by Paul Kramer
Peeling back the layers of an old 911’s past
Nearly three years ago, a 1967 911 vintage racecar showed up at the AutoKennel. The owner, Len Scott, asked us to help him sell his VARA prepared Porsche. As he unloaded the car from the flatbed, his wife (as if she had done this hundreds of times before) whipped out the Quick-Detail and a microfiber rag and started detailing the car. I was surprised at her actions, as no one had ever done this before, especially on a racecar. Most racecars that I get to sell look as if they just came off the trailer from the last event. I usually spend hours scrubbing the gumball marks off of the body from errant flying race rubber. On the other hand, this car looked as if it had just returned from the PCA concours circuit. My dad and I were perplexed by the immaculate condition. It turned out that the car had been recently restored.
When Len called me a month earlier, he neglected to tell me that his Porsche was a factory 911 S. In his typical humble manner, he said he had an older Porsche racecar that he was thinking about selling. I soon came to find out that he took a beautiful 1967 Porsche 911 S and turned it into a championship winning VARA racecar. Then again, these cars weren’t as collectible nearly 20 years ago as they are today. That would be sacrilege today!
Whenever someone wants to sell his Porsche, one of the first questions I ask is “why?” Unlike with other cars out there, a unique bond usually exists between a Porsche and its owner. In many cases, they don’t just become another member of the family but literally an extension of the owner. It is like one’s pinky toe…yes, you can survive without it, but life is much better with it. Len has a very unique way of understating everything. He simply said that he doesn’t drive it anymore. It took nearly a dozen phone conversations to get just a small part of the story. Finally, with the help of John Dilger, I found an older Early Esses article about the car.
It turns out that, in the mid 90’s, Len and his son got bit by the racing bug and wanted to race vintage Porsches together. They each found one, prepared it for racing and had nearly a decade of fun racing together. By the mid 2000’s, Len’s son got busy with life and Len had some health challenges. While he was recovering, he took a couple years off from racing and had Galen Bieker of Werks II do a freshening of the car. This also included a fresh paint job in its original factory blood orange. Alan Faragallah (well respected engine builder at Aase Motors) did a top end rebuild to the engine at this time. Finally, in 2007, Len entered one of his first events after the restoration work. The event took place in July at California Speedway. Before one of the sessions, the hood pins were left undone and the hood flipped open in the pit lane. He was pitted just in front of the late Patrick Paternie who told me he was startled to see an orange 911 hood come undone. That ended not only Len’s race weekend but also his racing career. Since his son was no longer racing with him, his heart just wasn’t in it anymore. The car went back to the paint booth and then to his garage. After two years of collecting dust and the occasional starting of the engine, he picked up the phone and gave me a call.
Little did I know that Len’s phone call was really a passing of the baton. He was ending a journey and I was beginning my Zuffenhausen vision quest. As I began to familiarize myself with this early S, I had countless phone conversations with Len. We spent nearly a year trying to sell his car, but we soon found that his car was too overbuilt for HMSA or HSR events and would require a significant amount of cost to “detune” it back to a 2-liter challenge car. Or, it was simply to pretty and valuable to continue racing at local VARA events. During this sale process, Len and I discussed the idea of turning the car back to a street car/R Gruppe type car, but he just wasn’t up to the process. He wanted to simply move on. So, my dad (Ed) and I decided to make an offer to buy the car from Len. I told Len that we were interested in buying the car depending on how many original parts he had and what Tony and Marco Gerace of TLG Auto thought it would take to accomplish our goal.
In October of last year, Tony and I met Len at his two-car tandem garage which is wedged into a 10 degree sloped lot in the historical section of Silver Lake, California. When we walked into the garage, we were both stunned at the volume of parts carefully spread out on the garage floor. It looked like you could build an entire car. From original muffler to the correct VIN stamped doors, hood, and deck lid, 95% of all the original ’67 S parts were there…amazing! And, he had done a superb job of storing them. There was no rust or damage of any kind. I knew at that moment I was embarking on my first Early S journey. I was excited and very nervous. Tony looked around the car for over an hour. He crawled underneath the front and rear and fired up the engine. His deadpan face gave me no clues as to what he thought. He noticed a “Werks II” sticker on the rear quarter window and asked Len if Galen built the car. He nodded. Tony cracked his first smile of approval. Finally, Tony and I went outside the garage to discuss the possibility of returning the car back to its original street condition. Tony stated simply, “that’s a nice f*$k’n car.”
