1971 Porsche 911 T - Jay Leno's Garage

[Music] it just makes all the right noises sometimes especially here in america we get caught up in the horsepower award now this is two and a quarter and it's as much fun as any of those other kind of cars in some ways more because you get to use all the power all the time welcome to the episode of jaylon's garage pandemic edition the car featuring today my 1971 porsche 911 t this is the base model porsche this is the one you got if well you couldn't afford the high performance models it was 125 horsepower uh 2.2 liter six you know a very nice car nothing exciting and what most people do is what i've done is upgraded a bit made it a bit more powerful uh you may have seen this car in the restoration blocks if you come to this website people are saying where do you find your cars how do you get them you know i try to go to good neighborhoods and then i go to gas station good neighborhoods and i ask hey any cool cars you haven't seen for a while that you think might be stored somewhere because i find rich people tend to just kind of put stuff in garages that's what happened with this one that's what happened with some other cars that i've got so if you're in like florida you want to go to palm beach area if you're in california san diego beverly hills brandon weather just talk to gas stations or car guys or even auto shops any cool cars you used to see around here you don't see anymore yeah there was an old man used to come in i'll tell you one day i my wife and i were having our house fumigated we stayed in a hotel and i took my 1909 baker electric down to the beverly hills hotel my wife had never stayed there it was like 30 years ago and she wanted to stay there now okay so i pull in with this thing and the old guy comes over valet he says is that mrs so-and-so's car and i go what oh yeah she used to come here every day up until about 25 years ago one of these electrics and then i tracked down where she left across the car disappeared to go but that was a clue oh that was kind of cool you know so sometimes uh if you ask around that's how you find nice stuff this car was kind of worn out it was well used but unmolested there was no body rod in it this car was parked in a garage actually an underground garage in beverly hills a condo a guy bought the car new in 71 and he kept it at his mother's condo in beverly hills in an underground parking space it was parked i guess in the late 90s it was one of those deals where you park right against the wall and somebody else parks behind you and then he lost the key and then the tires went flat and then he i don't know whether he moved away or whatever anyway the car just sat and sat when the owner finally passed away i i got a call from his wife when i like to buy it and i went down and looked at it and being a california car the most important thing in porsche it was 100 rust free there wasn't an ounce of rust on this car it's a well used car well over 100 000 miles on it but the original paint now we just buffed up this little area to see how well it would hold up and it looks fantastic i mean because it wasn't uh subjected to the sun and didn't sit outside it sat in a dark room for 20 years 25 years interior was a little tatty so we've we're doing up the interior stoddard out of ohio there they do they have all the porsche stuff they do a great job so we're getting a lot of the replacement pieces from them just did the rear seat uh still have the front seat to do and a few other things but it's coming along good and this thing should be running the next time the next time we check in with you as you can see it's a nice straight car had a little accident damage uh we'll put it up on the left and we'll show you that not much just you know just the usual dings and stuff it had a hundred and something thousand miles on it when i got it so but uh it's a porsche so they can take it you know i always say if you watch this website whenever the car and drive and road and track they do these shootout things with the fastest cars the ones that always compete and always do well are porsche and corvette because those two groups drive just drive the heck out of their cars they like to use them they use them hard you know a lot of italian exotics oh no this car i've had it 30 years it's got 18 miles on it well good for you i don't get that whole thing so we did a complete restoration on this we didn't repaint the whole car we just touched up areas so i would say it's probably 80 percent original paint uh i like the way it sits you know it's funny when you drive a car that's really lightweight what is this thing 2700 pounds something like this and with this upgraded motor it's got about two and a quarter horsepower so it really goes well i mean you're never lacking for anything it's great fun to drive it handles nice i wanted to keep the original block because well it's a numbers matching car i wanted to keep the original with that 901 style dog leg transmission which is when you switch from car to car you forget oh that's right first is over here it gets so annoying but but it's fun it's part of the character of the car you know when we did the engine on this thing uh we took it up to 2.5 liter well i don't want to repeat myself here let's go back to the restoration block and i'll show you what we did to the motor take a look it's a