100 years of the Porsche 911
01/19/2023
Round birthdays are always a reason to celebrate. It's just a shame when three different parties are thrown for the same birthday boy or girl. After all, he can only go to one. Applied to automobiles, this means that if an epoch-making classic car completes the next decade, it will almost certainly grace the front pages of the next issue of all classic car magazines, large and small. Unfortunately, it's not good for business if your own magazine advertises and features the same things as the competition. After all, you want to stand out - ideally as positively as possible - from the other cheese magazines. After all, who likes to buy duplicates?
So you celebrate your birthday and publish the anniversary story one issue earlier. Of course, you could just as easily go in the other direction. But then you'd be standing (or rather lying) in the newsstand display like that Al Bundy type of husband who once again missed his wife's birthday and was only reminded of it at the breakfast table by the congratulatory calls from her girlfriends. As the radiance of the anniversary diminishes with each successive cover story on the subject, it's imperative to get ahead of the others. In short: if you're not first, you're last!
It's just a shame if your competitors have the same idea the following year and bring forward the anniversary of the next big car celebrity by two months. Then you have to counter with a three-month lead time the following year. Until finally, at the beginning of December 2022, you congratulate a car on its sixtieth birthday that was only presented in September 1963 and built from September 1964 and, on top of that, only received its final name in November 1964 - nine months to almost two years too early, depending on the definition of a car's "birthday". But, as we all know, you are as old as you feel. And "59 ¼ years of the Porsche 911" also reads a bit bumpy.
The question I keep asking myself: Why do you even need an anniversary to think a car is great? From my own experience, I can say that a Triumph TR4 A was great when it was 37 years old, great when it was 50 years old and is still great now that it is just over 58 years old. And convinced Porsche 911 owners are certainly no different. It doesn't need to be reduced to its age. Nevertheless, we here at Zwischengas naturally don't want to ignore the really big anniversaries. Even as the largest German-language online magazine for historic automobiles, we cannot completely escape the pressure of competition. With this in mind: all the best for the next 100!
