911 Replica - Sign Of The Times
It’s
no great surprise that the so-called replica has become such an emotive subject. In a free
society we should undoubtedly have the liberty to pay homage to our chosen icons by creating
or possessing – purely for our own benefit – what the dictionary generally defines as ‘an accurate
reproduction of an object’, or ‘a scrupulous copy of a work of art, especially one made, authorised or
supervised by the original artist’.
But the term replica has also come to mean something altogether more pejorative: a fake, an
unscrupulous copy. ‘Something that is not genuine, but which is presented as, or appears to be,
genuine,’ suggests the same dictionary. And most likely a copy created for some sort of fraudulent
purpose, to be passed off as the real thing to those too naive, too lazy, or simply too greedy to
be bothered to check its provenance.
So let us get one thing clear from the start: the 993-model 911 Carrera ‘RS’ that you see here is
in every sense as accurate and ethically sound a replica of this iconic modern Porsche as you will
find anywhere. If it was built with any kind of ulterior motive, then that was purely to show that
it is possible to create a machine that even if not quite the genuine article, delivers probably 99 per
cent of the thrill and pleasure to be had from it.
It may not have the all-important RS chassis number – which itself proves that it’s a replica, not
a fake. It may be painted a colour that wouldn’t appear in the Porsche catalogue until last autumn,
12 years after the end of the genuine 993 RS’s all too brief reign. And it is, as you’ll see, something of
a hybrid, even a mongrel. But it is almost entirely both the concept and the work of its hard-grafting
owner. It incorporates as many genuine RS.
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