Q&A: Sebastian, Porsche 930

Name, occupation, where do you live?

My name is Sebastian Chen Spier, I’m a digital product designer and graphic designer living in NYC. Originally I’m from Vancouver, BC Canada but I moved to NY about 10 years ago for a variety of reasons mostly for work. My father grew up in Queens tho so I’ve always had kind of a connection to this place.

1. What do you drive?

I don’t really daily (drive) anything because we have great public transit in NY. And now that my work has gone fully remote, I am not even commuting anywhere anymore but on the weekends I drive a 1988 Porsche 930 In guards Red over beige. It’s also known as 911 Turbo. It is the first Turbo car that Porsche ever made back in 1976 and it was only made because race regulations stated that manufacturers had to produce 400 street-legal cars to gain approval for Group 4 homologation.

2. What is the story of this car?

I bought this car from a consignment dealer based out of Georgia. The car has, until now, only been owned by one person and he is actually a retired Nascar driver in the south. It became a little bit too hard for him to drive it so he put it up for auction. The previous owner worked on the car himself with his own pit crew as well as getting some bigger modifications done by Frontsblem? racing Georgia. He actually kinda built this as a track car but he actually never put it on the track once. Instead, he would take it for weekend trips around the east coast and he actually only put 71K miles on it the entire 31 years that he has owned it.

I completely intend on carrying that tradition forward and using it mostly only for weekend trips, I probably won’t track it. These cars don’t really make great track cars.

3. What made you buy this car? was this your dream car growing up?

This was totally my dream car growing up. It was the poster I had on my wall, It was the magazine photo that I would save. I actually went back home and ran through some of my childhood home in my mom’s basement and found about 12 different toys in various scales, all of this exact car, most of them were Red too.

4. What do you love about the car?

It's such an interesting experience to drive a 911 Turbo. they’re finicky, they're challenging, the car really forces you to pay attention to what’s it doing. It’s not by any means a comfortable car to drive, it’s not like a BMW comfort sedan that you can drive with one hand and hold a coffee in the other. The driver really has to be deliberate and intentional with cornering, choosing the right gear, and approaching turns with the right amount of speed. You have to be very engaged with what the car is doing. Mostly it’s a fun and really dynamic car that just completely wants your full attention at all times. When you give it your attention, it delivers a completely unique experience that you don’t really get from any other cars. A question most car enthusiasts hear is ‘why would you drive a manual car over an automatic car?’ it’s easier to drive but it’s a lot more fun being connected to a car like that and so it’s kind of the same thing as that, just times 1000 with most air-cooled Porsches. As a designer, I have also appreciated how special the design of this car really is. It's kind of like an accidental masterpiece, there are so many corks* and weird oddities on the inside. The car’s interiors remain pretty much unchanged from 1976 all the way to 1989 which is kind of unheard of. As technology improved and accessories got added, they shoved the switches and controls into little corners where you can’t even see them, it feels like they were iterating on the same product for a very long time which is very similar to the kind of work that I do, designing software. Each year a new problem would arise and they would solve it without going back and redesigning the whole car, I think that’s very interesting. Some people say that’s why the car is so iconic now because the look and the lines of the car remained unchanged for so long and it really left a huge impression on a lot of people. You get inside, It doesn’t smell like plastic, it smells like gasoline and oil, the sound of the engine behind you, and the way the Turbo takes a while to kick in, it just feels very foreign and different in it, it’s really special.