Eric Pasia, 42, a Phoenix-based management consultant and founder of Last Era, a motorsport-inspired clothing brand, in his tribute to the 1995 Porsche 911 Carrera RS, he told AJ Baime.
When I was young, my mom said to me, “Hey, did you know your birthday is the same as Mario Andretti’s?” I didn’t know who he was, so I went to find out. I soon became fascinated with him and motor sports. Throughout my childhood I followed racing and the Andretti family, and I really got into cars and modified cars. In high school and college, I started buying Japanese cars that I could afford and modifying them.
When I got my first job, I could afford my first real sports car, a 1999 BMW M3. Then I got a 2001 BMW M3, then a BMW M5. In the end, I decided to switch to Porsche in the early 2000s. I bought a 911 Turbo from 2002 and got to know the history and the Porsche platform. That’s when I started hearing so many things about air-cooled Porsches.
There’s a whole lineage of fantastic Porsches that everyone is talking about, driven by air-cooled engines, before the company switched to water-cooled engines, in the late 1990s. So many people told me I needed to have an air-cooled Porsche to really experience what it meant to be a Porsche enthusiast.