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An Air Cooled Jewel
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An Air Cooled Jewel

Pete Vlastelica's 1972 911S

Andrew Maness's avatar
Andrew Maness
Mar 14, 2025
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Between opening a brick & mortar business and having an infant hanging around the house, I’m stretched rather thin at the moment. This Nice Life remains something I’m passionate about and I want to continue to deliver great writing and photography on this platform. With that in mind, I’m going to be pulling from the archives of The Motoring Journal and sharing some of my favorite evergreen stories digitally for the first time. The stories will appear as they did in the magazine, but with lots of additional photos that didn’t make it onto the page. I’ll be publishing 2 of these a week for the time being and when time allows I plan to publish something current in the form of a product review or travel story. I hope ya’ll enjoy this series and if it moves you to purchase an issue of The Motoring Journal, you can do so here.

To kick things off I chose one of my all time favorite stories featuring my pal Pete and his 1972 911S. Re-reading this and going through the photos I can feel the warm breeze from The Valley and smell the faint whiff of salt air from the Pacific combining in what is truly one of the places most near and dear to my heart in the Santa Monica mountain range. The beauty of these scenes stands in stark contrast with the knowledge that Pete’s incredible car was turned to a husk of burnt metal in during the Palisades Fire back in January. Like so many of those that just lost “things” in the fire, Pete has remained positive and grateful that he and his family escaped danger unharmed. Now even more than when I first published this piece I think of it as a time capsule and a tribute to the spirit of the automotive community that connects across time by way of these cars we imbue with so much meaning, but are ultimately just machines that facilitate fleeting moments of joy.

Cheers - AM

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Pete Vlastelica grew up in Arizona loving old cars. “I was probably a strange kid in that sense --I loved old cars, old music, antique shops.” While other kids had posters of the Lamborghini Countach or Ferrari Testarossa on their walls, Pete had a '57 Chevy. His first car was a 1961 Ford Thunderbird that his uncle gave him when he turned 16 and the first car he bought himself was a 1970 Ford Bronco. He wrenched on it throughout high school and the knowledge gained from doing so helped him get an after school job selling parts at AutoZone. 

“There was one Porsche in my neighborhood growing up. It was a beat up old 914 that was parked on the street and I used to ride my bike over to check that thing out all the time. It was just so exotic compared to the pickups and muscle cars that made up the majority of my environment as a kid. I fantasized about owning the 914, but I didn't know anyone who knew anything about Porsches, so I doubt I could have done much with it.”

After college, Pete lived in London, New York, and the Bay Area, all cities that contributed to him losing touch with car culture. He then moved to Los Angeles in 2013 where he found it would make sense to own an old car again, so he bought a '72 Bronco and restored it. It wasn't until a friend of his bought a 1973 911E Targa that he ever considered buying a Porsche. After seeing how great that car was, he bought a 1992 “964” 911 C2 Targa and that kicked his passion for Porsche into high gear.

“I love to surf and spearfish and the Bronco was the perfect partner for beach adventures, but living near Malibu, we have these great roads in the hills too. With the Targa, I had a car that felt like it was built for those roads.” 

Since living in LA, Pete has been taking his 964 to Marco Gerace from TLG Auto for service. A year ago he let him know that he was interested in buying a long hood 911 and Gerace had a long-time customer who he thought might be open to selling his car, a '72 911S hot rod with the impressive pedigree of being an original RGRUPPE car that had been looked after by Marco and his dad Tony Gerace for many years.

“As fun and visceral as the 964 is, I couldn't stop myself from wanting an older 911. There's something special to me about a lot of early ‘70s cars -- those were the last days of an era, when a few manufacturers perfected the blend of power and elegance with the analog mechanical production process. I feel the same way about the music from that era. In about 1975, things really changed, and we got disco, Barry Manilow, big bumpers, and catalytic converters.” 

“What I loved about the car was that the previous owner had collected a bunch of rare, period correct parts in order to put the car together over time. It wasn't a rich-guy build, it was the passion project of a patient enthusiast with a very good eye. He put so much of himself into this car and it showed even though the car hadn't been on the road for years when I first saw it. He found the seats in a shed in Texas…god only knows how he tracked them down. They're original factory 911 ST seats, which are super hard to find even with the help of the internet. He also had factory 7" 911R rear wheels on there, also relatively “unobtainium”. The car had a factory replacement 2.7 911/83 RS spec engine rebuilt by Tony and Marco, rebuilt MFI, close ratio gearbox, lightweight flywheel, euro spec headlights, 911R style tail lights and front turn signal delete inserts...he just had all the right parts and all the right work done on this car.”

“By ‘right’ I mean old school. I feel like a lot of the RGRUPPE guys in the early 2000s cared deeply about building these "sports purpose" cars the way Porsche laid it out in the early 70s. When I saw the car, I knew that this was the version of it that I wanted to bring back to life. So the work we did over the past year was more about reviving and preserving the previous owner's vision than restoring it or adding a bunch of my own new ideas. We actually did a ton of work on it -- entirely new interior, lots of bodywork and paint, and Marco rebuilt the 2.7. But when you look at the car, you're not sure if it's new or not. To me, that's what makes it awesome. I wanted it to be new but not look new. I kept the amazing patina-ed racing stripe, I kept the wear patches in the seats, I didn't restore the wheels, I kept the 80s and 90s stickers in the windows. Aesthetically, It's still an old school hot rod, but mechanically, it's a freshly restored car. In other words, it's perfect.” 

As Pete put it to me while we stared out at the Pacific Ocean from a valley’s edge high in the Malibu Mountains, “This is the kind of car the world needs more of right now.” I couldn’t agree with him more.

“The more our world becomes digital and virtual, the more I crave real, visceral, analog experiences. A lot of people are building "vintage-made-modern" cars or taking modern cars and backdating them to make them look older. That's cool and all, some of those cars are amazing, but the early RGRUPPE guys were really on to something, and all of the technology they needed for their builds was available in the early ‘70s. Back in the early 2000s, they were paying tribute to the sports purpose ethos of that time period, long before it was cool to do so. Now, 20 years later, it's time to start paying tribute to them.”

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