While looking for information about a car a friend and I bought some time ago I came across this picture from a 1966 newspaper article:
Could it be the 1st 911 of John Buffum?
Well story says it's one of them at least.
So the story is:
My friend and I were speaking about building a FIA rally car for historical events for quite a while, dreaming of Historic Monte Carlo, Le Mans and the likes (we are in France).
One morning my friend sent me a link for an ad for a 66 911 in fair condition and price. After a few hours he get the VIN and it appeared that the car was actually a 65 built MY 66 thus a perfect base for our dream.
So after one night of reflexion, we decided to buy it, 50/50 as none of us actually had the budget for it... Sealing the deal was quite a story as well as my friend was in France, myself working in Korea and the car in California...
Quickly, we made the plan to make a “period gentleman driver car”, keeping most of the original appearance but with a fully seam welded shell, a FIA cage and squeezing as much power as we can from a 2.0 FIA legal engine...
Well, that WAS the plan...
Kardex confirmed the Irish Green color and that the car was full of factory options, catacolor, sunroof, full leather, 2 Talbot mirrors, New York radio, 3 points seat-belts to name them. The plan then started to change considering the interesting configuration of the car...
Being in Korea, far away from any of my toys in my garage, I started to spend some time digging the history of the car.
Kardex in hand I started to look for the 1st owner, some John Buttum in Middelbury VT.
After numerous hours of research it appeared that the name wasn’t typed correctly and should have actually been BUFFUM, things became quite obvious as the correct name was handwritten above the typed name...
I then tried my luck shooting an email to his race team and get a quick answer from the man himself:
“Boy that goes back a ways! Happy to talk with you about an old car of mine. I remember it - we had a green and a blue one. One we bought at the factory in Zuffenhausen in the winter of 1966. The other we bought from the Porsche dealer in Burlington Vt. The first one I rolled at a go-kart track.”
Quite an amazing find that the base of our rally car project had a rally legend as 1st owner...
So some more hours of research led me to find the article the 1st picture is extracted from:
In the mean time, the car arrived in my friends garage and he found traces of the mounting holes for the hood driving lights. Here's the beast waiting to be stripped:
As for now, considering the history of the car, and everything we learnt about these late 65 MY66 cars, the challenge of restoring the car to a full original condition became more interesting for us.
Our plan of building a FIA car is still on and will restart once our finances recover and when the opportunity to find a beaten up base show up.
We will keep you posted and hope that you'll enjoy the thread.
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