QUOTE(GregAmy @ Dec 11 2023, 09:38 AM)
QUOTE(Superhawk996 @ Dec 10 2023, 07:51 PM)
For anyone that doesn’t know the story of his 959 getting impounded by customs it’s an interesting tale.
I was at Sonoma Raceway in 1989, attending the Bondurant racing school. During lunch we were in the office and some guy drove up in what I swear was a 959 and started talking to some of the instructors...except I knew the 959 was not allowed into the country, so I figured it was just an add-on body kit on a 911.
As the guy was conversing I stepped outside and looked the car over...man, that was a nicely-done nice kit! I looked under the car...and was surprised to see it was all wheel drive. I looked closer and saw that it had an odd-looking engine, was that water jackets? And now I started to wonder even more...
I stood there stunned, admiring the car, and then started walking back to the office and the car owner passed me by with a wink, got in his car, and drove away. It sounded
glorious as he gunned it up the road. My stunned look when I walked back into the office musta been obvious because one of the instructors stepped up to me and said, "that car was never here" and walked away. And no one spoke of it again.
What just happened?
I got home to Texas later that month and told my friends that I swore I saw a real, honest-to-God Porsche 959, The Unobtainable of unobtainable cars. Which of course they didn't believe because we all knew that the 959 was not imported into the USA so what I saw was clearly a really nice add-on body kit on a 911. But I was convinced and just dealt with the resultant ridicule of my stubborn certainty.
A month or so later, Autoweek broke a story that Bill Gates (and his Microsoft partner, Paul Allen) had imported 959s which were hidden in a secret warehouse in San Francisco.
To this day, I'm betting my bottom dollar that what I saw during lunch at Sonoma Raceway was Paul Allen (I think I would have recognized Bill Gates) having snuck his Porsche 959 out for a nice Bay Area afternoon drive.
And I took that newspaper rag and stuck it in the face of anyone that had doubted me.
GA
Postscript: in the early 90s, both 959s were discovered and impounded by US Customs. Efforts to recover the cars led Gates' attorneys and lobbyists getting approved the 25-year "Show or Display" amendment, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1998.
Great story! Was the car silver?
I saw a 959 (but was it a kit??) going over the Golden Gate Bridge one day and was below away—even if the glimpse was fleeting, it sure looked like the real thing where the kits were fairly obvious.
Fast forward some years, and I heard a friend mention a silver 959 parked at a very well known Porsche shop one day. He said it was
definitely the real thing, but with Taco Bell wrappers strewn all over the footwell. Too cool.
Fast forward some more years, and a (much older) friend in SF who was kind of a car guy told me about an acquaintance of his, who lived in Presidio Heights, near some of the embassies…who had a silver 959 and drove it fairly regularly. I'll leave his name out here (I only know his last name), but he apparently brought the car in on a yacht (!) and was later confronted with a threat from Customs…that he had an answer for (leverage of some kind). He kept the car, and was able to drive it. To this day, I'd love to complete the loop on that story, and probably know a few folks who can help me do it.
I wonder if this is the car you saw? As I understood it, the Gates and Allen cars never got out of the port (until they did under Show and Display), but were regularly visited and maintained there. There were some others that got in here and there (Otis Chandler's Guards Red 959, for display only, as an example), but the "flood" only came after Show and Display came into effect.