The following week, we came back with a cashier’s check, van, pickup truck, and enclosed trailer. During the next few hours, we loaded the car and all the parts and moved the project to TLG’s shop in North Hollywood. I really had no idea of what it was going to take to see this endeavor completed. Initially, my dad and I discussed the idea of simply doing the minimum and make it more of a hotrod 911. We were going to cut out the door bars, leave the rest of the roll cage and put the steel doors on (leaving the rest of the fiberglass). Marco looked over the original parts and in one word convinced us otherwise. He said, “NO”. I must admit, he was absolutely right. Of course, our budget began to balloon, but this car deserved more.
John Esposito, (one of SoCal’s top paint guys), wandered across the alley to take a look at the project. He said that everything looked very straight and should be no problem. Well, John is a perfectionist and he ended up stripping the car down to the metal to do it right. Doing this confirmed what Len told us from the beginning. Even though he raced the car for 10 years, he never had an incident. The car ended up being very straight with no repairs, rust, or damage of any kind. This helped when John fitted all the original steel parts back on the car. They all ended up fitting perfectly.
The extended time the car was at paint and TLG gave me plenty of opportunity to gather missing parts and history. Eric Linden was invaluable here. He answered countless dumb questions I had and helped me source some great parts. The goal was to avoid reproduction parts as much as possible unless there was no other option and the quality was equal or better than original. There were several dilemmas we encountered during this process. For instance, we discovered that this S was a very late 1967 production (June 9th, 1967). As a result, the car was fitted with ’68 front fenders. We found photos of the car dating back to 1969 and sure enough, it had sugar scoop headlights and side reflectors. The side reflectors had been removed when it was converted to a racecar, but it still had its original U.S. ’68 headlights in remarkable unrestored condition. Personally, I’m not a fan of these headlights and I think they really detract from what the car is. So, we carefully packed them up and found a very nice set of unrestored ’67 headlights from a fellow Early S member. Also, the original 4.5×15 Fuchs were long gone (the owner before Len traded them for some 7’s in the early 90’s). Len had been racing the car on 7x15s wrapped in 205 and 225 Hoosier’s. The front brakes had been upgraded to ’73 S brakes and 4.5’s just wouldn’t fit. It was then that I noticed that the rear fenders had an ever so slight flare to them. Len said that he bought the car that way. It turns out that they were flared at the Porsche dealership before the first “titled” owner ever took delivery. We finally settled on a set of flat 6×15 wheels, which looked similar to what was on the car when Bob Bondurant drove it.
Here is where the history of this car began to come into focus. Len told me from the beginning that a guy by the name of Joe Vittone was the original owner and was a big VW parts guy. It turns out that Joe Vittone started EMPI (Engineered Motor Products, Inc.) because he was frustrated that VW just threw away so many used parts. I did notice a discrete metal EMPI badge on the far right side of the dash. Joe owned one of the first VW dealerships in Southern California. It was called Economotors and was in Riverside, California. Joe chose that location because he was a race junky and it was close to Riverside Raceway. By the mid-60’s, Joe had secured a Porsche franchise and had started selling Porsches out of his Economotors dealership. Meanwhile, the EMPI business was exploding and Economotors was selling “EMPI”-prepared VW’s new from his dealership with warranties as well as through other franchises.
The next step was to bring that California hot rod attitude from the Beetle line-up to their Porsche product. So, they began to develop a performance catalog geared towards 912s and 911s. In late 1967, the dealership added a 1967 911S in blood orange to their inventory. Joe immediately adopted the car as his own and decided to use it as his test car for his new hot rod parts. The first thing he did was employ his sons, Darrell and Dean Lowry (later known for his performance engine building shop called Deano Dynosaurs) to squeeze more power out of the high strung 2.0 liter engine. So, Dean created a 2.5L big bore kit that was reported to produce 30hp more than stock. Dean and Darrell became famous by creating the “Inch Pincher” VW Beetle drag car that dominated the SoCal drag scene through out the late 60’s and early 70’s. Also, to handle the extra power, they adapted the rear fenders to fit the EMPI 7×15 magnesium wheels that they were already selling to their Porsche clients. Finally, they created a custom two-in/two-out muffler with a cut out on the passenger side rear bumper (which we kept).
