"A PORSCHE REPRESENTS SO MUCH MORE TO ME THAN SIMPLY BEING A VEHICLE"

Michelle Hambly is known to most car enthusiasts around the world for her deep passion for Porsche. We pay a visit to her 911 wonderland in Cape Town

- Wilhelm Lutjeharms

Michelle Hambly’s garage is such an inviting place. Although primarily a place to store cars, it’s also a library, a coffee corner, and contains other memorabilia that pulls you closer to the Porsche brand.

This is a place where you’ll want to learn more about the sports car from Stuttgart. A place that invites you to relax, take your cup of coffee and start paging through one of the many books on Porsche. A place that manages to successfully combine the atmosphere of a garage with a Porsche museum.

Michelle’s Porsche shrine didn’t happen overnight though. There’s a long history behind her efforts in acquiring all of these cars, books and memorabilia. The floor on which Michelle’s cars are parked is the entrance to her house. Is there any better way than to be welcomed home by a room full of (mostly) 911s?

“I remember as a small child of three or four years old, I was always in the garage with my late father,” says Michelle. “He was always busy working on the cars, be it changing the oil or replacing spark plugs. One of my first memories as a child is when I tried to paint the inside of the garage with oil. My dad used to cut the oil tins in half, and I managed to find a brush and started painting!

“My mother would ask me to go and call my father, and he would always be in the garage. My grandfather had a Ford garage in Ceres, a 90-mile drive from Cape Town. The result is that there were always cars around us and I was always interested in them.

“The first semi-performance car I owned was a 1968 Ford Mustang that my husband bought for me. I thoroughly enjoyed that for around four years. However, people started telling me that if you haven’t driven a Porsche you don’t know what a performance car should feel like.