22:00] The RX seven and the 9 44 factor fiction there too. There’s all these rumors about lawsuits and who stole, who’s design, and if you look at the original RX seven versus the 9 24 and the second gen RX seven and the 9 44, they’re very similar.

The legend is that there were a lot of personnel that were traded back and forth between Mazda and Porsche. It wasn’t that they cooperated quite the opposite, but that there were same people were in different parts of the design phases on both cars. That’s the legend. Whether it’s true or not, who knows, but I will say this.

We raced an S C A in the same class with the first generation RX seven s, and they kicked our asses mostly because of top speed. They were just so much faster than we were. Oh. Oh, well that’s kinda the way it was. . You go to a track like Seabring or Daytona where you got long straightaways and you just see ’em come up and back of you and say, well, okay, I’ve lost this spot.

And sure [00:23:00] enough, you know about halfway down the straightaway, there they go. And it’s the way it was. But the nine 40 fours, especially the 9 24 S’s, cuz they’re even lighter, we could get into an infield course or into a twisty part and catch up with the nine 11. and with the RX sevens, when it got to top speed, we just didn’t have it.

I love the 9 24 s and I’m always looking for another one. I had a brief stint of ownership with a non-running 9 24 turbo cause I was sold a bill of goods. What was told to me was just a battery problem was much more than a battery problem. I’ll just leave it at that. So for someone who’s always looking for a 9 24, unless there’s so a 9 44, I’d prefer the lines of the 9 24.

Let’s talk. Some dos and don’ts from a buyer’s standpoint, when you’re looking for a car, are there ones that stay away from ones that are more desirable than others? The things like that? Well, I’ve always got my eye out for the next project to have, or the next one that’s gonna come along like [00:24:00] you. I like the 9 24, the 9 24 shape and the 9 24 lines.

I think it’s cleaner. I like it that it’s lighter and that’s what I raced. I, I really kind of got attached to the 9 24 shape and being that the 9 24 was my first one, kind of got taped to them pretty tightly. That said, the 9 24 s. is the 9 24 body gauges interior look and feel. The whole thing. You get the whole 9 24, the early car, the two liter cars, you get that whole thing, but you get the 9 44 engine for which you can get parts and people know about them.

Where the two liters, I don’t wanna say they’ve pretty much disappeared, but they pretty much disappeared. We don’t see that many of ’em. And when they come up, they’re either basket cases or they’re half taken apart rusted, cuz they’ve been sitting in a field for 10 years, they’re not that many good ones out there.

And finding parts, even things is easy [00:25:00] as main bearings or rod bearings for the engine. It’s just not very easy to. , even though the 9 24 2 liter engine is pretty bulletproof, unless you can get the parts you need, you can’t build it. The fuel injections are the old mechanical fuel injection systems.

They’re easy, but they’re finicky. Things like the fuel distributor, you can rebuild it. I’ve rebuilt several. They all leak. They’re a pain in the butt and it’s unfortunate, but it’s the way it is. So you can get one that’s been professionally rebuilt and hopefully it won’t leak, but they’re really expensive.

The value of a early 9 24 just isn’t there, not now. And I, I have to think we’ve probably passed that prime at this point. There’s one or two that come up with once in a while with 7,000 miles on ’em and this and that, and they’ll come up on one of the auction sites and they’ll pull 12, $13,000 to get one to that condition’s gonna cost you at 25 or 30.

A restoration just doesn’t make sense. . That’s why the [00:26:00] 9 24 s makes all the sense in the world. Cause you get the same look and feel and all that, but at the same time, you don’t get the headaches that come with that two liter engine and that setup parts availability is the big question when it comes to what are you gonna get?

When I say availability, I say both. Can you get it? And then how much is it gonna cost to get it? For the most part, the early nine 40 fours, the series one cars from 83 to mid 85 and the 9 24 s share a lot of the early 9 24 suspension pieces and rack and steering and all this stuff that you would have.

And there was a billion of ’em out there. So used parts are pretty easy to find. I kind of like those cars because they’re much simple. Than say an S two. The most complicated computer on my, on Sparky is, is a radio. The computer that controls the engine. You could probably put on a chip the size of your toenail, [00:27:00] but it’s in a box, you know, with the best eighties technology you could buy.

There’s still a lot of analog that goes with that. You know, I like having the availability of computer control, but it’s very simple computer control, but it works really well. There’s a handful of sensors on the engine that it reads, and it’s all. . As you get into the more recent cards, the series 2, 9 40 fours, the S two s, they get more and more complicated.

Porsche was really good for pushing the envelope on things like the 9 44 s two s, have things on them that for the day were revolutionary today. We look at it and go, man, there’s gotta be a better way to do that because the electronics were primitive. The mechanicals in some of these things, some of the oil fed adjusters and things like that, the variable valve timing stuff and all was by today’s standards archaic.

Trying to get that stuff to work right can be problematic sometimes. So I like to stick with the series 1, 9 44 or 9 24 s [00:28:00] just because parts availability is there. I can buy a control arm for an 86 9 44 aluminum control arm with the the glued in ball. Is 250 bucks aside, I can buy a control arm for an 87 9 24 s with the ball joint and with new rubber bushings in place for less than 50 bucks.

If that’s the case, I would rather go with something that I can, for one, I can. Work on myself and for two is not gonna break the bank. 500 versus a hundred is a lot of money, especially when you’re talking about a car that in most cases, you’re gonna buy today for five or six grand, maybe 10 at the outside.

You’re not gonna put big, big, big, huge money into it. So I like the earlier cars, but when you’re looking for one, what you wanna look for is things like history. Is there a history to the. Is there good paperwork on the car? Is there a good record of for one mileage? Cause the odometers are all broken at one time or another, so [00:29:00] you really don’t know how many miles they have on ’em.

So if you have a car fax or if you have a stack of receipts, I just sold a uh, 9 44 and 84, 9 44 that I bought from the original owner and he had every receipt of everything from oil changes on up. So I was able to track the mileage and know that the mileage was correct, and that makes for a big deal.

Another area to look at is paint work. None of the paint after 30 some years is gonna be perfect, but you want to not have to have the car painted if you could help it. It’s expensive. You can sometimes be as much as you pay for the car to get it painted. Even if you’re gonna do the work yourself, you’re gonna paint it in the garage.

it’s still expensive. Paint is a very expensive thing, so you look for decent paint and you might be able to clay bar and work it and bring it back to a presentable level. The front seats, the driver’s seat always has split scenes. A decent upholstery shop can fix that for a hundred dollars or so, but you can also get reupholstery kits.

The [00:30:00] front seats, 400 bucks. You get brand new reupholstery for both seats. You take the old upholstery off, put the new on. It’s not difficult and it looks great. There are some things that you can do. Obviously, if it needs everything, you’re gonna do the maintenance that has been neglected, cuz that’s why you’re buying it is because somebody couldn’t keep up the maintenance or didn’t keep up the maintenance.

