SRC Porsche 914

SRC carries the lingering scent of the old FLY days… or more precisely, of Spirit, the company that spun off from FLY.

What I mean is that the engineering always feels slightly half-finished, strangely impersonal and lacking in passion, and somehow there is always some small detail that leaves you just a little disappointed.

With the Alfa Romeo 33T12, for example, the dimensions between the cockpit floor and upper chassis were miscalculated, leaving no clearance whatsoever for the motor lead wires. I ultimately had no choice but to raise the ride height simply to create enough space for them.

And now, with this 914, the relationship between the motor mount and the rear axle bushing carrier is incorrect.

The motor itself is supposed to brace the rear axle bushings in position, yet the motor is not securely fixed within the mount to begin with.

The car does not produce enough power to rotate the motor violently inside the chassis or anything dramatic like that, so in practice I simply shrug and think, “Well… I suppose this is just how it is.”

Still, these little signs of careless engineering inevitably leave me disappointed.

To make matters worse, the locking tabs securing the motor mount also lack rigidity. On the orange car, one of the tabs had already broken.

Neither SRC themselves nor dealers anywhere in the world seem to stock spare narrow-body 914 chassis anymore, so there is no real repair path available. Complaining about it accomplishes nothing.

Again, the only realistic solution is simply to glue the chassis and motor together and move on with life.

What irritates me more is that SRC themselves seem eager to forget the narrow-body 914 ever existed.

The wide-body 914/6, meanwhile, continues receiving competition-oriented “Chrono” updates, revised versions, and even replacement chassis support.

That sort of corporate attitude ― abandoning the products and customers who supported the company in its earlier years ― is disappointing in its own way as well.

I had absolutely no interest in the wide-body 914/6, so I specifically searched for the narrow-body version instead.

Initially I chose the blue car because I intended to give it a Gitanes-style livery. But then I remembered the Michelin livery from the Mercedes C9, and decided instead to transfer that visual theme onto the 914 for my wife’s car.

As for lighting, the body was clearly never designed with bulbs or LEDs in mind, so I eventually abandoned the idea altogether.

Had I expected to live longer, I probably would have scratchbuilt raised headlamps and fabricated new taillight lenses from clear plastic sheet.

But realistically, I simply do not have enough remaining time to become deeply involved with this particular car.