“We love traveling the world to shoot episodes of Capturing Car Culture, but sometimes, the best builds are right in our backyard,” says Larry Chen to open the latest episode of his show. He nails it; there’s a distinct joy to finding folks just a short drive away who also love the automobile enough to spend every waking hour improving the form.
Among the many restomod shops famous for working their magic on the Porsche 911, Gunther Werks is one of the most well-known and highly respected. Based in Southern California, this shop offers no-expense-spared, wicked-high-performance versions of various generations of the 911. To understand more about the mentality that shapes everything Gunther Werks does, Chen paid a visit to the facility to speak with some of the team there.
The focal point of the episode is a 700-horsepower, air-cooled, twin-turbo 911 with a carbon-fiber widebody that Gunther Werks recently wrapped up. “The DNA of this car, the ethos, is rooted in performance,” explains Ross Bazarkowitz, Gunther Werks’ client experience manager. As Chen and Bazarkowitz walk around the car in the showroom, you can see exactly what he means. Yards of woven carbon fiber are formed into all sorts of panels, from door cards to shifter covers to luggage bins and charge cooler shrouds.
The level of detail on these cars is insane, as evidenced by the build process, which Bazarkowitz explains to Chen. The car in question began life as a 1995 Carrera Coupe (the 993 generation, last of the air-cooled cars), but you’d never know this is a 30-year-old chassis by the looks of it. Gunther Werks strips the whole car down to the bare frame, media blasts it, then begins reassembling/upfitting it with bespoke parts and upgraded engine components to reach the finished product seen here.
Of course, these machines don’t come cheap; as Chen discovers, this one rang the register at $1.8 million. Then again, the longer we watch the video and parse through the level of detail, fit and finish, and tasteful integrations of new technology into an older car, the more that price tag makes sense.
After the static walkaround with the orange car, Larry gets a few minutes to chat with Peter Nam, the founder of Gunther Werks. Nam shares some of what he thinks about as he walks around the Gunther Werks facility in Huntington Beach each day. (Spoiler: “We’ve got a lot of cars to build!” which, we’d have to think, is a good problem to have for a company like this.)
To get the rest of Nam’s thoughts and to see what Larry thinks about this Gunther Werks car from behind the wheel, be sure to check out the full episode below.
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