Unfortunately, Joe passed away in 2010 and I was unable to talk to him. However, after several months, I tracked down his son Darrell. Darrell is semi-retired but still building VW hot rod engines in Oregon. We had a great conversation. He remembers his dad’s car fondly. He said that car was so stinking fast that it just begged to be driven hard. He told me he remembered driving the car home after a day of drag racing at the OC Fairgrounds Drag strip where he had destroyed all the synchros. He said that he was turning mid 13 second ¼ mile times at 104 mph. This was over 2 seconds and 10mph faster than a stock one.
The next step for Joe was to get some press. Sports Car Graphic magazine decided to do a feature article on the car. They said he rented Riverside Raceway and employed Bob Bondurant to test out this EMPI 911 S. However, Darrell said that the event actually took place at the now defunct Orange County International Raceway. This makes sense since Bob Bondurant started running a driving school out of this location in 1968. Darrell did say that Bob took him for a lap around the track and scared the crap out of him.
Fast Forward 43 years: I ran into Bob Bondurant at a local car show. I talked to him about Joe Vittone and the car and he remembered both very clearly. He said that besides liking the great power range, he really fell in love with the color. In fact, he said that he liked the color so much that it inspired him to paint all of his driving school cars orange. Later, that color became known as “Bondurant Orange.” Bob was gracious enough to sign the car’s original sun visor as well as the magazine article. What a class act!
So, what happened to the car? Darrell said that unfortunately the 911/912 EMPI parts program didn’t do very well and, after just a few short years, they discontinued it and stuck to just the VW product line. Darrell said that this 911 S is probably the only true “EMPI” Porsche 911 S they really ever built. So, in late 1969, Joe sold the car to a local physician in Riverside who became the first official owner on title. I was able to track down the 2nd titled owner who was a retired oil businessman from Bakersfield. He said that the doctor was his friend and he purchased the car from Joe to use as his “track toy.” He was a speed junky but had to keep it under wraps from his family. He kept this 911 S at his office (conveniently located a few miles down the road from Riverside International Raceway) and one day a week, he would sneak to the track and spend the afternoon doing an open track day. On his way home, he would drop the car back off at the office and head home in his daily driver. This went on for nearly 2 decades until he finally sold the car to his oilman friend in the early 90’s.
The 2nd owner said that the car was in decent condition but the paint was pretty chipped up from the years of track time. Also, the mileage was pretty low since the car wasn’t used for much else besides going to the track. He said that the mileage was somewhere around the 70k range at the time so he decided to strip the car down and completely repaint it. He said he spent more time tuning the Weber carbs and tinkering with the mechanicals than driving it and only put a couple of thousand miles on the car in the few years he owned it. Since he was getting ready to move to Oregon and retire, he decided to sell the car to the 3rd owner, Len Scott. He had no idea that Len was planning on racing the car.
Len immediately began the transformation of turning this 911 hot rod into a dedicated vintage racer. He took the car to Galen to have him transform the car. They carefully removed most of the original parts and packed them away. Amazingly, he left the original dash with the radio in the car. So now the mileage on the car is around 80k miles and is believed to be original. Shortly after he started racing, he threw a rod and broke the motor. We have the EMPI pistons as well as the original number matching case. Darrell Vittone thought that those might be the original 2.5 big bore EMPI kit pistons. He said that because it was their prototype, they hadn’t started stamping them with the EMPI identification. When the motor was torn down, the case was sent to Ollie’s Engineering in Arizona. They determined that it could be repaired for street use, but not for racing. So, the original case was carefully stored with the rest of Len’s parts and a dedicated race motor using a 1968 911 aluminum case was built.
As this restoration (or more like resurrection) project continued, my dad and I decided not to restore this to be another over-restored concours example. We would restore it to a high level while respecting its SoCal hot rod roots. We decided to make the car look as close to it did when Bob Bondurant drove the car in 1969. Also, we decided to leave the “B” hoop and back of the roll bar in place to pay homage to its VARA championship history. Finally, we have vintage Riverside Raceway decals and dash plaques recognizing its decades of track history from the first owner.
Although this process has been more fun than I ever could have imagined, I’m anxious to finally get it on the back roads of California where I think it ultimately belongs. Hopefully, we will be able to debut this car at the R Gruppe gathering this October in Cambria.
I must thank Tony and Marco of TLG for sorting out all the mechanicals and making the car a great driver on the street. Also, John Esposito did an amazing job with the paint. Thank you to Jeff Tighe of TP Motorsports who was incredibly patient when it came to reassembling the car. Mark Motshagen did an amazing job on the fan and engine bits. And finally, thank you to Juan Ortiz for helping recreate the original interior.