porsche guy daryl hall you might remember from the proper singing group hall and oates as you can see the road has been very rough on him it's been a tough tough gig to it so now he's back to doing porsches carol how are you good i'm doing really well thank you he is our porsche guy tell us what we're doing here this is my uh engine from the 71 911 t which was the base porsche model what was it 2.2 2.2 2.2 liter now we're taking into a 2.5 2.5 liter exactly right right so what we've done is gone to larger barrels or bigger pistons you can see that the difference in the size of the holes here yeah and so we get a bigger bore plus a longer stroke crank this is a crank out of a 2.7 liter so we're getting exactly 2.5 liters and with a longer stroke we get a lot of torque right instead of going to a very large bore with a short short stroke and we didn't go to 2.7 liter or 3.2 because i wanted to keep the original transmission with the old dog leg on it just to keep it i didn't want to make it a hot rod hot rod i just want to make it a little bit more powerful 911 and we put the dual plug head on it right you apply the head on it and and larger valves right so you'll see there's two spark plugs right very cool one on the top one on the bottom they they sit i didn't ask you do these fire simultaneously or is there a millisecond there's there's a i believe it's a 12 degree difference between top and bottom the bottom fires first the top fire second okay because the flame travel is lower on the bottom than it is on the top actually yeah so then we got bigger holes coming in here and bigger bigger valves right so it's going to breathe a lot better through the set of weber carburetors that's going on here and we put the oil squirters in there so we're going to have a little more yeah a little bit cooler so if we come over here to the to the case and a magnesium case this is a magnesium case and that's what i think even on the base model t they use magnesium so if we look right down in here there's a little spot bright spot in there and that's a little orifice that is drilled into the oil passage and it squirts oil up onto the skirt of the piston so that it it doesn't detonate as much and it also doesn't burn right right and what do we have here there's a there's a plug for for machining at the factory and there's a just an aluminum plug that that is pressed in and i like to put epoxy on the top to help keep it in yeah cool all right and our transmission is over here the track yeah yeah how bad was the synchros and whatnot synchros weren't too bad yeah the brake bands were worn out right right um but the teeth themselves are are just flying and the other thing we're doing is is put putting a uh delimiter slip in it instead of just the old one lager that you get on the power and that lights up the right rear and then you get go the other way and it lights up the other rear and this will will allow the car to be a lot quicker cool very cool and more more predictable yeah yeah yeah the crankshaft this this the two seven crank or the the 70.4 millimeter stroke is a much more balanced crankshaft counterweighted better um with this crankshaft you can you can take it to over 7000 rpm easily and these are our new rods and those are the new acryla rods that are significantly lighter and stronger than that than the stock rods boy they're beautifully made they do a really nice job i don't want to say that too much because then they raise the price again it's real hard i like these early air cooled 911s because the engine bays are so clean you can get to everything you can see some of the updates the weber carburetors the msd ignition on it it's not too radical two and a quarter horse is just about right you know i didn't want to do flares and all this kind of nonsense i just want a nice driving car with a bit more power brakes are fairly stock and obviously new pads and everything but they stop fine it's just such a light fascinating fun car to drive they do become addictive and it's so different porsches are so different than any other kind of car just figure out exactly how much oil you got to drive like 40 miles and then check the oil after it's warm which is always weird to me because you know i come from the old school before i take a car out i always pull the dipstick check they're all just to be sure and of course there's never anything on the stick oh my god you know i you get all sort of screwed up in these things but it takes about what eight and a half quarts something like that wonderful driving car uh the engine as i said totally rebuilt so even though it has a hundred thousand miles on the body you couldn't tell it's a great thing about california you know it's so dry that these things never rust and these early cars were just notorious for that but and i'll show you and we'll put it up on the lift you'll see what i'm talking about it was bumped in the back once and bumped in the front so it was tricky getting these to close exactly but that's okay but never not not crushed just you know just normal road damage you would experience on a regular basis no matter what you think you know about porsches it's always good to find a specialist one of the best out here is scott's independence inc in anaheim california he just does air-cooled porsches and when we got this thing all done i took it out in the first week i'm