Eric Pasia, 42, a management consultant in Phoenix and founder of Last Era, a sports-inspired clothing brand, paid tribute to his 1995 Porsche 911 Carrera RS, as he told AJ Baime.
When I was young, my mother said to me, “Hey, did you know that your birthday is the same as Mario Andretti’s?” I didn’t know who he was, so I went to find out. I soon became fascinated with him and motor sports. Throughout my childhood, I watched the races and the Andretti family and really got into cars and changes. In high school and college, I started buying Japanese cars that I could afford and modify.
When I got my first job, I could afford my first real sports car, a 1999 BMW M3. Then I got a 2001 BMW M3, then a BMW M5. Eventually, I decided to move to Porsche in the early 2000s. I bought a 911 Turbo from 2002 and started learning about the Porsche platform and history. That’s when I started hearing so much about air-cooled Porsches.
There is a whole lineage of fantastic Porsches that everyone is talking about, driven by air-cooled engines, before the company switched to water-cooled engines in the late 1990s. So many people have told me that I need to own an air-cooled Porsche to really experience what it means to be a Porsche enthusiast.