Dan Trent: Craving a 911 that's true to its vintage

Then there’s the craze for ‘backdating’, the interchangeability of air-cooled 911 parts over a three-decade period making it relatively easy to make an 80s car look like a more fashionable 60s one.

Done sympathetically the results can, of course, be spectacular, as they are in the Singer-restored 964 era cars. You’d hope so if you were putting half a million into such a job though. And although I love their work I remain conflicted, wondering what’s really so bad about keeping a 911 faithful to the era in which it was born. 

Or, indeed, the era in which I was born. It’s fairly arbitrary but if my numbers come up and I’m in a position to buy a 911 I rather like the idea of having one built in the year of my birth, that being 1976 and slap bang in the middle of the ‘unfashionable’ era of 911s. Accordingly many of those cars were updated to look like newer ones in the '80s before fashion then dictated they were transformed back into 60s lookalikes. Were the 70s really that bad though?

I was contacted recently by a chap I know who’s just completed a very extensive and, no doubt, expensive restoration on a 930 Turbo from ‘my’ year. On the face of it this is exactly the kind of thing I’d be looking for, given it’s a Californian car and one of the first Turbos imported to the States. Some fuss is being made of the serial number being four digits away from the similar one bought by Steve McQueen which is, I think, a tad tenuous. But I think but the car itself is very much of its time, faithfully restored in Copper Brown with a Cork interior (more like mustard yellow) for full 70s effect. It’s an early 3.0-litre Turbo too and much rarer than the later 3.3 so there’s exclusivity on its side, perhaps explaining why the Silverstone Auctions estimate tops out at £160,000. 

That’s a big chunk of cash. And while I wish my man luck achieving it I think I prefer my 911s with naturally-aspirated engines. Thankfully the same auction also contains this ‘regular’ 3.0 in the same Copper Brown as the Turbo and with a similarly '70s hue to the interior. It’s got fetching gold Fuchs and colour-matched Carrera script along the side too, adding to the appeal. Indeed, were Singer’s restorations '70s inspired rather than 60s I reckon they’d be doing something that looks just like this.

As a 3.0 it’s got rarity on its side too, these made for just a short spell before the SC was introduced – the catalogue listing has it as one of 3,678 compared with the 58,000 SCs it says were built. Honestly, I need to do some swotting to find out whether that’s actually a good thing or not but with one eye on future values anything prefixed ‘rare’ has to make it a safe investment bet. 

So it’s the right year. It’s the right colour. The top end of the estimate is a whole £100,000 less than the Turbo. And it’s a right-hand drive UK car with a recent full restoration. Perfect, right? Nearly. Original option or not to my mind whale tail wings on non-Turbo 911s look a bit silly so I think my one concession to customisation would be to swap it for a plain, wingless engine cover. Given it’s little more than a bolt-on, bolt-off exchange I think I can justify that and the wing could be retained for originality, should it be required. 

Or have I just totally compromised the principled stand I took at the outset of this story?