Me and the Gold-Plated Porsche

Yours truly, stylin' in a Dolce and Gabbana black, gray and olive striped knit cap, Calvin Klein black long-sleeve T, and A&F olive-drab cargo pants, peering under the hood of Stephan Wilkinson's bright yellow Porsche 911 race car, 2004. Hah! I always wanted to walk down a red carpet and have someone ask me who I was wearing, instead of asking me who I was stalking and escorting me out. None of my clothes had paint on them at that point. Rips and tears, and in some cases duct tape and staples as I don't sew, but I didn't start painting until late fall 2004 when I stopped working full-time.

B O O K S — The Gold-Plated Porsche: How I Sank a Small Fortune into a Used Car, and Other Misadventures, Globe Pequot Press, 2004. This is a book by my publisher, but I had nothing to do with its design or production. Stephan Wilkinson is a former editor of Car and Driver, a graduate of Harvard and contributes a monthly column at Popular Science, "Man and Machine." The car isn't a product of a Las Vegas shopping spree gone wrong, it's not actually gold-plated; the title refers to the obscene amount of money the author spent to have the car made race-worthy after buying it for next to nothing. 

I was still working full-time in 2004, about to quit actually, when the author dropped by with his book's namesake Porsche. He was a really interesting guy to talk to, aren't all car people, lol? The car's six-cylinder 'pancake' horizontally opposed engine was L-O-U-D and stripped out as race cars tend to be. It was good weather, a great afternoon to gather outside for an impromptu car show of one, and I always enjoy the times I can tell someone associated with a book or magazine I've read forever, just how much I appreciated their contribution to my car-fueled adolescence. We have a few Porsche lovers that read this blog so I thought you'd appreciate this post.

For a link to the Amazon write up of this now out-of-print book, click here.

Here's what Car and Driver said of the book:

". . . this isn't a book about Porsche restoration. It's about Wilkinson's colorful life. . . . That, along with elegant writing, is what makes this book so endearing--the tales are told without ego. Wilkinson is amused by life's inevitable disasters and humiliating blow-ups, trotting them out so everyone can laugh. This is . . . less a tale about a machine than a tale about a man enjoying a machine."