by Matthew Mitchell
I was a 14-year-old boy when my father Steve had the opportunity to purchase his dream car. After working for twelve years at Hitachi as an attorney and building a family with my mom Jackie and my adopted and disabled sister Melissa, the stars aligned, and an order was placed for a new 2002 Carrera 4S. It wasn’t an easy journey to this milestone, but it would lead to a lifelong bond and love for a car and a club. After a 6 month wait for the order to be fulfilled with the factory and so many online build configurations, the car was ready. For 2002, Porsche had released the 996.2 and Steve had not even seen a 996 4S in person; neither had I.
I was a kid obsessed with cars by 14 years old, having at least a dozen remote control cars, scale models, and collages of car magazine photos in my room. I even had the opportunity to be with my uncle when he picked up his Ferrari 360 the year prior. I read the manual for the 360, and with the F1 transmission there was a very special order of operations that required completion to even start the car. My uncle had to ask me how to start the car after driving it home. I even got to drive it around the parking lot at night in front of the Nordstroms at Stanford Shopping Center. As special as that was, seeing my father pick up his new 911 was something that would create a unique bond between a father and a son.
The delivery experience was a little lacking; we were at the dealer on Steven’s Creek for hours going over every part of the car. This process was exhausting, even for a kid who was arguably obsessed. At the end of going through the features, my father opened the center console and it wouldn’t close again. The service department was long since closed for the day, and like getting a child out of a swimming pool, I could feel my father’s disappointment in not being able to drive the car home that evening. Alas, the following day, he was able to pick up the car and drive it home. I remember the unique flat six rumble that car made as it turned onto our street, dad double clutch downshifting into first gear as he pulled into the driveway. A smooth, silver spaceship for the road is what it looked like to me.
Only a few days into our ownership, dad let me drive the car: my first real world manual transmission experience. Mind you, I was an avid sim racer at the time and had gone through the proper actions in my head several times, but without a clutch on my sim pedal set, I had never actually done the deed. I was able to learn the clutch engagement rather quickly on our drive, and once we got up the hill a mile or so away from our house, there was a secluded straight away; dad told me “punch it”. I was in second gear and I let it have it – what a rush! The sound of the valves opening at 5250 rpm is something that would forever “give me the fizz” as James May would say. 
I pushed the clutch in, changed to third gear, and hit the gas again. The motor revved up, but we didn’t accelerate. Frozen with fear, a surprised look crossed my father’s face as he looked at me and the controls on the car; he finally told me “you didn’t let the clutch out”. My nerves and inexperience got the best of me, but hey, it could have been worse. Right after that, we rounded the corner, and I found myself on a 15-degree uphill grade at a stop sign. I had only started the car from a stop about 4 times at that point and was sweating from my little operating error just a few seconds earlier. Dad told me, “you got this, just feel the clutch slip a little and ease into the gas”. Sure enough, I got it on the first try. From then on, I would tell people that if you can learn clutch in a new Porsche, you can drive anything. It was little moments like this that would stick with me and further our bond, not to mention that with the car.
Steve had been a part of car clubs before but none like the Porsche Club of America, Loma Prieta Region. From the social gatherings, planning banquets, autocross events, and even Steve editing the Prieta Post, everything was an engaging experience for our whole family. Steve and my mother Jackie participated in rally events, tours, and many small get togethers at people’s houses. Jackie even planned the LPR 40th anniversary party, which I know she enjoyed greatly.
Naturally, I pushed my dad into some autocross events where we would either both drive the Porsche or I would drive my car, a BMW Z3. I knew for Steve he didn’t enjoy the autocross events as much as he enjoyed spending time with me and with the club. Not only did the car offer driving enjoyment, but the people associated allowed my parents to find true friends.
My father was not a “do it yourself” kind of guy with anything, but I absolutely am. For several Father’s Day gifts, I would spend the entire weekend cleaning and polishing every inch of the Porsche. I even got him some H&R sway bars and a B&M short shift kit and installed it for him. During installation, he would take a quick look at what I was doing, ask about how it was going, and then leave, because it was too much for him to watch his car be torn apart by his son. Boy did he love those modifications though.
