You’ve seen the pics of the trim on that 944 I bought - grim in the extreme. I was obviously going to need to replace the lot and, once again, eBay came to the rescue.  A few days after I got the ‘44 back to base, I spotted an ‘85 924 Lux with full black pascha on a very cheap Buy It Now, so I snapped it up.

The Porsche was a non runner thanks to a failed starter motor, but had been in regular use up until a few weeks previously so, with fingers tightly crossed, I set off for Essex on the morning of the dyno day to pick it up.  The sun was shining and the drive down was great as I had fixed the bumper, exhaust and prop U/J on the truck.

I arrived an hour early and got Simon (the owner) up out of bed - well it was 7am. We loaded the car, I gave him some cash and then headed back towards Jack’s Cafe in Towcester, where some of the lads were meeting up despite the cancellation of the dyno runs. I got there dead on time to have breakfast and enjoy the craic; this was turning out to be a good day. Some of the guys came back to mine for tea and cake, in exchange for helping me to push the car into the back garden.

Next day, I got mass out of the way and set to work on this starter. The 924 board on Pelican reckoned that connections were usually at fault rather than starter motors and they were right. I dropped off the motor, cleaned out the solenoid and the connections, reinstalled and it fired straight up. There was a bit of a tap which I ascribed to a cracked manifold but could have been a sticky lifter. I threw some injector cleaner into the system, along with some Wynns oil improver. The injector cleaner did make a difference to the idle speed but the oil additive did not change the tapping noise.

Anyway, I ran the car about for the next few days and it’s not hard to see where their reputation for good handling comes from. Slow though, ponderously boring, and dull behind the wheel; there is just no feedback from it at all compared to a 911. I want to love it because it looks so pretty, but really the Audi 80 of the same era was a better driver’s car.

Today I decided the time had come to get that lovely pascha out and get the car ready for sale this weekend (eBay), but the more I look at it, the better I think it would be to break it. It has quite a few good bits on it - lots of new parts - so it might break well. I guess the thing to do is to scrub it up, then stick it on as a running shell with a healthy reserve and see how it goes. Watch this space.