So you’re gonna do timing belts and then you know, you do all that kind of stuff and check the brakes and change the fluids and all that and you’re gonna put some money into that. , you just figure that into your purchase price. And you know, a lot of ’em will come to me, I’ll, I’ll pick up and they’ll have really good tires and then, you know, they’ll put in the head, you know, tires are great and go look at ’em.

And they’re 13 years old, so you don’t really wanna go driving around much on 13 year old tires if you can help it. So there are a lot of things to just to look at and see what’s what you wanted though, see through a good presentation and you wanna make sure you check everything. At this point, there are steering wheel that grab the wheel and it goes up and down [00:31:00] about a quarter inch in the column.

There’s a plastic bushing that costs $5, that takes about an hour to replace. That fixes that. , but it can take 500 bucks off the price of the car as you’re negotiating, you know? Well, the steering is loose. So there are a lot of things that you can do when you’re looking at these, you know, tires, wheels, brakes, what has to be done to make it presentable?

You’re never gonna get one that’s Concord perfect. It just doesn’t happen. But you can get ’em presentable so that you can go to a local event. You go to the grocery store, I take Sparky to the grocery store. you can, cause it has a hatch. Rarely get out of the parking lot without somebody coming over wanting to look at the car.

To me, that works out well. I just enjoy that. What should we be looking for? What are some of the known common issues with these cars, and then what are some things that need to be revisited or fixed immediately? I know you mentioned the steering column, you know the breaks and things like that. Things that can go wrong on any car that’s been sitting around for, for several years.

[00:32:00] But before you answer that, I’m just curious, how come you should stay away from the 9 24 turbo? You’ve touched on the turbo a couple times, but it doesn’t seem like it’s, you know, a car that you favor too much. It’s not that I don’t favor it in comparison. This is simply, you know, in my cico mind, uh, 9 31, which is the 9 24 tur.

Makes about 150 horsepower and 9 24 s. NA makes about 150 horsepower. The suspension look and feel the driving experience and all is almost exactly the same. However, the 9 31 engine, while it is not a bad engine, getting parts and getting it to work properly and all is extremely difficult, and it can get extremely expensive when you start replacing the turbo parts and having parts rebuilt that you can’t actually get anymore.

Things like the headers on those cars [00:33:00] crack. You can weld ’em all you want and you can’t get ’em to seal, you can’t get ’em to work, right? There’s just a myriad of issues with the 9 31 when it comes to performance. I can get the same thing with uh NA 9 24 s. So that’s kind of why I’ve stayed away from ’em and people I know who have had them and have them now.

They’re always fixing something. There’s always something up. There’s always a a problem. And even my friends 9 24 Car gt, which was a 9 31, it had some serious issues that needed engine out and a lot of replacement of things and all, and I just, that’s something that I just don’t need that kinda aggravation in any of these cars.

The I 44 engine is an interference engine. If you break the timing belt, you’re gonna bend valve most of them. Exhaust valve, if you’re lucky and it breaks at an idle, you’ll bend one, maybe two valves. I had one guy brought me a car, it just quit running. Well, he had it around 6,000 RPM when the timing belt broke and it bent every [00:34:00] valve.

intake and exhaust, that thing was destroyed. Things like the pistons, rods, the crank, they all went in the dumpster because you, you don’t know what kind of damage it did. If you don’t have an actual history, if the timing belt’s been on there more than a couple, three, four years or more than 30 or 40,000 miles that you can document when you buy one, just replace it.

When you’re doing that, everybody says, well, you do the time build, do the water pump at the same time. Water pumps are cheap. You’re there, you’re looking at it. Change the water pump, especially if you’re in the south like we are here. It gets hot here in the summer. We put 160 degree thermostat in it, so it opens up a little sooner and that way we can keep the car a little bit cooler.

The front of the engine also has four seals on it. Crank seal, balance, shaf seals, cam, seal that. With the seals and all in it, it’s a hundred bucks. Replace them too. You replace all that stuff, seal up the front of the motor. Timing bell’s not gonna be an issue. You’re all set. Make sure you get a time back properly.

Make sure you get the balance [00:35:00] shaft time properly. If you off one or two teeth on the balance shafts, it’ll shake like the balance. Shafts aren’t even there very violent. So you wanna make sure you get all that done. Come across a few lately, but very few of ’em have the original clutch disc. But a clutch job, if you’re going to have it done at a shop, can be eight to 10 hours of labor, plus six or $800 in parts.

So you’re looking at two grand to get a clutch done. And if it’s the original rubber clutch, it’s 30 some years old, it’s gonna break. So keep that in. That said, looking at a car to buy and it’s got a recent clutch job on it. You’ve got the paperwork on it, that’s all good. When it also comes to a car that’s been sitting for a while, the clutch slave cylinder tends to go bad.

You replace the master and the slave together. Those two parts have gone up lately. They’re in the 150 to hundred $80 range each, but you replace both of ’em because they never get bled to bleed the clutch [00:36:00] slave to do it right, you really have to take starter out to get to the bleeder, and so nobody ever does it.

So all the debris and all the, the crap from the fluid and all, maybe they change the fluid, bleed the brakes, but they don’t touch the clutch. All that debris goes down in there and eventually fails the the slave. So you have that going on Common. Everything else is pretty well straightforward. It’s normal car stuff.

Do the lights work? Does the AC work? Are the tires okay? Do the brakes stop the car? When you turn the wheel, does it actually steer? I mean, these are all the things, you know, you look at the rear shocks, you can’t see the front struts, but you, you know, you can’t see what kind of condition they’re in, but you can see the rear.

and if they look like they’ve been there since the Carter administration, then you probably need to replace ’em. There are two choices when it comes to shocks. There are K y B shocks that are inexpensive about a buck and a quarter. You get off four corners, do those. There are good street driving around, going back and forth [00:37:00] to work shock.

Or you can spend $800 and go to Coney or Bilstein and get a performance shock. You can upgrade with bigger sway bars if you need to, or you can put coilovers on the front fairly inexpensively. The rear to change the torsion bars is a pain, highly, highly, uh, labor intensive, so you may not want to do that.

The front suspension is where all the magic goes. You don’t need to have a limited slip transaction. People say, you know, you gotta have it, gotta have, unless you’re going and doing track days or racing, you don’t need a limited slip. So don’t worry about it. Come out of a turn and you lift the inside rear wheel without limited slip, you’re gonna spin that wheel.

I’ve done it. I’ve been on track days with open differentials, and it doesn’t really make all that much difference. You know, the things like the paint and the upholstery and you, and you wanna make sure that the lights all work and the gauges all work. If there’s anything weird going on with the gauges, you wanna look into that.

Oil pressure should be at an idle between two and three bar and between [00:38:00] four and a half and five. At rpm, you wanna make sure it’s not leaking anywhere. Rear main seal is like doing a clutch, so getting to it is tough. All in all, they’re pretty bulletproof and they’re pretty reliable. I would not shy away from any of these cars that I have brought back to life, especially my special edition or Sparky.

