Sharks in the Mountain - 2001

May 18-20, 2001

Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina

(and the Banner Elk Holiday Inn, and Mount Mitchell, and Beech Mountain, and the Blue Ridge Parkway, and...)

(Click on these small images to jump to larger images)

Some of us thought this silver car belonged to Jay Kempf because it had the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything*, clearly marked in the top-middle of it's windshield.  Turns out that this was just a strange coincidence that a silver car like Jay's had the number 42 as one of it's race numbers and the owner had just not taken it off yet!

*According to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (by Douglas Adams), the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is "42".  This took, as I recall, about 6 million years to compute with a gigantic computer, Deep Thought.  The computer, before giving the answer, indicated to the great minds which awaited the answer, that they were "not going to like it".  After giving the answer, the computer proceeded to indicate that now the question needed to be computed, but that even it could not make such a great computation.  Instead, the computation would have to be carried out by a much more complex machine.  That machine turned out to be the planet Earth.  To ensure things were kept according to plan, the intelligent beings transformed themselves into mice, and ran the Earth machine...

The Konig Beast!  I actually saw this car several months ago in Tampa, since Ahmet's shop is about an hour from there and he and the owner, Chris, brought it to a get-together we had when JP Rodkey and Jim Morehouse visited (whose pictures I STILL haven't posted).  From what I remember, it is a 1984 body, with a Konig wide-body kit, and a supercharged GTS engine.  It actually had a different supercharger when I first saw it, but still in the same location and still of the centrif. type.  The car came over from Germany, where Lotec had done the work.  It had just rolled out of the paint bin on Thursday and showed up very late Friday night at the Banner Elk parking lot, having been trailered from Florida at a frustrating 60 mph max speed.

Some of the many things that caught my eye:  Some nice Sport Seats.  Check out that extra lateral support!  I never noticed that even the seat BOTTOMS are different on the sport seats.  Or is this an option - I mean, do they ALL come with that, or is this what is meant by the "extra lateral support"?  Not to stir up the discussion again, or anything...

I also like the contrast between the black insert and the tan leather in this auto's center console.  Most center consoles I've seen are all black or all dark, but this contrasting one really shows off the details nicely.

Herr Kempf (did I say that?) shooting the breeze concerning Timing Belts.  I had been yapping elsewhere (despite Jeannie CLEARLY announcing the starting time) and by the time I got to the designated spot, there was quite a crowd amassed around Jay and his patient.

Prizes!  Prizes!!  Prizes!!!

A Carbon Fiber strut tower cross brace, Rear Steroid Treatments, front sway bar bushing thing-a-ma-jigs, a cool jacket, and other goodies...

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My image of the 928's assembled at the circle track is also a pieced together picture - quite obviously.  I think my camera battery is low, because a lot of my pictures, including these, did not turn out as well as I had hoped.  Still not too bad, however, and gives a good sense of what it was like...

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Sunday morning, those that were able to stay around head out to Beech Mountain to watch an SCCA Hill Climb!  The "track" is a public road that runs up the mountain.  The competitors are staggered so they essentially run one at a time and are racing against the clock.  Since they are running on the public road, the road is closed to public access except about every hour.  Here we decided to wait about twenty minutes, so that the road would be open long enough for our entire caravan to go "in" and all the way up to an area where we could remain assembled together.  There were lots of trucks in North Carolina.  What a sight these couple of trucks heading down had when they came by our caravan of 928's waiting to get in to see the SCCA Hill Climb!

At the designated parking lot, all the 928's line up side-by-side.

The variety of cars is one of the great things about the get-togethers.  Here are some combinations that I thought were pretty cool.  When we did the Porsche Parade on our way out, the announcer mentioned something about our displaying "all the colors in the rainbow".  Well, we probably COULD, if all the 928's were in one place, but as it is, we came close.  Maybe the comment was made because we remind them of some other marque with very few color choices, mostly RED.  The Weissach gold is becoming one of my favorite colors each time I see it.  The red-white-blue cars image I had to reverse so that the order was red-white-blue.

Just one of the many cool race cars at the Hill Climb.  This is a nicely done old Triumph.  And, this 928, with dark painted Club Sport wheels, I think was quite ready to tackle the Hill Climb - he even had a custom belly plate protecting the underside.

I keep my eyes open for cool shapes.  Lo-and-behold, in my very bathtub at the Banner Elk Holiday Inn is this aesthetically very pleasing tub drain.  The proportions I think are beautiful, and, of course, remind me of a spaceship.  So, I had to snap the pics.  Also snapped some with my hand next to it so I could reproduce the proportions.  You may wonder where the heck this webpage's background came from - now you know...

I had a great time and look forward to the next one!

This just in!!! Just after reading the posts about whether the Weissach 6-speed actually exists, and right when I'm finishing up the revisions on my site, I get an e-mail from California. This is from an elderly woman, living apparently in Pasedena. I don't know how she got MY e-mail, but she sent me some digital images that she developed from a roll of film she found by a telephone booth during a recent trip to Mexico. She said a young man in a red foreign sports car had been standing behind the phone booth doing some "business" when she pulled up and he quickly left, apparently leaving behind one of those cheap throw-away cameras. Anyway, she sent me the images, and here is one of the pictures. Could this verify the existence of the mysterious Weissach 6-speed in Mexico? The shifter seems different somehow.