Eric Pasia, 42, a Phoenix-based management consultant and founder of Last Era, a clothing brand inspired by motorsports, on his 1995 Porsche 911 Carrera RS tribute, as told to A.J. Baime.
When I was young, my mother said to me, “Hey, did you know your birthday is the same as Mario Andretti’s?” I did not know who that was, so I went to find out. I soon became fascinated with him and with motorsports. All my childhood, I followed racing and the Andretti family, and I got really into cars and modifying cars. In high school and college, I started buying Japanese cars that I could afford and modifying them.
When I got my first job, I could afford my first real sports car, a 1999 BMW M3. Then I got a 2001 BMW M3, then a BMW M5. Ultimately, I decided to switch over to Porsche in the early 2000s. I bought a 2002 911 Turbo, and started learning about the Porsche platform and history. That is when I started hearing so much about air-cooled Porsches.
There is a whole lineage of fantastic Porsches that everyone talks about, driven by air-cooled engines, before the company switched over to water-cooled engines, toward the end of the 1990s. So many people told me I needed to own an air-cooled Porsche to really experience what it meant to be a Porsche enthusiast.