I’d drive across country tomorrow no problem. They’re just that good and that reliable. So on the other side of that, there’s a bunch of special models in there to include the 9 24 s special edition 44 s two s. People gravitate towards the turbo cars. Are there some other ones in there like that we should be aware of?

There’s even these Champaign Rose, metallic, or Special Rose edition of the 9 44. Some of those, well there are some special editions and Porsche was really good for special editions. They took the model from Harley Davidson in some cases, even with their nine elevens where you take things off and then you charge more money for it.

[00:39:00] Harley had a uh, a model. They took all the chrome off of it. They took a lot of other stuff off of it, and they charged you an extra five grand. It doesn’t make sense to me, but it’s a business model that seems to work. If you think of some of the nine 11 special editions, they would take out the interior stuff, door panel, sound, insulation, all this stuff, and then charge you twice as much for it.

You know, whatever works. I mean, that’s all good. There were several special edition, nine 20 fours. There was a seabring edition, there’s a martini edition, there was a special edition in 79. And all these are great, but they’re disappearing, finding one that’s in fairly original condition. Cause some of them had some really special stuff on it that you can’t.

I mean, you just can’t do it. I mean, the martini edition is one of my favorites, 77. It was a white body with the martini stripes on the side and martini stripe down the hood and the, and the roof. They had white wheels and the carpet was bright red. I mean, bright red wasn’t maroon, it was red, and the seats were [00:40:00] black with blue piping and red accents.

And you can’t get that interior anymore. You can’t get a replacement unless you have it custom made, which now you start talking about a lot of money. So if you find a martini that’s out there, most of the time they’re just worn out and you need to do everything. And you’re gonna put 20,000 or $25,000 into it and it’s gonna be worth.

So the earlier special editions really don’t carry that same kind of value that you would. In another later mop, the Silver Rose edition of the 9 44 is absolutely beautiful car. The silver rose was a silver color with a hint of raspberry. What they said, they only made a few of them, but the Silver Rose had a GLAD interior.

That was kind of a gray, maroon and red plaid that was absolutely be. , you can get that material as a replacement. But again, if you [00:41:00] get the material, then you have to have an upholster actually make the seats, put that all in and do the door panels and all it, it costs a lot of money. The Silver Rose editions, they didn’t make very many of ’em.

I don’t know what the number was, but I think it was less than a thousand. If you find one in really good condition, they’re a lot of money. They’re big, big, big bucks. But it’s one of the few special editions that you can find, and it’s a nice turbo. S you know, the best you can get in a turbo, in a unique color combination with unique interior, which is what they did with most of their special edition cars.

They would take the base car and they would make it a little bit better and then make it. Fantastic and charged a lot of money for it. The 9 24 s in 87, they sold a lot of ’em. They sold something in the neighborhood of, I wanna say 13,000 total. The first run in 88 was 980 special edition. The first 500 of them that came off the line came to the us.

Now, this [00:42:00] special edition was kind of a club sport sort of thing. They were all black. Very few of them had sunroofs. It seems like the later it got in the production run, the more that one would pop up with a factory sunroof in it, but it wasn’t supposed to have a sunroof. It had crank windows, plastic manual mirrors, kind of like out of a golf.

Even the passenger side mirror was an option. The little cassette tray in the middle between the front seats. They didn’t put that in there because. It was extra weight. We have to save weight, but the black with the maroon carpet and then gray with maroon pinstripe cloth seats is probably one of the nicest interiors that you’ll see in a Porsche.

The cloth that they used in the seats was really thin. It was really light and it didn’t last. Even in cars that have been garaged and didn’t have many miles on ’em, they still, this stuff just fell apart. But that cloth is also available in the aftermarket. You can buy the cloth and have it made into your car.

but they also put bigger [00:43:00] sway bars. They went wild. All the 9 24 S’s had six by 15 wheels. They put seven inch wheels on the back. Ooh, they put a little bit bigger tire. They put two 1560s all the way around, even though the, the wheels were two different sizes. Same tire went in front rearer, but with the bigger sway bars, it was lower by about a half an inch.

They put Coney Nonadjustable sports shops, heavier springs, 250 pound springs on the front, one or two millimeter, bigger portion bars in the rear. They handled really, really, really well. I have one, took a lot of soul searching, but I decided to sell, gonna be up for sale, and it has 29,000 miles. , it’s almost all original, but the interior fell apart on it, so I had to redo the interior to redo an interior on a special edition.

9 24 s is about two grand, but these cars have more value, so it’s okay. The engines are the same. They’re 160 horsepower. There’s a 9 44 engine, but they do handle really well, you know, a little bit lower, better [00:44:00] suspension, all that. They handled quite nicely and they’re very comfortable. They have all the air conditioning and all that stuff that you want, and they were about $26,000 in 1988 out of the 500 that came to the us.

Were thinking that there may be. 200 or 225 on the left out there. I am actually in the process now. I have a friend of mine who’s putting together a, um, online registry for the special edition 9 24, so we can try to track these cars and figure out where they are. I would say that being obsessed with these 9 24 S’s is something that I do.

I have 6, 9 24 s special editions here at my shop. I did buy one up in the floor of Panhandle about a year ago. That is a 9 24 s special edition. with the automatic transmission. We believe they may have made a dozen with an automatic. Now the automatics are not great. Three speed automatic, they’re [00:45:00] not fun at all.

But to have a special edition car anyway and then have the automatic transmission there, and this car needs everything, but it’s complete. Everything’s there. That’s a project down the road for me and I’ll probably keep that one just cause it’s so weird. But I’ve got these special editions and if I see one and it’s reasonably priced, I buy one, I’ll buy it and bring it home.

So the special edition 9 24 s is worth about twice of what a regular 9 24 s would be worth. And they’re going up as they get more and more rare for a stock as delivered model. If it’s been modified or anything, it drops the price. But the special editions, the silver Rose, the 9 24 s special editions, they’re gaining value and they’re not that many of ’em out there.

It’s a good thing to have if you can find one. And then I could drive my cars. We took mine. I took it on a trailer. I live in central Florida. We towed out to the Dakota regions to Rapid City a year ago and participated with them in a weekend, drive through the mountains. It was great. [00:46:00] Had the Special Edition.

Went out to uh, 9 44 Fest the next weekend. In Ohio and went to Blowing Rock North Carolina the next weekend to a PCA event there. I always marvel at going to these events, especially the PCA events, and people look at my car and say, what is that? I’ve never seen one of those had one guy peeking into the hatch and saying, as the engine in the back

So, you know, it’s, it’s kind of cool. It’s kind of fun. There was always a poster on my wall that I will never forget, which is the Hugo. 9 24 Carrera gt. So the question is about that car being the rarest of the rare. Is it like the Audi Sport Quattro or the launch of Delta or things like that where they had to build ham allegation versions of the race cars?

So do street versions of the 9 24 Carrera GT exist? Yes, they do. They made 406 of them, and most of them still exist, although they exist in museums, rarely see one out there in the wild. Although a buddy of mine here [00:47:00] locally had one, he bought it. He drove it for two or three years, doubled his money on it.

