Porsche 911 993

Tony Hatter did the body under Harm Lagaay, and the change everyone sees is the headlamps. For thirty years they had stood upright and proud on the wings; the 993 lays them back into the bodywork on a rake, keeping the round shape and losing the vertical. Around them the wings are wider and lower, the front smooths into a single deep valance, and the rear haunches swell over the new multi-link suspension in a way no earlier 911 could manage. The mirrors get their own teardrop housings on stalks. The G-Series light bar is gone, replaced by wider, flatter lamps and a cleaner panel. It is the most substantial reshaping the 911 had ever had and it still reads as the same car from fifty metres, which was exactly the point. The wide-bodied Carrera S and 4S borrow the Turbo's arches, and the Turbo itself adds a fixed rear wing and hollow-spoke alloys. The Targa reinvents itself completely: no removable panel, no hoop, just a glass roof that slides away under the rear window.

The 993's racing life was fought by customers, and the car that did the fighting was the GT2. Homologated as a road car with bolt-on arches and rear-wheel drive, because the regulations would not take four-wheel drive, it became the default GT weapon of the mid-1990s. In its first full BPR Global GT season in 1996 it took seven class wins from eleven rounds, and it won its class at Le Mans in both 1996 and 1997. Between 1995 and 1998 GT2s collected titles in the BPR series, IMSA, the SCCA World Challenge and the ADAC GT Cup, before Chrysler's factory-backed Viper GTS-R got the better of them in 1998. A 993 GT2 also served as the Formula 1 safety car through the 1995 season. One thing worth keeping straight: the 911 GT1 that won Le Mans outright in 1998 wore a 993 nose and 993 badging, but underneath it was a purpose-built mid-engined prototype, and that result belongs to it rather than to this generation.

The 993's cultural life is unusual because most of it happened afterwards. It arrived without a defining film role, a hit record or a bedroom poster, and then spent twenty-five years becoming the object at the centre of a movement. Luftgekuehlt, started by Patrick Long and Howie Idelson in a Venice car park in 2014 and now an international series of gatherings, rests on the premise that air-cooled Porsches are a category worth celebrating on their own, and the 993 is where that category stops. Every conversation about the end of air cooling ends on this car. It was also absent from video games during the exact years a generation was learning cars through them, because Electronic Arts held an exclusive Porsche licence from 2000 that kept the marque out of Gran Turismo until 2016, with RUF standing in for it. The result is a car better known through ownership and the enthusiast press than through mass culture, which is part of why its reputation reads as earned rather than inherited.

The 993 is the air-cooled 911 you can use without planning your week around it, and its problems are few and well understood. Oil leaks are the constant: the cam covers are plastic and stop being oil-tight with age, and the oil bridge carrying oil up to the cam towers seeps. Neither is dangerous, both are routine, and an air-cooled Porsche that never leaks has usually just been cleaned. Valve guides wear, which raises oil consumption and puts a puff of smoke out on a trailing throttle, and becomes a top-end job when it goes far enough. The one genuinely expensive item belongs to 1996-on cars: the secondary air injection ports coke up, the warning light comes on, the car fails emissions, and putting it right properly means removing the cylinder heads. Owners in emissions-test states plan for it rather than fear it. Otherwise the list is short. Sunroof and Targa mechanisms want exercising, dashboard electrics are ageing, interior plastics scuff. The car is galvanised, robust and happy to be driven, which is why so many carry high mileage and nobody minds.