For someone who currently owns three 968 Sports and who’s also the Club’s enthusiastic 968 Register Secretary, Matt Staines had a surprisingly accidental introduction to Porsche’s final four-cylinder transaxle car.
Although an owner of 911s both in the past and to this day, and a 986 Boxster at one point as well, it wasn’t until a motoring-themed trip to America in 2022, where he noticed the high value of 968s at auction Stateside, that the model piqued his interest. “I was a 911 guy, I still am,” says Matt, “but these cars suddenly came onto my radar”.
Some months later and back in the UK, an innocent Facebook tag in an advert for a red 968 Sport perilously close to being broken up for spares led to an inquisitive visit the next day. “I Googled it and he was just seven miles from where I happened to be going; it was just like it was meant to be. One of those days”.
Matt knew the car’s engine was out of the car and on a pallet, but what had seemed like
a lost cause was actually far from it. The shell was in good condition and free from rot, all the parts and the interior were present and the engine was built by John Holland at Unit 11
in Warrington. Moreover, the owner had a multitude of spares in his garage. It turned
out that the car had been in pieces for 17 years and only had 64,000 miles on the clock. The engine had blown a piston (very rare on a 968, Matt notes) and, in spite of the rebuild, the car had been laid up ever since.
A deal was done and Matt’s 968 journey began. Today, the car still looks unkempt from the outside, but is well on the way to recovery in a mechanical sense. “We have never completed it because other cars have come and gone, but it is on the job list for later this year”, says Matt. He’s not joking when he says ‘other cars’...
“Prior to the red car, I knew about this purple car. It was in Southport, about an hour away from me, but there was always a reason the owner wouldn’t let me come and see it. Anyone who knows 968s will know my car. It was on Autotrader at a stupid price, as it clearly needed work, for about two years”.
In August last year, Matt and his friend Hugh decided to pursue the purple car once and for all, after Hugh had initially asked – unsuccessfully – if he could buy the red car off Matt. After much encouragement of the owner, they were told it was languishing neglected in a backstreet garage. “It was in a muddy yard with a load of other scruffy cars – filthy outside, filthy inside. We should have just run a mile, but that colour just draws you in…”
Matt made the owner an offer, but they were miles apart and, after words were exchanged, the trail went cold. In the meantime, a black 968 Sport down in Newbury caught their eyes. While contemplating a trip down south to view it some weeks later, Matt’s phone suddenly pinged with a text. It was the owner of the purple car: the deal, at Matt’s original offer, was on.
Understandably, given the history to this story, Matt didn’t wait for the owner to change his mind. Having agreed to go into it as a joint venture with Hugh, he began to make arrangements. “It was a mad scramble to get my trailer guy Phil to collect it. He said: ‘How about in three weeks’ time?’, and I said ‘No, we need to get it tomorrow’… so off we set for Southport the next day.”
Once the car was home, Matt began to discover what his money had really bought. We’ve informally referred to it as purple in this article, as many do, but its real name is Amaranth Violet and Matt believes it was applied to just 12 968s that came to the UK.
Unusually, the name ‘Sport’ was a British invention. The car that was originally to have been called the 944 S3 found it tough going in the marketplace when it was launched in 1991, but the arrival of the Club Sport model in 1993 added much-needed interest and lustre. It combined a more focused chassis set-up with a substantial weight saving thanks to the removal of many convenience items, various soundproofing parts and the loss of the rear seats. The weight saving seemed to bring the 968 alive and the car rightly won many plaudits from journalists and owners alike. This is the beautifully balanced transaxle concept at its finest.
However, the compromises in achieving the weight loss were too radical for some. Indeed, as is so often the case in the sports car market, what many customers thought they should have and what they really wanted were two separate things. Porsche GB were particularly savvy to this phenomenon and hit upon the idea of offering a car that was some way between the regular Coupé and the hardcore CS. From the factory, these cars were known as ‘P35 F 968 CS with Luxury Package’ and had items like the rear seats, remote boot release and central locking fitted as standard, being built on the same line as the CS. Legend has it that someone from Porsche GB had a batch of ‘Sport’ badges made in the UK and applied to every car before delivery. Today, the market recognises a hierarchy in value between a ‘pure’ Club Sport, a Sport and then a Coupé, with only 179 of the former coming to the UK versus 306 Sport models. However, there’s no doubt that, now as when they were new, a Sport is a sweet spot in the range for many.
No sooner had Matt’s second Sport arrived than it was whisked off for recommissioning work. “It went to my friend’s workshop in Lincoln and that’s when we found, unsurprisingly, multiple problems with the car. We knew it needed a major service, we knew it needed discs and pads and tyres and things – that’s a given. But we started to find other issues where things had been botched, and the worst one was an MOT failure where the wipers didn’t work. You assume the blades have perished, the usual thing, but it was that the wipers didn’t actually wipe. Okay, no problem, we thought. So we got a refurbished wiper motor and the wipers still didn’t wipe! Then we start chasing our tails a bit…”
“Eventually, we found out that some lovely person had left the cover off the fuse box, so
we had water ingress into the fuse board. There were other electrical issues like the stereo not working, the heater being dead, all of which we hadn’t checked because the car was dead when we picked it up”.
Matt enquired at his local Porsche main dealer about the price of a new fuse board and was somewhat stung at the reply he received: £2,000. “I found a guy with a few for £45 on the internet, and lo and behold, my mechanic plugged the fuse board in and a couple of relays and everything suddenly worked.”
A spreadsheet of all the work Matt’s done to the purple 968 so far runs to many lines, from simple things like new wheel bolts to various electrical components and all the obvious recommissioning items you’d expect for a car that had done around 300 miles in 10 years. The most recent expense has been a full detail, which has returned the shine to that amazing paintwork – or, at least, the majority of it. He is sending the car off to the bodyshop next to get a few things smartened up. “It’s not 100 per cent finished yet; it still needs some paint, where it’s faded on the bumper, the mirrors, the handles and the spoiler. And there’s a little bit of corrosion on a wheel arch, which we think was probably a historic car park ding that’s not been repaired properly. But I’ve probably driven nearly 1,000 miles in the car now.”
The colour-coded wheels may not be to all tastes, but they were an option in period. Matt has other sets in silver and black he could put on but, as he says, the Amaranth Violet wheels are “a bit of fun”.
As for the aforementioned black 968 Sport, that reappeared while the purple one was
in the workshop and, as I’m beginning to understand, Matt doesn’t waste time when
a car he fancies becomes available. Described as being “probably the worst-looking of all three” when he went to view it, it had been sat for eight years but only had 85,000 miles on the clock. Suffering from “chronic lacquer peel”, it was very clean underneath once inspected on a ramp and is now waiting its turn on Matt’s list of projects. It’s just the next step for a man with a newly found passion for restoring and championing one of Porsche’s most underappreciated but captivating models.
The 968 Register
“I’ve run Region 5 with my team since early 2021 and we have 1,100 members, so it’s a big territory,” Matt explains. “I wanted some knowledge when I bought the red car, so I went to the 968 Register but it wasn’t really doing anything. I approached Steve Gillings and asked what was going on and found out the guy who was running it had actually sold his car!
“After about six months, I offered to do it. I didn’t know that much about the cars, but we were learning fast by restoring them and I know the Porsche and Club worlds well. I started in July 2023 and found out that there are about 200 cars on the Register. That’s not all the cars in the UK, but there are some great stories of ownership and a real love and passion for the cars.”
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