Porsche 911 F-Series

Ferdinand Alexander Porsche drew it, and the discipline is what makes it last. The roof falls in one continuous line from the windscreen header to the tail, with no break and no step at the decklid. The wings rise above the bonnet on both sides so the driver can place the car by looking at its own fenders. The headlamps stand upright and proud, a detail every later 911 has kept even when aerodynamics argued otherwise. The bonnet runs long and low to a slim chrome bumper, and that single line is where the longhood name comes from: shorten it in 1974 for the impact bumpers and the whole face changes. Detail work carries the era. Chrome trim, painted steel wheels on the base cars, and from 1967 the five-spoke Fuchs forged alloy, first fitted to the 911 S and still the only correct wheel for an air-cooled 911. The 1972 cars wear that oil filler flap on the right rear quarter, deleted after one model year for reasons the hobby has never fully settled. The Carrera RS added the ducktail, the first rear spoiler Porsche put on a road car.

The competition record starts on loose surfaces. Vic Elford and David Stone won the 1968 Monte Carlo Rally in a 911 T after a fight with Gerard Larrousse's Alpine that ran to the final night stage over the Col de Turini. Bjorn Waldegard then won the next two, in 1969 and 1970, giving Porsche three Monte Carlos in a row with a car whose weight was supposedly in the wrong place. On circuits the payoff came right at the end of the generation. The 2.8-litre Carrera RSR, built from the 1973 Carrera RS, won the Daytona 24 Hours outright on its race debut in February 1973, Peter Gregg and Hurley Haywood finishing twenty-two laps clear. It took Sebring, then won the Targa Florio in May with Herbert Muller and Gijs van Lennep. Porsche counts three international and seven national championships for the RSR in that one season, including six of the nine European GT Championship rounds. The Targa Florio result carries the most weight, because 1973 was the last running of that race as a world championship event, and a 911 won it.

Steve McQueen opens the 1971 film Le Mans by driving a slate grey 1970 911 S through the French countryside for several minutes without saying a word, and that sequence did more for the car's image than any advertisement Porsche ever placed. It was McQueen's own car, ordered with air conditioning and leather, and when RM sold it at Monterey in 2011 it made $1.375 million, a record for a 911 at auction at the time. Beyond film, the longhood carries a different sort of weight: it is the car the Porsche world measures itself against. Luftgekuehlt, the air-cooled gathering that Patrick Long and Howie Idelson started in a Venice car park in 2014 and now runs internationally, exists because of these cars and what came after them. And the shape got out of the car world entirely. A silhouette drawn in 1963 is still legible on a new 911 sixty years later, which is true of almost nothing else, and it means people who have never driven one can still name one from behind.

Living with a longhood is mostly about heat, oil and water. Oil first: it is a dry-sump engine with a separate tank and long external lines, it holds a lot of it, and it will mark its territory somewhere. Chain tensioners are the known weak point, and the pressure-fed conversion is the standard answer. Heat next: engines from 1968 use magnesium crankcases, and a car run lean or hot can pull a cylinder-head stud clean out of the case, which is an engine-out repair. Case savers go in during any rebuild as a matter of course. Water is the one that decides values, because nothing was galvanised and it collects in the front suspension pan, the kidney bowls, the battery boxes and the torsion bar tube, where the repairs are structural rather than cosmetic. Day to day the car asks very little. It starts, it idles, the heater smells faintly of exhaust, the wipers are slow, and none of that stops anyone. Owners drive these hard and far and the cars keep going, which is exactly why the market respects them.