I got to drive it and it was magic. The thing was wonderful. . But one of the things that you can do these days, and I’ve done a few of them, is you take a 9 24 s, which is the same body as the early 9 24, and you buy the flares for the rear and the 9 44 front fend, cuz that’s what they were. And a fiberglass nose piece and a hood scoop to put on it and you turn it into a career GT replica.

And I’ve built several of them. If you wanna put real Fs on it, you can, but they’re pretty expensive. So you get replicas and you make a lookalike 9 44 engine air conditioning. radio set up with your tethered into your phone and all that with a four point roll bar and race seats and here you go. They were great.

They look the part, they look really cool, and people look at it and go, now that’s something [00:48:00] I’ve never seen. But the 406 that they made were four racing so that they could actually race that car and GT turned into the gtr, the gts. The other one that people don’t really know about is the 9 24. Normally aspirated de production.

S C C A car. It’s a Porsche kit car. You got the kit. From Porsche and they sent all the stuff that you needed and you turned it into an S C C A DE production race card. There were 16 of them total Al Holbert in 1980 and 81. They went out and kicked ass in S E C A with this car. And what’s funny is that you, there’s actually a video on YouTube of the entire race final at Road Atlanta where you have the 9 24 de production cars going against triumphs and such of the day there’s a TRR seven and T R six racing with them and the Porsche is just killing them.

The [00:49:00] commentators going, yeah, this 9 24 is like the latest engineering. It’s like the best thing ever. And it’s, it’s really kinda funny to hear that. But it was an NA car. It was nationally aspirated. It wasn’t a turbo. They made 16 of them. At the, uh, Porsche Works reunion two years ago up in, uh, mill Island.

One of the original ones was there. Of course, I got to crawl all over and take all kinds of pictures of it, but cool. Race car. Early on you mentioned things about, you know, the development of the 9 24 and 9 44 where they talked about putting six cylinders in there and things like that. But it begs the question, and I’ve always wanted to do this, and I’ve seen it done like once, which is a one eight turbo swap from a later Volkswagen in a 9 24.

And on top of that, we’ve seen all these renegade V8 swaps. So what are your thoughts on taking some of these well-built, well handling cars and putting different power plants in ’em? Well, I’ve done a couple of VAs with LS motors, in my opinion. They’re undriv. I met a guy out in [00:50:00] Houston at a track day. He had a twin turbo LS, 650 horsepower.

He knew how to drive it. He could actually drive the car. I don’t have that kind of time to dedicate to learning how to drive. A monster like that just comes down to it. If you’re gonna do a 350 horsepower LS one, those you can drive, but there is a big weakness and it comes down to the engineering. You could put the LS in.

It’s similar in weight to a 9 44 turbo motor, so you’re not losing handling or anything. But what you do have going on is the gearing in the transaxle, a 9 44 turbo transaxle that is in good shape. Can handle the torque and the horsepower. The legend is that a Porsche transactional can take twice the horsepower that it was originally mated to.

So if you have a 300 horsepower engine on a transactional, it can take 600 horse. So that’s not really an issue. The problem is that when you’re going 70 miles [00:51:00] an hour down the in, In your turbo and I 44, your I 24 s, you’re tacking 36, 3800 rpm LS motors don’t like that. They like 1700 rpm, 70 miles an hour.

Because of that, that LS is just singing the whole time. I have to think it’s probably not good for it. You know, not as a car that you’re gonna drive three or four times a week and go to the grocery store. It’s probably not a good idea. When you put all that together, it’s like, yeah, I’m, I don’t think I’m gonna do, plus the expense, the kit, all the stuff you need, you’re gonna spend seven or $8,000 and then you gotta have an engine.

You gotta find a gearbox that’ll handle it. I mean, there’s a lot that goes into it and you’ll, you’ll never see that money back again. That’s for. . But like I say, I’ve done a couple, I’ve driven a few. I’ve drove one on track and it’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but I like driving my cars. I like to be able to get in my car and drive it wherever, whenever.

And a VA [00:52:00] conversion just isn’t the way to go. Now, you may have seen, and I may have this wrong, but I think it’s Ma Motorworks in Atlanta, and they’re doing 1.8 turbo conversion, and they are. I’ve not seen one personally and I have not driven one, but they weigh nothing that One Eight Turbo has. With just a chip, you can get close to 300 horsepower.

It weighs 60% of a turbo motor. It fits almost entirely behind the front axle, so it brings the weight back even farther. It’s a good, dependable. You know, they say, well, yeah, you can tune one up and you can get 600 horsepower out of it. If I could have one with 300 horsepower, that’s all you need and the transmission will be happy, the car will be happy.

And yeah, so that is a good alternative I think, to the VA conversion. Plus the V8 really fills up the engine department. That one eight does not. You have lots of room to do things. I also belong to the 9 [00:53:00] 24 owners group in Great Britain. Those people are crazy for the two liter nine 20 fours. They have great events and all this, and they’re just a wonderful group and they do all kinds of stuff with different engines.

In their cars. They do four cylinder V6 S rover engines, V8 S, small V8 S cause they don’t have, you know, the monster V8 s we have. But they do all kinds of things and one of the things I noticed about ’em, they’re not scared of fabricating plates and adapters and motor mounts and all. They just make whatever they want and make it work.

And that’s really a cool thing. So I kind of keep my eye on them too and, and see what’s going on over there. But the one eight Turbo conversion looks to be probably the next big thing when it comes to engine swap. So one other technical questions since we’re talking about motors. Can you explain the whole floating cylinder design that the 9 24 s and the 9 44 share?

It’s strange cuz when you first open up an engine, you’ve never done one of these engines before. What you’re used to seeing is a solid [00:54:00] block with holes building. You just think of it that way, where when you open this up, . You see a case that’s open and the cylinders are sticking up inside the case and all the area around it is cooling jacket, which is kind of cool.

That’s kind of a neat thing because you get a lot more volume of coolant through the engine than you would in say, a standard Toyota drill holes in the block sort of thing. Because of that design, the cylinders can regulate their temperature a lot better. They’ve got so much fluid around them that they’re able to cure any hotspots.

At least that’s what I’ve been told. Now, the other part of the 9 44 cylinder system is that the inside of the cylinders and the pistons are coded with something called nico. It’s got some other names too, but you know, Nico is basically nickel silicone and worked so well. Of course in the nineties, Germany, the government.

[00:55:00] outlaw it, so they can’t use it anymore. But that is why the 9 44 blocks, the cylinders tend not to wear like you find with other engines. I have had engines with 150,000 miles on ’em where the cylinders are in stock spec, no boring, no sleeping, none of that stuff, and not even recoding. Put a very, very, very light hone just for the new rings, put it all back together, get the head redone, and off you go.