shifting i put the clutch and boom pedal goes right to the floor i'm stuck ah flat bit it back here and it i guess from what uh two years 70 71 i think it was they had this cable-operated deal on the clutch it was sort of the reverse as opposed to pushing it in it it pulled it out and it it couldn't take the added horsepower that we had put in the motor and at first we put the cable back on and tried okay let's try it again and about three weeks later i shift boom same thing okay that's it uh i sent it down to scott uh pulled the transmission reinforced the cases made it stronger and converted it back to the old traditional style clutch and the two liter cars from the late 60s and now it's perfect it's it's fine but again to us here at the shop porsches are kind of different kind of new i didn't get into the porsche game until uh well i i guess it started about my career back in 2004 16 17 years ago but anyway they're just different and they're and when you find a specialist like scott who knows exactly how these cars are supposed to operate it can really uh just take a lot of wear and tear off your mind and your wallet because we had finished the thing and then ah the clutch kept going out and then we found out now those those clutches were bad even stock they didn't last very long so he converted it back to the old style and now now it's great now it's perfect runs cool runs fine let's go over the inside of the car as you can see the interior is completely stock started as i mentioned in the restoration video beautiful leather beautiful seats you know i didn't want to go to the buttock clutching clutching recaro racing you know i just want a nice comfortable car that's fun to drive i like this i like pre-airbag wheels i know they're not as safe i get it but i just like it you know what's interesting i always heard that the key was over here because of racing that's what they always say that you know during le mans you could guys could jump in and with this hand turn the key while they're shifting gears and that's why it's that way but then i heard when they were a young company at ramond in those places and struggling well they save this much wire by moving the ignition here instead of putting it over here so that saves a couple of cents so you always hear those kind of things i have no idea it's just sort of interesting nice greenhouse very comfortable car it's just so light it really is addictive i see why porsche guys get addicted because it's just different to drive than anything else out there it handles different you go into corn you know you want to power through the corner and porsche is now the only rear engine car sold in america it's the only one he can get there are mid-engine cars but no rear engine like like these i don't beat on this i like to drive it swiftly i like to take it through the hills and i only compete against myself you know i don't try to race guys uh i don't try to turn it into a phony you know carrera or any that kind of stuff you know when i got it i thought ah it's this horrible brown color i hate that well maybe i'll paint it green or do something with it but then once we cleaned it up i started driving it people come out of the woodwork to tell me how much i like the i guess sepia color they call it i call it baby poop brown but hey whatever you want and now i really like the color because it's so 70s there's nothing out there now like this you know all cars now are matte gray or white or black or silver and that that's a that's about it but this this it just doesn't look like anything else on the road and i get an awful lot of compliments on it we did new rugs and all of that and it's just such a pleasure to shift you know scott did a nice job with the transmission and i didn't realize how out of whack it was because i don't have a lot of experience with 911 so it was always but he set it up properly strengthened the cases and uh that was fantastic uh i think you all know the porsche layout you got you got your gas here sponomer dead center of course uh tachometer i mean dead center speedometer off to the side you know just the radio when you go like this you get the station i've talked about this before i hate these modern radios where you turn it and the screen goes blank and the line moves across it yeah just just press the button that let me get to the station okay thank you very much i don't have to take my eye off the road to change the station um i like this standard porsche wheel you all know the standard stock controls heater is right here and then you have a hand throttle here i mean it's hard to believe this car is 50 here i mean it's half a century old but this is when uh they were really trying to sell to the american market so they come out with this lower priced model the 911 t this is the base model 125 horsepower which which moves it along fine with only about 2 700 pounds so uh let's take it next door we'll put it up on the left and uh we'll see if we can find where that accident damage was let's start it up i love the ringing through the cylinder okay we have it up on our sterile coney lift as you can see i've put a few thousand miles on it stays nice and clean down here ahead of this center roll bar here to make it a little stiffer and a little nicer see we got our coney shocks up in there but the important thing is there's no damage there's no