The Long Way Home

Luke Bradley, and his mate Tom, set out to drive a ‘classic’ Porsche to its birthplace in Stuttgart via a string of Europe’s best hidden riding spots.

- Luke Bradley

It didn’t start well. We’d only covered three miles on French soil on our tour of continental riding spots and I was already lying underneath our car with eyes full of metal and dirt while surrounded by an angry DIY store manager and some security guards. My companion for this road trip, Tom, was busy trying to explain in broken French that the exhaust had dropped off, and while we were using their car park as a workshop, we did at least have the courtesy to buy all the jubilee clips and bits of ducting we were using to try and fix it from their store. It was not working.

Rewind six months and I was in a pub, and sufficiently inebriated to decide that spending a £1,000 on a luxury car for a grand tour of interesting riding spots, and possibly some classic car races, was a great idea. The empty beer glasses amassed on our table said it all really. Even so, with the hangover a distant memory, there I was eyeing up the undercarriage of a brown 1985 Porsche 924 that was slightly over budget but too exciting to turn down.

While it might not look like the ideal bike transporter, it has a lot going for it. With a roof rack fitted, it can take two bikes comfortably, the boot is enormous, and because of the massive glass hatch, you can thread a bike in without any issues at all. And because the interior is almost exclusively brown, sitting in it while wearing muddy riding gear is no problem. Add in the fact that it is covered in luxurious carpet, almost an inch thick, and it has massive ground clearance for access to fire roads, and, well, there's no reason not to. Well, none good enough to persuade me from buying the thing.