Eric Pasia, 42, a driving consultant in Phoenix and founder of Last Era, a clothing brand inspired by motorsport, on his 1995 Porsche 911 Carrera RS tribute, as told to AJ Baime.
When I was young, my mom said to me, ‘Hey, did you know your birthday is the same as Mario Andrett’s?’ I did not know who it was, so I went to find out. I soon became fascinated with him and with motorsport. All my childhood I followed racing and the Andretti family, and I really got into cars and changed cars. In high school and college, I started buying Japanese cars that I could afford and changed them.
When I got my first job, I was able to afford my first real sports car, a 1999 BMW M3. Then I got a 2001 BMW M3, then a BMW M5. Eventually I decided to switch to Porsche in the early 2000s. I bought a 2002 911 Turbo and started learning about the Porsche platform and history. That’s when I started hearing so much about the air-cooled Porsches.
There is a whole range of fantastic Porsches that everyone is talking about, powered by air-cooled engines, before the company switched to water-cooled engines, by the end of the nineties. So many people have told me I need to own an air-conditioned Porsche to really experience what it means to be a Porsche enthusiast.