A New Coffee-Table Book Celebrates the Porsche Outlaw Movement

Contrary to the prevailing notion that Porsche hot-rodders are a rogue faction of outsiders challenging the establishment, the new book Porsche Outlaws: Stuttgart Hot Rods, by Michael Alan Ross, posits that the custom revolution sprang from within the marque itself.

“Don’t let the suits fool you,” Ross writes, “instead, imagine if you will, Dr. Ferdinand Porsche and his son Ferry in white t-shirts, jeans, and high-top PRO-Keds just like any other SoCal family of hot-rodders.” Pointing out that the first road-going Porsche, model 356/001, was a piecemeal assembly of spare parts, Ross contends that the storied automaker’s foundation was in fact built on such souped-up examples.

The thesis continues with Porsche’s early “blurred lines” cars that stepped beyond the orthodox. Examples like the 550 Spyder made famous by James Dean, the largely experimental 904, and the radically aggressive 1967 911 R marked the indie spirit at the heart of the manufacturer. The book’s ensuing chapters document the multifarious microverses of deviant Porsches which were launched by what is the commonly acknowledged first-ever outlaw Porsche: the so-called Kustom Karrera. The latter was created by Dean Jeffries in 1957 as a whimsical riff on the 356 model.

The work of leading builders like Rod Emory (Emory Motorsports), Bisi Ezerioha (Bisimoto Engineering), Rob Dickinson (Singer Vehicle Design), and Rob Ida is featured, revealing the kaleidoscope of methods and philosophies that inspired such individualistically modified German sports cars. Several outlaw-loving drivers are also profiled, including Luftgekühlt cofounders Patrick Long and Jeff Zwart, designer Carl Magnusson, musician John Oates, and personality Magnus Walker.

While road-going and race-tuned outlaws are featured in their stripped-down, brashly painted, rebelliously tweaked glory, a chapter on Safari cars lays out the rough-and-ready Porsches that have been ruggedized, lifted, and given knobby tires ready for dirt duty.

For Ross, a tried-and-true photographer, the transition to wordsmith was not an easy one. “I’ve worked with the greatest writers in the business, and I’ve had tremendous respect for them,” he says. “But now I have ten times as much respect because this was something that was not in my wheelhouse. My neighbor told me, ‘You’ve got to sit down at the keyboard and start doing it . . . just put your computer on dictate and just talk. Tell the story.’ And that’s what I did.”

Photographing the cars presented unique challenges, such as the one adventure with Dean Jeffries’ Kustom Karrera. Ross recalls the car was about to be placed on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum for a year and he only had a few minutes to photograph it before it got tucked away for the exhibit.

“I looked at the NOAA [weather report] and saw that I had a 14-minute window before another thunderstorm came in. The roof was already completely soaked, and I ran around like a complete maniac shooting that car . . . It was like a pressure cooker of all these things having to come together to create this incredible image that is in the book,” he recalls. “I’ll never forget that moment.” Porsche Outlaws: Stuttgart Hot Rods is available through Quarto.

Click here for more photos from the coffee-table book Porsche Outlaws: Stuttgart Hot Rods.