Photos by Dustin Coury
On June 19 - 21, we were invited to participate in Robin's Rally 2015 - a friendly drive that a bunch of LA-area friends have been running since 2013. It started as a way to commemorate a friend's bachelor party (shockingly, his name is Robin) and has grown to include some 20 or so Porsches (and an Alfa Spider and Meyers Manx) for this year's run. Our contribution to the mix was in the form of two 911SCs - Matt's black 1979 and Brad's Kiln Red 1980.
Starting Friday afternoon at Neptune's Net in Malibu, right off the Pacific Coast Highway, the first leg had us stopping off for the the night in San Luis Obispo. Saturday's leg took us to an amazing campsite in Big Sur, and Sunday had us driving the full distance back to LA. All in all, we saw almost 900 miles of driving.
The important distinction here is that almost none of those 900 miles took place over any freeways. Backroads were the main event here, with many of them being high-speed, undulating, mountainous, and even totally unpaved (some of them were both mountainous AND unpaved).
To say this was an epic drive doesn't do the experience justice and we were extremely impressed with how well some of these older cars (our own included) handled it all. Despite long durations of temps (and speeds) well above 100, dust that would have choked a camel, and over 20 miles of deeply-rutted and jagged rock-lined fire roads, no one got stranded.
One car (the Manx buggy) ran out of gas, one had some clutch cable issues (repaired at the campsite) and another (Matt's 1979 SC) saw a clutch pedal actually shear off at the base on the way home (Santa Barbara area), but all-in-all it was a pretty uneventful trip as far as mechanical issues were concerned.
Such an amazing time with some amazing people, and anyone who believes all Porsche owners are snobs who baby their cars needs to hang out with these people for a day or two or three.
