When I was finally fortunate enough to get my hands on a 67 S coupe some years ago the best information available was that the car had always been in California except for a couple of months in Virginia and Texas. I always had the notion that it was a U.S. spec car.
Ignoring the rule never to assume anything when it comes to old car stuff, I neglected to dig further into the car's origins. And so during these past several years I never thought much more about it.
But in February I was contacted by a prior owner with whom I had stayed in touch. He put me in touch with the original owner, who had in turn succeeded in tracking down the chassis number on E911S after coming across some long forgotten paperwork that turned up during an office move.
It all started when he cleared out a stack of old boxes that had blocked a filing cabinet in a storage area. He told that when his fingers reached out for an unmarked, age faded but strangely familiar manila folder towards the back of the bottom drawer of that cabinet, an involuntary tremor shook his hand and intuition told him exactly what was inside, having been stored away for almost fifty years.
By now you must know that the image attached to this post is what fell out when he opened that time tinted folder.
He very kindly sent the photo recording the car's first morning stateside, down at Terminal Island in the Port of Los Angeles. The date was October 13, 1967. It was a typical autumn morning with temperatures around 60* F with the usual blanket of smog under a clear SoCal sky.
He had ordered the car through a gray market dealer down in Orange County and opted for a factory delivery. For vacation that summer, he headed out from Stuttgart after picking the car at the tourist delivery department and drove south over the Alps all the way down to the heel of the boot in Italy.
He tapped the nose on the way back north and returned to Stuttgart where he dropped the car off at the factory for a paint repair. Porsche handled the shipment out of Bremerhaven on the freighter Johan U, shown in the background of this image taken down at Terminal Island.
...turns out to be a Euro spec car after all.
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