Owning an air-cooled Porsche is the dream of many Porsche fans. At this point in history, ownership is not an impossibility, and certainly will remain feasible for several more decades. The cost of ownership, however, is not-so-slowly creeping upward.
To explain exactly why that is, we have a roughly 35-minute discussion from a couple of Porsche veterans who were gracious enough to sit down for a spell and share their knowledge. Our panel of experts are Mike Spinelli, who works for Autoblog’s Drive and Jalopnik, and the owners of Classic Car Club in Manhattan, Zac Moseley and Mick Prichinello.
The trio have been collaborating since 2004 when Spinelli and company at Jalopnik wrote a post titled, “If You Had $1 million, What Cars Would You Buy?” which drew the attention of CCC.
Air-cooled engines, for the uninitiated, use blocks of angled fins to draw air through portions of an engine—you might have seen these sliced up blocks in other old-timey machines from the era. The advantage of this over a water-cooled system is that it weighs much less, and is much less likely to break down. Air-cooled engines don’t work so well when unleaded gasoline is being used, however, so as leaded gasoline has been phased out over the years, the switch to water-cooled systems was inevitable.
Following the discussion of why air-cooled engines are becoming increasingly valuable and if the price is expected to fall, the three experts go deeper into talking about old Porsches in general, which sounds like a good time to us. Enjoy!
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