Eric Pasia, 42, a Phoenix-based management consultant and founder of Last Era, a clothing brand inspired by motorsport, in his 1995 Porsche 911 Carrera RS tribute, as told to AJ Baime.
When I was young, my mother said to me, “Hey, did you know that your birthday is the same as Mario Andretti’s?” I didn’t know who it was, so I went to find out. I was soon fascinated by him and motorsport. Throughout my childhood, I followed the races and the Andretti family, and became very interested in cars and car modification. In high school and college, I started to buy Japanese cars that I could afford and modify them.
When I got my first job, I was able to buy my first real sports car, a BMW M3 1999. Then I bought a BMW M3 2001, then a BMW M5. Finally, I decided to move to Porsche in the early 2000s. I bought a 911 Turbo 2002 and started to learn about the Porsche platform and history. That’s when I started hearing a lot about air-cooled Porsches.
There is a whole line of fantastic Porsches that everyone talks about, powered by air-cooled engines, before the company switched to water-cooled engines in the late 1990s. Many people told me that I needed to have a Porsche cooled air to really experience what it means to be a Porsche enthusiast.