Stephen pulled back the cover story on a 1992 Carrera RS wearing race livery that was never supposed to be permanent. The cars around him at the mountain stop in Obay were almost entirely 996s, gathered for a Soul Drives run through the Alps, and most of their owners had no idea that one of the men standing among them had sketched the car they were driving into existence. The morning light was coming over the peaks, the weather was improving, and somewhere in the lineup sat a Carrera 2 chassis running a 4.3-litre engine pushing 450 horsepower to 8,000 RPM, a build by V96 that sounded like nothing else in the convoy.
The car with a story it almost never got to tell
Stephen’s 964 RS started its life with a first owner named Ursula P., then passed to a colleague, then vanished to England from roughly 1995 until 2012, where it was driven by Thomas Schmidz, someone Stephen described as ‘probably the most significant person in the success and the price situation, let’s say, with 964 RS.’ Stephen picked it up in 2012 and never looked back.
The bold livery on the car has its own chapter. Stephen has worked for Porsche for over 40 years and belongs to a club called the FLB Frederaka Boxer Motor, which built up a 997 Cup car running a 964-schooled engine for an ice race in Salam. He delivered the car through most of that build process. Very close to the event, it looked like the 997 might not be ready to run on ice, so Stephen made a last-minute call: put the same livery on his RS, hand the wheel to racing driver Patrick Long, and display the 997 at the event. The 997 made it on time. Patrick Long drove the 997. Stephen drove the RS. When the weekend was over, he decided the livery was staying. ‘It’s become part of the history,’ he said, ‘of what is now a 30-year-old car with a number of significant owners.’
The sketch that became the 996 and the Boxster
The Soul Drives organiser noted the detail that made the morning unusual: Stephen had worked on the design team of the 996 at Porsche. He explained the context plainly. In the early 1990s, Porsche needed to replace the 993 and had studied a four-seat car called the 989, which was promising but would not generate the profit margin the company needed to recover. The solution required a new manufacturing philosophy: two cars sharing roughly 60 percent of their components while keeping entirely separate identities. Stephen worked with a small team on a concept to show how that was possible. He sketched one car that would look considerably more modern than the air-cooled cars. That sketch became the 996. The other car in the study became the Boxster.
The 964 with its ice-race graphics sat in the lineup among the very cars Stephen had helped bring into the world, its stickers from Nurburgring and Spa layered over three decades of ownership.
The wheel and the 10 percent
By mid-morning, the Soul Drives convoy had its own small drama. The organiser handed the Carrera 4 over to his fiance, settling into the passenger seat with what he called ‘maybe 10 percent’ anxiety and a laugh that suggested the real number was higher.
The convoy rolled back onto the Alpine road, the V96 car somewhere ahead at 8,000 RPM, and the RS carrying its ice-race graphics through mountain air it had somehow found its way back to after thirty years and several continents of ownership.
