Unloved
February 20, 2026
Rory CarrollYou’ve seen an interesting car mouldering in the back of a two-car garage; the owner says they’ll get to it at some point, but you know they won’t. They won’t. Why don’t they just move it along to someone who’d take care of it? It’s gross. In this story I am that guy. There’s no big, dramatic explanation for how I gave up on the desirable air-cooled Porsche 911 that was once a huge part of my life. It just stopped being a cool car to me. I stopped loving it.
Here’s how I ended up with it in the first place:
In maybe 2006 or 2007, I bought a brand new car, a MK5 GTI. It went on sale in Europe before it went on sale here, so I read European reviews, downloaded a video clip of Tiff Needel doing a 360 in one and waited. I fought with the dealer to get a “package 0” delivered, no sunroof, manual, plaid seats. It took less than a year for me to conclude that the GTI was a wonderful car but it was not for me. So I sold it on eBay. I don’t remember if I made enough on the sale to pay it off.
What was for me was a black ‘84 911 that I found stuffed into the back corner of the parking lot at what used to be a rural used car dealer/service center. I’d been tooling around with a friend who I would later attempt to marry (and who, some time after that, threw a serving platter at the 911 hard enough to break the windshield) and I was drawn in by a Buick Grand National. One of the guys at the shop put me in touch with the owner of the 911, who said he had five of them and his wife wanted one of them gone. The black Carrera was the worst of them, so I negotiated a $14,000 bank loan on a handshake and got busy ruining the old sports car, which assuredly would not come to be worth several times what I paid for it.
Years of off-roading, high speed driving, DIY cobbling and extensive salt-season use turned the scruffy 911 into a very rough driver. And the second I bought another car, the 911 turned into a project. The Porsche lived in seven different locations, getting tinkered with sporadically. Aside from a pretty solid run of work in the Indian Village carriage house, the car has been neglected so badly that I feel actual shame. It’s missing some paint, it’s been dinged and dented. It’s dirty. It’s on tires I bought in maybe 2008.
It’s not that I haven’t been wrenching. I worked on a boat and dozens of cars in the time the 911 was sitting. I built a Lexus GX and I built the same Lada into two wildly different race cars while I let the Porsche rot. There’s been this persistent mental block, I would always find myself doing anything but working on the only really valuable car I’ve ever owned.
It might not even be that I don’t care about it, maybe a part of me just feels bad for letting it get to this point. Or maybe it’s a totem from a time in my life where my brother was alive and everything didn’t feel like it was on rails and some part of me is avoiding going back there to sift through those ashes.
It’s not that I haven’t wanted to drive it. I often feel that driving it would provide me with a deeply needed catharsis. I’m not predisposed to nostalgia, I don’t miss the old times any more than I’ll miss today. I do miss the people who are gone from me, usually more than I can afford to. When I sit that old car and take a breath, I do remember an awful lot.
Maybe it would be good for me to remember flying around Leelanau County in the summer, at night with the windows down and the sunroof open. Seeing a cop pull out from behind the trees, downshifting and watching him reverse back into his spot when he realized his Crown Vic did not have it. Drinking all night and sleeping in, whiskey-mouthed and sour-stomached. I could remember the way things were with the 22-year-old in the passenger seat, now mother to my children. Would, being back in the car, even old and creaking, even worn-out, broken, dirty and changed, be good for me? I think it probably would be.
There’s no reason why I couldn’t have sold before it got so ratty, except that I know I’d regret it and I’ll probably never be able to afford another one. There’s no real reason why I didn’t get it back on the road previously, except that when it came down to it, I didn’t want to. As Porsches, especially air-cooled Porsches, ascended to Tropical Dial GMT-Master status, my contrarian impulses took over and I just lost interest.
The 911, which is genuinely a wonderful car, is a victim of its own success. Owning one is a little like telling people your favorite band is The Beatles. It’s for normies. I’m insuferable. I built a Honda-powered, BRZ chassis’d Lada race car and I listen to bands that nobody knows about or likes.
Well before a Porsche made great luxury cars, it earned a very specific gritty hot-rodder vibe through racing, both professional and otherwise. The cars you could actually buy and drive on the street were relatively more stout than comparable offerings from England and Italy and today they sit just on the cusp of raw enough to be an all-encompassing experience and refined enough that the experience is that of driving a car, vs operating a contraption.
In 2026 if you have a large amount of disposable income–and if you want to be seen as a person of taste and discernment who doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty, and who, in fact, might luxuriate in the smells, sounds and sensations of an old car, if you want to convey a certain devil-may-care, high-status Southern California romantic vibe–you can buy an old 911.
I don’t have a problem with that really. I want people who refer to themselves as “creatives” to be happy in their cars and to drive something that feels good to them. But, I am personally too self-conscious to be misidentified as the kind of guy who buys an air-cooled 911 early in middle-age—especially because I am, in truth, shamefully close to actually being that kind of guy.
Even if I am, I wasn’t trying to be. When I got the 911, it may as well have been a Miata or a TR6. I didn’t have any particular interest in Porsche. I thought Porsche made cars for dentists who wanted something sporty that wouldn’t cause problems at the yacht club valet stand. I was 23 (?) and driving a cheap 20-year-old old sports car. I was disheveled, broke and I dressed like shit. The 911 was cool, even if I didn’t get it at the time.
Now, I’m 43 and driving an old 911 makes me feel like a guy who has, in mid-life, decided to let his inner rebel out for the weekend (go to a cars and coffee). I am a middle-aged guy who is ashamed about wanting to be young, to have it all back and really think about it this time. I remember how obvious and pathetic that looked to me when I was young and I don’t want to be seen that way. I don’t want to be seen as a guy desperately trying to claw back a few pivotal moments.
Of course, nobody gives a shit. It’s entirely in my head and always has been.
I am sure that there are people reading this, thinking “Jesus, what an asshole, complaining about his indifference to the incredible sports car he lucked into at exactly the right time. He needs to get over himself and just drive it.” That’s correct. You should know that I even feel bad about feeling bad and self-conscious. That’s centuries of Catholic muscle memory, building a little house of guilt, anguish, self-loathing and shame, just for me. I do plan to drive it this summer.
Mostly because of a few friends who will not stop giving me shit about having a non-running 911 in my shop, I’ve been chipping away at it again recently. I made it run and made it idle. Pushed some fluid into the brake lines. I’ve got the clutch release apart, trying desperately to get the clutch unstuck so I don’t have to take the engine and transmission out. By the time the snow melts, if everything goes right, I’ll once again be broke and adrift, driving an old 911 that has lived with me for almost 20 years and is very much the worse for it. Will it be a massively emotional moment of catharsis or will it sink immediately into the gray din? Am I capable of unselfconscious joy? Read Alloy to find out.
Regardless, Porsche will be fine. Porsche has cool people. Some of the coolest people, really. Hurley Haywood, Pat Long, Marino Franchitti, Mark Webber, etc. They’ve been Porsche people a long time and when aircooled 911s are no longer the “performative male” car, they’ll still be Porsche people and the cars will still be good cars. By then, I too will be a Porsche owner in good standing. Improved standing.
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