American Beauty

Want to see America via the windscreen of a Porsche? Of course you do, and so did Aussie travellers, Stewart and Ross Perry. To live the dream, they bought a Carrera 3.2, sight unseen, and set off for the trip of a lifetime. Not even an engine rebuild halfway was going to stop them and, at the end of the trip, they shipped the Porsche back to Oz.

- Stewart and Ross Perry

The short story: two Aussies – that's me, Stewart Perry and my mate, Ross Perry – buy a Porsche Carrera 3.2 unseen in America, for a very long driving adventure. Here's how it panned out!

Ross and I were greeted by a line snaking through the door of Long Beach DMV (Dept of Motor Vehicles). Our taxi driver commented “it’s always like this, recently took me five hours” – the last thing we needed after enduring an overnight economy flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles. A mere four hours later, I emerged triumphant with a permit allowing us to drive to Kingman, Arizona. Less stringent registration requirements, the offer of a permit for non-residents with no local address, and the chance to avoid hefty Californian sales tax made registering the car there the obvious choice.

Next stop was the CARS USA warehouse,where the 911 had been hibernating since purchase. It looked exactly like I expected: a neat original Iris Blue 1985 911 3.2 Carrera, with a few little chips and marks, and just over 103,000 miles on the clock. I bought the car sight-unseen via the well-known Porsche forum Pelican Parts. A pre-purchase inspection by a third party was reassuring, but nonetheless it was a relief to see it in the flesh.

I knew in advance the battery was dead, so we had one waiting at the auto parts store around the corner. Once installed, the Porsche fired straight away, sending a disturbing cloud of oil smoke wafting through the warehouse. But especially after sitting for months, old 911s have a reputation for blowing smoke on start-up and it seemed to vanish within a few miles.