It’s an amazing system, but the way that they built it, I have to think that their engineers were thinking nine 11 pistons sticking out. You put the cylinder over the top of the piston and then you put the head on top. I’m thinking that that was their model they were going after and they. , they have a box that needs cylinders in it.

So you have a box and then you glue the cylinders down inside of it. I mean, that’s the only way I can, I kind of think of it. I’ve heard that there’s an Achilles heel to this design, and this goes back to us talking about known problems and issues with these cars. It stems from if they sit for a long time, not running, because there is [00:56:00] so much surface area of the head gasket touching water because the water jackets are so much larger than a conventional engine that the head gaskets tend to blow.

Almost just looking at them now, is that truth or is that fiction? I’ve not seen that, except in turbos. Normally when a head gasket goes on a 9 44 turbo, it’s because they’ve changed the waist gate or they’ve changed the turbo or both, and now they’re pushing a lot more pressure than they should be and they blow the head gasket on the other end of that, I had an 83, 9 44 with 110,000 miles on it had been well cared for.

Paint was good, the interior was good, you know, just needed some updated maintenance for some reason. And I gotta think it was a head issue that I did a leak down and couple of the valves seemed like they were, needed the head done. So I pulled the head on it and the head gasket, as you said, where it was touching, the water was rusted through the head gasket itself was [00:57:00] a rusty mess.

Okay. It still ran well. It. Compression, what you’re saying is probably true in some cases. It is not what I’ve seen as being normal. If this thing would run with this rusty head gasket, I’d never seen anything like it, and I pulled it off the block and I’m, I’m looking at ’em, holding it up to the light and seeing, you know, looking through it.

There’s no way this car should run. And it ran well, got the head done, put it all back together, and it’s still out there running today. Five or six years ago, guys still driving it today. So Kevin, you mentioned in the beginning too how there was a lot of back and forth between the Volkswagens and the Porsches during this time period, whether it was the nine 14 or the 9 24, even the 9 44 in some respects.

You talked about the availability of parts, how much cheaper it is to own and operate a 9 24 and 24 s versus a 9 44. Are there even some cheaper ways to maintain these cars? Is there things that you can cross-match against the Volkswagen parts, been maybe from a Chico or a GTI that you could still even pick up on Rock Auto that would be a [00:58:00] cheaper alternative to the, you know, the Porsche branded part as you’re trying to maintain these?

Or are there some tips and tricks? For making ownership of the vehicles even cheaper. Well, there’s not a lot of crossover that you can say. Go to the Chico list and get the control arm from Charco, from Porsche. Where the difference is is if you have to buy a genuine Porsche part box for the part to come in and then you’re looking at huge, huge difference.

With Sparky, I needed a new wiring harness cause the engine wiring harness was burned. One of the reasons they told this in 2015, this is the wiring harness was $2,600 from Porsche. And when you start putting in all the other rubber stuff and everything from the Porsche parts list, the parts bill was over $7,000.

And in 2015 that’s about what the car was worth. Immediately they totaled, of course I’ve got parts cars, so I just pulled the harness off another car and this and that and I was able to cobb it together, use some new parts. But for the most part I took stuff off other cars. [00:59:00] Yeah, it was at one point that you could go and cross breed another car, but you mentioned Rock Auto with Rock Auto and even Pelican Parts and all these other places that are good parts suppliers for us, they’re all getting their parts from the same folks.

Unless you’re getting a genuine Porsche parts box to go. , the prices are the same with my 78,924. I went down to the local battery shops. I needed a battery and there was, you know, local shop here and the guy looked it up and he says, you want the VW battery or the Porsche battery? The Porsche battery number and the VW battery number were exactly the same, but the Porsche battery was quite as much.

That really doesn’t happen anymore. You buy a control arm from Rock Auto and it’s a control arm for a golf. It’s a control arm for a rabbit, it’s a control arm for aco, it’s a control arm for a 9 24, a 78 9 24, or an 87 9 24. It’s all the same. It’s the same part, same part number, same price. And that’s a good thing for us.

[01:00:00] Cause we don’t have to go searching for all that junk anymore. Trying to find what’s what, Brad, let’s switch gears. Let’s talk about the future of ownership of a 9 24 and all the cool things you can do with it to start. I mean, you, you gotta get into one first before you can think of all that stuff.

You’re right. And I was looking earlier today and personally I think people have lost their damn minds because there was an 87,924 s on Autotrader that somebody wanted $36,000. To me, that seems like a bit much, but is that what the market price is for one of these cars these days? Yeah, he’s an idiot.

they’ll never sell for that much. If you see a car on, bring a trailer or P car market, an 87,924 s, really clean, low miles and good records and all that stuff, it might go for 20, maybe more like probably 16 or 17, and that’s high end. That’s as much as it goes. I have sold a few rescues that I’ve done, and again, when I do a [01:01:00] rescue, it’s not a full restoration or anything.

It looks decent. Everything works the way it’s supposed to. The interiors aren’t falling apart, the gauges aren’t hanging out of the dashboard. It’s a decent driver level car. A 9 24 s, 87, 10 grand is a good price. A 9 44 is gonna command a little bit more. If it’s got an automatic, it’s probably gonna go down.

by as much as 20 or 30% used to be. We couldn’t give away an automatic. These days the automatics have, uh, seen a little bit of resurgence and I’ve had a couple of ’em here that I’ve picked up and sold around town. As much as I hate to admit it, they’re really kind of nice . But when you get on the interstate and you start going 70, 75 miles an hour, they’re tacking above 4,000 rpm.

Cause that three speed gearing just doesn’t work. If you’re in 1984, the best you’re doing is 60 miles an hour. They’re great, they’re wonderful, but you get above 60 and they, they get a little scary, but it’s [01:02:00] still, it’s a 9 44 and if you can’t drive a five speed, that’s what you got. That’s what you do.

You know, it’s just the way it. A decent 9 44, 5 speed, 12, 13,000. Really, really nice. Great paint Fook. Good options. You know, sports seats and that can, you can get 17, 18. I see cars that pop up that are asking prices of seven, eight, 9,000 and the paint’s terrible. The interiors are falling apart and it hasn’t been serviced in 10.

No way. That’s a three or $4,000 car all day. However, six or seven years ago, that was a $750 car. You’re gonna have to put money into it just to drive it. So that’s kind of where the values are today. And you’re right, people have gone crazy from these cars. And if you’re in the kind of business I am where you’re rescuing and restoring, it’s like, yeah, this is great.

I mean, it depends. We’ve seen 9 24 S’s on brig, a trailer and such go for 2020 2000. That there’s no way, but online auctions, that’s what happens. And from the conversation we’d be having so [01:03:00] far, you’ve mentioned several times low mileage options, but also you said the car’s got service records. If it’s been maintained, if you do those immediate things that need to be taken care of, you shouldn’t shy away from a high mileage 9 24 either.

So you can pretty much go in any direction. It just depends on, I guess, how much elbow grease you wanna put it into it. Yeah, and that’s the thing is it’s, you gotta look at the total picture. You can’t just say, well, it’s got 140,000 miles on, I’m not interested. If it’s been driven regularly and it’s been maintained regularly and you have records on it, you know, compression and leak down tests will tell you everything you need to know about the engine.

