This is the tale of two phone calls, both of them unsolicited, each one finding its soulmate in the other. It’s also the tale of perhaps the most invigorating car I will drive all year – part restomod, part hot-rod, all Porsche and executed to perfection by Tuthill.
You’ll have heard of Tuthill Porsche, located just outside Banbury on the northern edge of the Cotswolds. But if you think it still mostly builds rally cars out of old 911s you’ll be in for a shock as you wander into its gleaming new workshop. Look around and you’ll spot racing 911s built for the 2.0L Cup series, classic road-going Porsches in for service or restoration and, yes, more than a few 911 rally cars (including the one used by Ken Block last year on the East Africa Safari Classic, which sold at auction a few days after my visit for £241,000), plus a handful of one-off builds that will stop you in your tracks, slack-jawed. But more on that later.
This 914/6 is one of those bespoke projects. ‘We received a call out of the blue in December 2020 from a totally new client,’ says business development manager David Cox. That first call came from a collector on Jersey called Peter who wanted to discuss building a restomod 914, something that would sit happily in his garage alongside his 918 Hybrid – ‘Peter considers the 914 a sort of baby brother to the 918,’ says David.