In late 2013, after having the car for a decade, the love for the car didn’t fade, but Steve’s health did. He was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer originating in his mouth. The experimental solution from UCSF was to perform a very invasive procedure to remove the cancer and take the fibula bone from his left leg as grafting material. Steve’s only real concern was if he would be able to push the clutch in on his car again. Despite the operation, chemo, and many other drug trials, he endured; his outlook stayed positive, and he took out the car a handful of times over his 3 years of suffering. One time, late into his treatments, a fellow PCA friend Bill Jump was over, and they decided to slip away and take the car for a little spin. The story told by Bill was that Steve was doing in excess of 90mph on a backroad into a 90-degree corner. Steve expertly slowed the car and downshifted into the corner as if nothing was wrong with him; Bill, however, needed a new set of trousers.
Three years after undergoing his procedure, Steve succumbed to his cancer, with several PCA members visiting him and offering support in his final days. There really is no way I can truly express my gratitude towards the PCA and its members, other than giving back and volunteering myself to better the organization.
A few months after my father’s passing, my mother allowed me to take ownership of the 911. It needed some work after sitting for quite a while without much use, and the most immediate items were addressed. My wife Melissa graduated with her PhD in Physics and secured a job and relocation to the Atlanta, GA area. We were able to find a car guy’s dream house with many more garage bays then bedrooms, including a 3-stall shop equipped with a lift. Steve absolutely helped my wife and me find a good spot to care for his car.
I had only driven the car under my ownership a couple thousand miles when one day the car wouldn’t start. The clutch was extremely hard to push down and wasn’t activating the clutch switch to allow the starter motor to run. The throwout bearing needed to be replaced, which for a small part meant I would be doing a full engine out job addressing the clutch, flywheel, IMS, RMS, AOS, et cetera. At this time, the car had a little over 120k miles on it, so everything needed addressing. I decided to do an extremely thorough job cleaning up the underside of the car, changing all the fluids, and even rebuilding one of the front CV joints. I got pretty deep into the project and set a goal for myself to have the car done by the last concours event that Peachstate PCA was putting on for the year of 2019. This would be my first, and the car’s first, concours event ever, but after about 200 hours of work on it, I felt it would fit right in. My bond with the car and my late father grew even more having to do all of this work myself.
I entered the concours in the Rookie class since I was very green to the event, but I could have easily competed with the higher classes. Everyone at the event was as welcoming and interested to hear my car’s story as anyone in the LPR region ever was, and I knew this group was something I wanted to give back to. I scored nearly a perfect score for a Rookie and astonished the judges in telling them the car was all original, had 120k miles, and I had just done an engine out operation on it. I promptly took the car to a Peachstate PCA autocross event, where the car performed as good as it looked. A few hundred miles later, I signed up for the last autocross of the year and upon arriving still had no real issues with the car after the rebuild.
On the first run, first turn of the autocross, the dash lit up like a WW2 bomber being hit by enemy fire. I immediately got out of the throttle and limped it back to the staging area. The car felt like it was misfiring badly, but I thought I would do the old I.T. trick of turning it off and back on again. That worked for about 30 seconds and then it was back to awful misfires. My stomach sank, and I knew there were major issues. I brought the car home and analyzed the damage. I decided to just dump the oil and look in the oil pan and filter to see if I had the dreaded metal bits in there. Sure enough, just about every piston had the coating on it flaking off, with some of the flakes getting caught in the cylinders causing catastrophic bore score.
I can’t possibly get rid of the car, and due to the extreme cost of our education system, paying for a PhD is basically like buying a new GT3. I have to sit on the car and wait for funding opportunities to come up in order to enjoy it again. But, my adventures with the PCA are not over! During my time in Atlanta, I also got involved with the Peachstate region, trying out sim racing as a sanctioned event. I helped with hosting some races in Project Cars 2 as we decided on a platform to run something more permanent.
PCA National caught wind of our sim racing endeavors, and I was able to become part of the steering committee as the social media manager. Given my experience from a young age with sim racing, I thought it was a fun activity to bring to the PCA group and had no idea how much enjoyment could be had at home racing against others online. iRacing is a great platform for our current race series, allowing us to customize conditions for real world tracks in Porsche race cars. I even got into a team of PCA sim racers that run the iRacing endurance events. I have participated in several long races in the simulator where we can trade off driving the same car, and even won 1st place at the 24 hours of LeMans race in a 911 RSR.
Being able to continue my passion with the car and honor my father by giving back to the PCA has established friendships within the club much like my mother and father had. If you are interested in participating in PCA Sim Racing Series, please visit pcasimracing.com and sign up. We are a rapidly growing community of passionate drivers who hold live broadcast races with professional announcing on Friday evenings. I encourage everyone to extend your passion of Porsches and the PCA with your children as my father Steve did. He will be missed by all he touched, but his legacy lives on through his Porsche and the PCA.