In most cases, it’s got good compression, it’s not good valves aren’t leaking. Hell, you know, go for it. , you know, you may still have to do some things to update it and fix the little things that are wrong. For the most part. Yeah, just go for it. Above 150, I start getting a little leery because like they say in, in the aviation industry, the airframe starts to get a little nasty.

You, you look for bends, you look for door gaps that aren’t [01:04:00] lining up, things like that. And then you see what you can do about that. But for the most part, under 150,000 miles, none of that. When I’m ready to buy another one, obviously I’m just gonna call you and I’m just gonna say, what do you have available or what do you know of in the market?

But for your average Joe who doesn’t have direct line to Kevin Duffy, they don’t want to go to bring a trailer. What is a good resource? Where can people go to find a reasonably priced car from someone who’s not a complete crazy person? The go-to place these days, as much as I hate to admit, it’s Facebook marketplace, in that you have that price point car, the under 10,000.

Needs a little work car. And so there’s been a lot of good deals that have popped up there. I used to go around Craigslist quite a bit, but not anymore. I just don’t trust them anymore. So word of mouth has a lot to do with it. The Porsche Club had a reputation for decades that, you know, the 9 24, 9 44 people need not apply, and that’s not true.

I go to these events with my cars, [01:05:00] people crowd around it. Either they’ve never seen one up close because they’re so old, or I get, I had one of these in college, I had one of these, my first Porsche was one of these, and, and it was a great car and I wish I’d never sold it. , so you get that kind of stuff too.

But just going and asking around, Hey, you know, I’m looking for a 9 44. What can I, can I find, you know, the other thing is that there are Facebook groups for nine 40 fours. 9 24 Ss. I belong to probably 10 or 15 of ’em, and there’s always people buying and selling and plus there’s a lot of advice. The one thing though, that I caution folks about is that if you are adverse to picking up a screwdriver or a wrench, you don’t need to buy one of these cars because when you start paying people to do all the work, it’s going to quickly outs, strip the budget very fast.

that said, I mean, you’re not going to, unless you’ve got the facilities and the tools and the knowledge, you’re not gonna do your own clutch. Maybe not even do your own timing bill. You can do all the other little [01:06:00] things that come up on Jack stands in the driveway, and there’s a lot of reference. There’s a lot of help.

There’s a lot of videos, there’s a lot of everything to try to learn how to do what you do with basic tools. You really don’t need anything special. You know, you can replace your own starter. You can place your own shots. You can even do your struts in your driveway. There’s enough YouTube on there that you figured out that said, these are old cars.

The newest 9 44 S two is 32 years old. That’s the newest one you can get your hands on. And as we say, you’re one broken bolt away from a three hour job turning into a three week job. And that’s any car, I don’t care, Forche or not. Mm-hmm. . When we open our gaze a little bit and we think about the 9 24 and 9 44 for more than just cruises and shows.

We wanna do something fun with this car, let’s say autocross, or even using it on the B roads in a spirited way, or we want to take it to a de, or even to your point, there’s some 9 44 cup cars [01:07:00] still out there. There’s 9 24 de prepared cars out there that you can still race in S E C A today. There’s classes for them.

You have raced nine 40 fours and nine 20 fours yourself. Tell us all about that. What does it take to get it to that level? What are the things you gotta do? Expectations? What do they like to drive at that limit? The one thing about the 9 24 9 44 series is that they do handle really well. There are real drivers’ car.

In thinking about how cars handle and how suspensions work and how cars turn and all on a track, there are three axes that go through a car. Front to rear is a roll axis. It rolls left and right. You have a yaw axis that goes straight down through the middle of the car from top to bottom. And that’s where the car turns.

You have a pitch access, which goes through the center of the car. It either pitches forward or backwards. Okay? So you have all three of those, and where they meet is called the center of gravity in an I 44. That center of gravity is in the tunnel at your hip. . [01:08:00] So when you say, when I’m on track, I can feel where the car’s doing, where it’s going, and what it’s up to in my ass.

That’s true because that’s where the center of gravity is. All the rotation is going on within two or three inches of your butt, and so you know where the car’s gonna go. You feel it. I had a stock 9 24 s, stock tires, street tires, up at Robling Road in Savannah, early on. That’s probably been 20 years. We drove through a hurricane to get to the track, which is what you do when you have diseases.

Like we have drove through a hurricane, got to the track the next morning with the, the end of the hurricane was leaving, it was still, the track was wet and it was still some rain. We opened the track, you know, people were saying, well, I don’t know if I want to go out there in the rain. I don’t want to, you know, spin my car and hit something or we don’t wanna get it dirty or whatever.

Cause I’d never been on track in the rain. And I said, okay, well I’m gonna take my car and I’m gonna go out there in the rain. I’m just gonna see what happens. And so I went out there and drove like grandma hitting the brakes halfway down the straightaway. I mean, I was scared to death, but [01:09:00] you know, the car just gonna go skidder off into the sunset and every lap.

I went a little bit faster, a little bit more aggressive, a little bit more break, little bit harder just doing all that stuff. And by the time the session was over in eight or nine laps, I had come down to within a couple of seconds of my dry lap time. In that car because they handle so well and they’re so predictable.

And as a de car, we see these folks come to our regions des and they’ll show up with a, uh, 2020 1 9 11 turbo. And they’ve never driven anything faster than a Toyota Corolla. They’ll go a hundred twenty five hundred, thirty, a hundred forty miles an hour down straightaway, and the rest of the track, they’ll go 30 miles.

A 9 44 will teach you how to drive. Because one of the things about these cars is they’re old enough that they don’t have all the things that make you into a hero. I had a boxer for about a year. It was a great car, loved it. Had it up at [01:10:00] Rolling Road in Savannah on two occasions in the middle of a turn, it saved me too aggressive, too hot back end, started to come out.

The car fixed it for me. To me, that makes me a hero. But actually the car’s the hero. 9 44, you don’t have any of that stuff. You have brakes, you have clutch, you. Gas pedal and steering wheel and that’s all you have to go with and you learn how to drive. We always say, and of course it’s the 9 44 guys who say it, but it’s more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car.

Slow horsepower will get you out of a lot of trouble at 150, 160 horsepower. We don’t have horsepower. The gas pedal in a lot of situations is an on-off switch. You’re either flat out or you’re off the gas, but they’re so predictable and they work so well in S C C A. We have stock breaks. We don’t go with big aftermarket breaks and all, cause the stock breaks are so good.

Another thing too is these guys will go out here and these Dees with these nine 11 s and box S and Caymans and all, and they’re going 160, 170 miles an hour with no cage, no other protection other [01:11:00] than the body of the car. My stock 9 44 might be good for 120 miles an hour, and if I go off track and I hit something and scrub off speed from there, I’ll survive.