there's no rust floor pans are excellent all along here this is where you want to look when you're buying these kind of things as sills these are the first things that rust out especially around these points as you can see it's definitely not a show car it's a car we use all the time and it's just so much fun to drive if you don't get the porsche thing it's probably because you've never really driven one and these old ones obviously they were not corvettes or mustangs and couldn't keep up with those guys but it's just a different feel it's a feeling of precision shift quality it's just so enjoyable to drive especially up in the hills it's kind of nice not having any freeze problems or corrosion problems like that within the motor nothing there but oil but as i said the floor plans are nice say four plant i mean floor pans said four plants four pans are nice uh as you can see i need to clean it up in here a little bit but when you buy one of these things this is what you want to do put it up on a lift and take it to a porsche guy and have him just do it for you just inspect it get a good one you'll enjoy it the rest of your life you get a bad one oh my god it'll charge you crazy and nickel and dime you to death because you know what happens with these things people do fixes on fixes and just put it back just like you see where it's been beefed up here you see nicely done once again scott thank you let's uh take this thing out the road and show people how it goes i love these early air cooled cars there's just a purity about them there are someone like anything else that's out there especially back in the day i like how compact and tidy this car is you know extremely comfortable these seats are really nice a manual gearbox i know manual's not as fast as a uh pdk or any other stuff but that's a feeling of control the car now has 100 more horsepower than it had stuck which feels just about right it pulls to about 7 300 rpm something like that it just makes all the right noises sometimes especially here in america we get caught up in the horsepower wars ooh 700 800 900 horsepower you know this is two and a quarter and it's as much fun as any of those other kind of cars in some ways more because you get to use all the power all the time you know i've talked about this a lot with porsche i love when you just sort of pick second gear and then put your foot in and watch the attack come all the way around 25 3 4 5 6 7 7 boom in that shift i mean it just makes it so much fun of course it goes without saying there's no driver's aides of any kind on this thing no any lock break no lane control no you know see they have something different you're supposed to know how to drive that's the key learn how to drive thank you there's nothing on this car that doesn't need to be there i'll be enjoying this engine note as much as i am 60s up to about 75 this is the golden age of motoring i think you know when computers and everything have an overwhelm you know you have cars now where they they pipe in the engine noise so it sounds what what is that that didn't make any sense how about just having a nice engine noise instead of faking one and piping it in my love it just has a radio turn on you just do it turn it up i don't have to program it and this kind of car you go out for the day and you still get a pretty good gas mileage excellent visibility plenty of headroom and when you find one that has good bones like this one not really dented anywhere too much not not too much damage nothing to knock everything out of [Music] and whack the most part bulletproof reliability you build them right you can make them oil tight yes there are cars that are faster and i'm sure their cars can handle better but it just handles right just feels like it's dancing in your fingers here you know when you move that shift lever in a lever and it clicks in nothing as nice as a perfectly executed [Music] ship because every modern 911 is a direct descendant of this one you know there are a lot of guys out there that can tell you every numerical designation of every portion gears and ratios and 996 992 all of that i'm not there yet i'm getting there but nothing makes me feel as good as driving this 50 year old example just a few upgrades and it feels like a modern car i'm sorry this is not as in-depth as it could be just of all that's going on these days gets a little crazy can't really take it out in the hills and show off too much because well for obvious reasons but anyway i hope this gave you a little insight into what makes porsche's great and uh make a u-turn and we'll see you guys again next week i'm gonna i'm gonna go take a drive for the day see you later [Applause] [Music] uh

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 529,356

Rating: 4.9619951 out of 5

Keywords: Jay, Lenos, Garage, Porsche, 911, boxer engine, German car, sports car, car nerd, car porn, Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage, car reviews, classic cars, vintage cars, sports cars, super cars, cars, jay leno garage, jay lenos garage, car collection, cnbc, CNBC Prime, Jay Leno Cars, Restored Cars, jay leno garage tour, 1971 Porsche 911 T, Porsche 911, 1971 Porsche 911, Restoration Blogs, car shows, 1971 porsche jay leno, 1971 porsche 911t, jay leno cnbc, porsche, jay leno porsche

Id: Xsc46vhB82A

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020