0n offering this mouth-wateringly original, unmolested and intricate
‘time machine’ 550 RS Spyder, we feel privileged to present what is
considered to be the world’s best-preserved, never restored example of
this seminal Porsche model surviving today...This exceptionally rare and therefore extremely important Porsche
550RS is offered here with the perfect provenance of long-term caring
ownership by a succession of great American fine-car connoisseurs.Most critically, with every passing year more of the world’s diminishing
treasury of such unrestored ‘as-manufactured’ or ‘document’ cars lose
that irreplaceable characteristic by usually well-meaning, yet perhaps
not fully thought-through, restoration.The problem is that while restoration can return an ageing artefact to
something purporting to match its initial condition as first manufactured,
that will always be – inevitably – however painstaking well executed -
an artifice. Far-reaching restoration applies on a ratchet principle – it
only ever works one way. Once original finish has been obscured or
replaced, original paintwork, the original time-machine evidence of how
the artefact in question was originally completed by the contemporary
craftsmen whose skills truly created it... has simply gone for ever, with
no option to retrieve it.Comprehensive restoration to achieve mere glowing quality is
simultaneously a process of obliteration. Once lost, ‘originality’ can
never, ever, be regained. And as the motoring world’s treasury of these
increasingly rare ‘time machines’ depletes, the basic laws of supply and
demand must most assuredly apply. As we enter an era in which fully-
restored classic cars are effectively two a penny – the real rarities will
be the protected, connoisseurially-conserved crown-jewel cars such as
550RS chassis No 0090 as now offered here.211
0090 in Fred Sebalds Foreign Auto Shop,
Glendale, California, 1965
2
Whilst in the ownership of the Sebald’s at
their Bavarian Resort, 1970.
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