NORTHWEST SAFARI
LUFTAUTO 001: A RALLY-BRED PORSCHE WITH A CHARITABLE HEART
STORY | Tina Chau
PHOTOGRAPHY | Josh Sikora
A historic Snowmageddon weather front had just passed, and a driving January rain revealed fairly manageable roads as we headed east out of Seattle. The windows, cracked to keep away the fog, let in the raw notes from the Porsche’s iconic aircooled engine as owner Alex Kochis and I looked past the backs of the 911’s round auxiliary headlamps to the snow-covered mountains in the distance. Anticipation was high.
Inside, details like the custom-made woodblend shift knob and the sideways-rotated tachometer spoke to the special nature of the car. “The tach is sideways so the important numbers are easy to see at a glance, enabling the driver to focus on the path,” Alex explained. “Luftgekühlt”—done up in orange stitching—adorned the brown Recaro bucket seats that hugged me in place. On the brown leather dash, in front of the passenger seat, like the personalized label sewn inside a made-to-measure suit, was a stainless-steel plate with the word Luftauto.
The story behind Luftauto starts like any modern-day superhero movie: a group of individuals, each with their own special skills, combine their unique capabilities to craft something extraordinary, beautiful, and magical for the good of the world. In this case, the car world. Beginning in 2016, Luftgekühlt founders Patrick Long and Howie Idelson decided they wanted to build a Porsche into a unique, rally-inspired car to auction at Luftgekühlt 3, their annual air-cooled Porsche show. Residing in warm, sunny California, Patrick envisioned a car that could handle an off-road rally as easily as a drive to the neighborhood coffee spot. The heart of the rally car operation was to donate proceeds to The Autumn Leaves Project, a charity providing resources for families and individuals living with pancreatic cancer. Patrick’s friend and musician Butch Walker, who lost his father to the disease in 2013, had started the charity.
With an aggressive timeline of only 4 months, Patrick decided to start with a Grand Prix White 1985 911 Carrera Coupe with 79k miles on it. He had acquired it a year before while racing on the East Coast. Prodigious aspirations inspired Long to recruit his friends to build out this mission. The dream team included Joey Seely from E-Motion Engineering for suspension and overall build; Rod Emory from Emory Motorsports for design; John Benton from Benton Performance for electronics and wiring; and famed rally driver Jeff Zwart for development and testing. Truly the best of the best.
Because the car was already so immaculate and Patrick is a purist at heart, little was changed to the car’s aesthetic. The engine stayed primarily stock, but they added an exhaust and limited-slip differential. Patrick explained, “My taste is to try and celebrate the period originality of how these cars may have rolled out in their time, as an original piece of the storyline of Porsche, rather than reimagine or recreate. You celebrate the heritage, but you refine the subtle and sometimes less visible parts of the car.” They kept the budgeting conservative to maximize potential margins—and then the car auctioned for $275,000, over double the expected amount. Patrick and Joey considered it a mind-blowing success for the team.
Patrick’s racing history heavily influenced how he thought through the design of Luftauto and his motorsport projects. “As a racing driver, besides getting paid to do fast lap times and finish first, your biggest impact or value add is being able to connect with the car and quickly assess the most important things it needs for it to be better or more practical or refined. That’s a lot of what I focus on in cars I put my hands on; I try to design and engineer from the cockpit out, starting with seating position, safety, everything that’s around the driver, and then working out.
The list of features on this car is long (and can be found in full on the Luftgekühlt website), but a few deserve special attention. First, Rod Emory, known for building rally and race-inspired cars, added extra protection in the form of rally-style bumpers and three skid plates. A skid pan covers the entirety of the underside of the car and then front and back skid plates reach all the way to the bottom line of the bumpers. Next, inside the car, the roll bars are all handmade and integrated into the strut towers to add stiffness and give extra support to the rear end of the car. Uniquely, the mudflaps have a tether to return them back into their original resting position. Keeping in the true spirit of a car made for long rallies, a luggage rack was fitted to the roof to carry the second spare tire and a small shovel. And finally, after assessing common parts damaged while driving through brush or a tight trail, the team custom designed sleek and smaller side mirrors that lie more flush to the body of the car.
After the triumphant auction, the 911 traveled from Southern California to Arizona, where it resided for 5 years during which it was sold to another enthusiast. Then in June of 2021, Alex heard that the second owner was ready to sell Luftauto after 4 years of ownership. He immediately jumped on the opportunity. Since its acquisition, Alex has been enjoying sliding the car around his property in Oregon, where he has ample amounts of gravel roads and land to play on.
Luftgekühlt produced two more unique Luftautos (002 and 003) in the last five years. Asked what they would have done differently to the first one, both Patrick and Joey responded: “Nothing.” The car is everything they had envisioned it to be. The only modification Alex has added to the vehicle is the heating system, mainly to counter the fogging effect when the car is driven during the humid and frosty winter months in the Pacific Northwest.
One-of-a-kind specs aside, this car gives everyone who has been a part of its journey a special memory or feeling when driving it or working on it. Joey Seely stated with almost a nostalgic feeling, “I lost touch with 001 but would love to see it, drive it, and even work on it again. That project was my first major project as E-Motion Engineering.” Patrick recounted a few of his favorite memories with the Luftauto team, including the joy Rod Emory felt when he jumped the car from a driveway into his shop, and then the shakedown of the car with Jeff Zwart behind the wheel at Tejon Ranch, where he got to hammer down some twisty, rally-style roads leaving a trail of dust behind him.
Where this special car is probably happiest is a on dry, gravelly road, spitting rocks as it slides and drifts into the bends. Picture James Bond driving it around in the desert scene in Quantum of Solace. Yet the car has adapted well to the cooler, wetter environment of the Pacific Northwest, with our sometimes treacherous and slick terrain of snow and ice. Alex shares a video of him zooming the white Porsche like a streak of light down his long, gritty, curvy driveway as fast as he can. He loves feeling the car scooting on its 15-inch rally tires, hearing the suspension working over uneven terrain, and seeing all the customized interior features. He often gets smiles and thumbs up from passersby and is happy driving it, even without a radio, to run errands. He summed it up: “I LOVE how this car feels to drive.”
That pure love of driving meant that Luftauto’s designers had achieved their goal: to build Luftauto to be like a BMX bike, something that makes you feel like a kid who can do so many different things and do them well.
