By Tim Harris · May 25, 2026

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A few days ago, we published an article titled:

And then an email arrived that made me stop what I was doing.

Not because it was angry.

Not because it threatened me with legal action from a man named Trevor who stores Corvette parts in a climate-controlled shed behind a strip mall.

But because the sender clearly knew exactly what he was talking about.

The email came from a reader named Olle.

And right away, he opened with this:

Now normally, when someone says you’re wrong “in my humble opinion,” what follows is usually a Facebook Marketplace-quality manifesto involving fake Carrera GTs and why modern oil is ruining flat tappet cams.

But then Olle casually mentioned he owns:

At which point, frankly, everyone else in the conversation should probably lower their voices.

Those are not cars.

Those are sacred relics.

The sort of machinery that makes grown Porsche collectors suddenly start speaking in whispers while adjusting their glasses.

And what made Olle’s email genuinely interesting wasn’t that he disagreed with me.

It’s that he agreed with a surprising amount of the original argument.

Olle wrote:

Correct.

Building a truly proper old-school Porsche hot-rod today requires one of two things:

And he also made another critical point:

Exactly.

The engineers building RSRs in the early 1970s were not sentimental preservationists.

They were racing engineers.

If Porsche engineers in 1973 had access to modern ECUs, carbon fiber, titanium exhausts and CAD-designed aero, they would have used all of it immediately.

As Olle perfectly said:

That’s historically accurate.

Which is why modern restorod culture often argues that using modern technology is actually very “Porsche.”

And honestly?

That argument holds water.

Then Olle hit the real issue.

And this is where things got interesting.

He wrote:

That line stayed with me because he’s absolutely right.

Somewhere along the way, the modern “custom” car became strangely standardized.

Every second build now follows the exact same formula:

The irony is incredible.

The anti-establishment hot-rod has become establishment.

And Olle said something else that was brutally accurate:

Painful.

But fair.

Let’s define this properly because the internet has made a complete mess of the terminology.

A hot-rod — or restorod — is essentially anything that deviates from original factory specification.

That’s it.

Mild to wild.

Lowered suspension? Hot-rod.

Twin-plug engine? Hot-rod.

Digital dash and carbon body? Also hot-rod.

The spectrum is enormous.

And history tells us something important:

Customized cars are often prisoners of fashion.

The Pro Street era looked incredible once.

Then suddenly it looked ridiculous.

Billet-heavy street rods suffered the same fate.

Countless Ferraris and Porsches modified in the 1980s and 1990s later required expensive “de-customization” to return them back to factory form.

Which raises a fascinating question:

Because they absolutely will.

One day, giant wheels, exposed carbon weave and minimalist interiors may look as period-specific as frosted tips and Ed Hardy shirts.

And then what?

Do future enthusiasts begin re-hot-rodding the hot-rods?

Do they restore old restorods back into something more historically grounded?

It sounds ridiculous until you realize this cycle has already happened repeatedly throughout automotive history.

This was the line from Olle’s email that really landed with me:

That matters.

A real 1973 RS Touring matters because it represents a frozen moment in time.

The smell.
The noise.
The thin metal.
The mechanical honesty.
The slight sense that something expensive could explode at any moment.

You are not driving someone’s interpretation of history.

You are driving history itself.

And I think Olle is probably right that originality may actually become more valuable as the world fills with increasingly elaborate reinterpretations.

Because authenticity becomes rarer once everyone starts “improving” things.

I now desperately want to know something:

What are those three cars actually like to drive back-to-back?

Seriously.

How different is the RS Touring from the S/T FIA car?

Does the 1972 S coupe feel sweeter and lighter than both?

Which one feels alive at sane road speeds?

Which one scares you?

Which one makes you laugh out loud?

Because at that level, nobody really cares about numbers anymore.

The conversation becomes about feel.

Texture.

Steering weight.

Noise.

Mechanical honesty.

Modern cars may be objectively better.

But objective “better” has never really been the point of old Porsches.

A microwave is objectively better at heating food than a wood-fired pizza oven.

And yet nobody dreams about owning a microwave.

Reply directly to this email.

Especially if you own something air-cooled, loud, mechanically questionable or financially irresponsible.

— Tim Harris

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