But somebody in a nine 11 at 170 miles an hour may not because they don’t have the protection. Now I’m to a point in my life now where I won’t go on track unless I’m in a car with a full cage and five point harness, Hans device and all that, only because I’m married, and that has a lot to do with it.

I’ve been on track. I’ve raced at Daytona, at Seabring. You know, Daytona International Speedway is a great place to race. It’s kind of boring cuz you’re flat out all the time. But it’s a historic place. Seabring, same way. It’s historic. You go out there, you do the best you can, but the cars are so solid and they talk to you and because of that there are great starter car for Des cuz you have to learn how to drive it.

And there’s nothing more fun than going into a. and the turn. All of a sudden you [01:12:00] feel the car take a set, it just sits down and then you get a nice controllable four-wheel drift. As you’re coming out, the car straightens out and you are rocketing down there and you think, wow, you know, that was really pretty cool.

I wanna do that again. And then you try the next three laps and doesn’t work. DE is is the way to go. And then you can go to PCA club racing. They’re very competitive. They have their own class three levels in p c club racing S C C A, you’re either in it t a or it t s or E production it, which is improved Touring.

The cars are basically stock with a cage, seats and harnesses and a fire. Relatively cheap racing. My race car, if I get 130 mile an hour a back straight Daytona, it’s because the wind’s blowing from the west . The RX seven s go 150 as we were talking about earlier. You know, they go right by you. So that’s kind of where I stand on the whole de racing thing.

So that being said, for somebody that might have a 9 44, 9 24 sitting around now, any [01:13:00] setup tips or longevity items you recommend for somebody. Gonna take it from their street, from their cruise, from their cars and coffee and do a de with the car. Or maybe decide to get into racing. Some things that you can pass along.

Brakes, of course, are imperative cause if you’re gonna go fast, you need to be able to stop. Check every system. Make sure that the suspension, the Coney adjustable shocks are the, the hot ticket. I love them. Big sway bars, coil overs on the front. Cause the front springs on a 9 44, really weak. They’re 160 pound, 200 pounds.

We run 2 75 in a big sway bar on the front, 18 or 20 millimeter sway bar in the back. And that tends to tighten up the rear enough. The original nine 20 fours didn’t have a rear sway bar. They didn’t need it. You know, you still don’t see really big sway bars on the rear, but an 18 or 20 millimeters about all you need.

The stock torsion bars, you don’t really need to beef anything up. Put a couple of coney uh, adjustable shocks on the back, set ’em full hard and then adjust on the front is where you go. A four point roll bar [01:14:00] in a track car. For one thing, it allows you to run race seats and a five point harness, and that’s important.

But the four point roll bars, the legs bolt in to the floor right next to the rear suspension pickup points. And as long as the roll bar has a diagonal in it, it makes the rear end as solid as you can ever make it because it takes any twist that might be incurred by the rear suspension. It takes that and keeps it from twisting the car so that when the strut bar and the inching apartment and that car is tight and solid, decent tires can experiment with different size wheels depending on what track you’re at, what they allow.

But you know, a good street tire with a low tread wear rating, 200 that you can drive to and from the track with those tires, you know, everybody says I want more horsepower. No, you know, Take weight out of it if you can, and beef up the suspension, make the suspension really work really well, and then you can use the horsepower you have more efficiently and more effectively [01:15:00] on track.

So we’ve talked a lot about the 9 24 and the 9 44. What about alternatives? What about the 9 28 or if you can afford it, the 9 68, which is the grand baby of all? Of all of them? Well, the 9 68 was actually supposed to be a 9 44 S3 when it was under development. That’s what it was supposed to be. But then they realized that about the only thing that it shared with the 9 44 was the main body shell from the firewall to the tail.

And even the tail was different and the rear suspension pickups were different. So they said, we’re just gonna give it its own. Sure the marketing department had a lot do with that too. The nine 60 eight’s a great car, don’t get me wrong, but they didn’t make ’em in great numbers. It’s a three liter, which is a huge force on, it’s 104 millimeter bore twin cam.

It’s got variable valve timing that’s oil controlled. There’s a timing belt that drives the exhaust side cam, and then a timing chain between the two cams. It’s really [01:16:00] complicated and one of the things about the twin cams, the 9 44 s twin cam, as well as the three litter cars, is that if you don’t get the timing chain between the two cams exactly perfect.

With the right lash and all that and it’s dial indicators and all the stuff that you have to do to get it right, it’s gonna run ho. and most of us aren’t capable of doing that kind of thing, so you’ve gotta get it, you know, you gotta hire somebody to do it and since they didn’t make very many of them, finding somebody to do it is kind of tough.

The 9 28, I had a student in a DE that had a 78 9 28, and it was wonderful. What a car. Oh my goodness. It was a, an early one. It was a 4.5 liter v8. The thing handled well. It was comfortable, it was powerful. It was a great. . However, when you look at a 9 28, you open the passenger door, you get down on your knees, and you pull down the foot well, that your passenger is gonna put his feet up against at the [01:17:00] front of the interior, and then a little leather strap there, and you pull that strap down and that entire area, which is probably 16 by 10 inches, is all wires, relays, and connectors and jumpers and stuff.

I’ve yet to see one that was unmolested, that somebody had gone in there and say, well, this isn’t working right, so I’m gonna fix it. And once you start screwing with the electronics on a 9 28, you’re done. . The other thing too, about a 9 28 that we didn’t know until my friend’s shop almost burned to the ground was that the a b S pump for a 9 28 lives under the driver’s side fender, which is aluminum.

Of course, it has a direct connection to the battery that is unfused, so when the pump shorts out goes bad and overloads, which it can do sitting in the shop overnight or your garage overnight, it will burn, and when it [01:18:00] does, it burns everything. He had one in his shop that they were doing a restoration on.

The pump caught fire and the fire was hot enough that the fender in that area actually caught. That takes 3,300 degrees for aluminum to actually burn. Again, the 9 28 was way ahead of its time, but a lot of the things that they made it do that made it ahead of its time were done in a way that we would call today.

Crude was mechanical, it was crude electronics, it was relays, micro switches, things like that. And because of that, I’m not a big fan. If you haven’t figured out by now, I like simplicity. I love that. The 9 44 has a steel tube connected to the shifter. That steel tube goes down on top of the drive shaft tube, and that steel tube connects directly to the transaxle.

That’s what you shift with. It’s simple. There’s no cables. There’s no nylon pulleys, none of that stuff. It’s. A piece of [01:19:00] steel and I like that. So I’m not a fan of the 9 28. Because of that. They did a good job and in the day it was a wonderful car, but they really messed up in some of the stuff that today it just doesn’t work.

Well, let’s talk about if somebody needs your help, Kevin, and they visit 9 24 s, nine 40 four.com, what should they expect to find there? What kinds of products and services do you offer? Tell us a little bit about what you do here now in your retirement specializing in these vehicle. When I started it, I started it because I wanted to send out information and just make information available.

