Featured Car for August 1, 2024
Owned by Kent Mascotto, London, Ontario
Kent has owned this Porsche since 1989 and completely restored it about 15 years ago – engine, transmission, body and interior. At that time, the car’s colour was changed from the original Albert Blue to a midnight black.
A Canadian-specced car, it has an air-cooled 2.2 litre flat-six “boxer” engine with a Weber carburetor. The transmission is a 5-speed manual with a dogleg shift pattern – 1st gear is down and to the left, rather than up, to make shifting between 2-3 and 4-5 faster.
The engine has been modified with engine parts from other series Porsches. While the engine in the 911S was created to race and developed power above 4K rpm, the 911E was designed for a more drivable experience and boasted a broad power range, mainly due to its camshafts. Kent followed the advice of a well-known Porsche expert, Bruce Anderson, and combined the high compression (9.8:1) S-series pistons, the camshafts of the E-series and the Weber carburetor of the T-series to create an engine that creates more power in the lower rpm range, yielding a faster time to 60mph than even the 911S. Kent says the car is great at idle, city driving and highway cruising.
At the same time, the intake was modified so that ambient air normally forced over the hot exhaust, to provide cabin heat, is diverted to the engine intake, supplying the engine with an even greater volume of air, increasing power even further. To make sure all of these modifications don’t do any damage, O2 sensors were added to make sure the engine doesn’t run lean.
At the end of the restoration, the odometer was zeroed, and the car now shows about 11K km. Kent says the car is not a trailer queen and is driven regularly, noting that his wife drives the car more than he does
Kent owns other Porsches as well, including a rare, fully-restored 1989 928 GT, Club Sport version, and he is a member of the Upper Canada Region of the Porsche Club of America.