Things that I had learned over the years, I couldn’t find anywhere else. And so now there are over 200 articles about these cars that you can search. For instance, there’s several articles on the hatch and how to adjust the hatch so it’ll actually work when you turn the key in the back. Will the hatch actually.

without having to jiggle it or play with it and all that. There’s some secrets that I’ve learned on how to adjust the latches to make it right. And there’s a couple [01:20:00] articles on that, things like that, that, you know, I just couldn’t find anywhere else. And if I have a project I’m working on and I find something unusual, I have one article on there right now where I had a car with one of the CAM followers actually.

into two pieces and then shattered into other pieces in the chem tower. I’d never seen that before. So I put that out and then I put it out on Facebook and I said, you know, can, has this happened to anybody else? And what’s the reason and what’s the fix? So that’s the kind of stuff that I put on the site.

I also, if I have cars for sale, I put those up. I have parts for sale. I put those up. . I get people that email me and call me and they’ll say, I have this going on and I’m not sure what to check. I’m not sure where to look. I’m not sure what to do and it does take some of my time. But I really enjoy talking to these folks because it allows me to kind of stretch my brain a little bit and say, okay, it’s always a good day.

When my shops in back of my house, my commute’s about a hundred feet. It’s pretty rough some days, cause you know it, it may be a little bit cold. Like [01:21:00] this morning it was 57 degrees. It was sterile. . We’re in Florida, you know, 57 is cold. But I’ll go to work in the morning and my wife kicks me out and tells me to go to work and I’ll go out to the shop and somebody will call me and say, this is what I have going on.

And I don’t know where to start. I dunno where to look. I’ll go through a series of four or five questions and say, okay, do this. Try. and look at that invariably by afternoon or the next day I’ll get a call back, Hey, I did this like you told me and I found that and I replaced this, or I adjusted that and now it’s working fine.

And I just wanna let you know that you know it’s working and it’s fine. And I’ll go in the house at the end of the day and I’ll tell my wife, I fixed the guy’s car in Michigan today by phone. That’s fun. I have a good time with that. I’ll have people email me, you know, I don’t know how to make my hatch work.

Okay, well here’s three articles. Take a look at it. Here’s the langstone. And somebody needs parts. Some of the stuff that is no longer available. It’s hard to find wiper motors right now. Calibers are hard to [01:22:00] find right now. Cause the rebuilds like AA Cardone does a lot of the rebuilding of import. , they don’t have any cores to do rebuilds with.

And now we’re seeing that the rebuild kits are also hard to find. If I see that, I’ll write an article and let people know, Hey, you know, it’s finding a wiper motor is almost impossible. But got somebody who’s 70 years old and has a small electric motor shop in your town, take your motor to him. He can probably fix it.

He can put a set of bearings in it and he can clean the electrical stuff inside and he’ll make it work again. Let’s just throw it away. Also gives me a sense of kind of giving back and saying, here’s some things that you know, that I learned. Some of ’em the hard way I learned with my 78 that putting in a clutch on jack stands of a carport was something I never wanted to do again.

You know, you gotta learn that the hard way sometimes, you know? That’s what I do. And 9 24 s nine four.com kind of says it all. , my big focus these [01:23:00] days is on the special edition part because they are very special putting together this, um, registry to try to track where these cars are, you know how many of ’em are there and try to connect people who are trying to do restorations and make ’em right.

That’s a big deal for me. Preserving some of that past and not letting these cars sit in the corner somewhere and just right away. So that’s where I’ve been and where I plan to go. I’ve stopped doing service work cause I’ve got too many other things to do and I am retired and it’s just me. Uh, you know, I don’t have a crew out here to help me out.

Are there any other shoutouts promotions or anything else that we didn’t cover thus far that you’d like to mention? Got a real good friend of mine, known him forever. He is up in, uh, north Georgia and he’s got a three acre farm cover with nine 40 fours and sells parts and if I don’t have it, Elliot does Elliot graft.

what a guy. Nice guy. And he is up there in Blairsville, Georgia and he services our customers all over the country and even overseas. One really important one, and that’s my wife, Barbara. Barbara, although she [01:24:00] will never admit it openly in public, is a gearhead. She’s as bad as me. She’s had a couple of Miatas, she’s had a couple of MGBs over the years.

We just celebrated our 47th Ann. and when I retired, we have a house with two and a half acres here and out in the country. And when I retired she said, well, now it’s time to build your shop and do your thing with your cars. We know as gearheads, we know how rare that can be, that you have that kind of opportunity.

When you say, yeah, I gotta shop in my backyard. You think of a single bay with a roof that’s half caved in and a door that almost closes. I have a, at this point, three and a half year old, 2,700 square foot steel building with two lifts and outdoor lift, and the only thing I don’t have is air conditioning, but I’ve got everything else and I have my tools and my equipment, I can do my own tire mounting and balancing.

I’m in my shop right now. You kind of see what’s behind me. I’ve got my office out [01:25:00] here with my computers. It’s just amazing to be able to have this kind of facility in my backyard. For me to do what I really, really were about. It couldn’t happen without her. Then I have my son Chris, and my grandchildren, oldest grandchild is uh, Beth, and she’s 17 years old and we’re working on a 9 24 s automatic for her.

She’s doing all the work on it, so you know, it’s kind of the whole family. I couldn’t do it without, for me, it’s always been about cars. For someone that can check their ego at the door, enjoy a spirited drive and doesn’t need to look flashy or brag about horsepower while doing it, and that’s why I love the 9 24 specifically, but I guess also the 9 44.

To learn more about 9 24 s and 9 44 s, be sure to visit Kevin site www.ninetwentyfoursninefourfour.comorreachoutdirectlytokevinviaemailatkrduffyme.com or by phone at three eight [01:26:00] six. 5 4, 7, 9 6 2 5. Thanks Brad, and thanks again to Kevin. I can’t thank you enough for coming on break Fix and sharing your passion for the 9 24 s and 9 44 s with our audience.

With everybody out here, it’s really awesome to talk to subject matter experts about, especially what we would consider nowadays, classic cars and collector cars, like a 9 24 and a 9 44, especially from the Porsche world. And you know, when you think about these cars, obviously they’re iconic. It’s always been on our honorable mention list to this day as a starter track car for somebody to cut their teeth in the motor sports world, it is probably one of the best, if not the best handling vehicles on the planet.

But we shouldn’t shy away from the 9 24 s, especially the 9 24 s. So for those of you out there that are considering your first collector car or maybe your next de car, think about the 9 24 s and give Kevin. A call and I do appreciate you guys, um, [01:27:00] calling me up and, uh, and wanting to, uh, reach out and see what I might be able to offer for you.

It’s been a privilege and it’s been an honor and I do appreciate it. Thank you for coming on. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you all very much.

If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about gtm, be sure to check us out on www.gt motorsports.org. You can also find us on Instagram at Grand Tour Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call our Texas at (202) 630-1770 or send us an email at crew chief gt motorsports.org.

We’d love to hear. Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that G T M remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge. [01:28:00] As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies and GTM swag.

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