Eric Pasia, 42, a Phoenix-based management consultant and founder of Last Era, a clothing brand inspired by motorsport, on his tribute to the 1995 Porsche 911 Carrera RS, as told AJ Baime.
When I was young, my mom said to me, “Hey, did you know you have the same birthday as Mario Andretti’s?” I didn’t know who that was, so I went to find out. I quickly became fascinated with him and motorsport. All my childhood I have followed racing and the Andretti family, and I really got interested in cars and customizing cars. In high school and college, I started buying Japanese cars that I could afford and modifying them.
When I got my first job I could afford my first real sports car, a 1999 BMW M3. Then I got a 2001 BMW M3 and then a BMW M5. I eventually decided to switch to Porsche in the early 2000s. I bought a 2002 911 Turbo and started to learn about the Porsche platform and the history. Then I started hearing so much about air-cooled Porsches.
There’s a whole bunch of great Porsches everyone is talking about powered by air-cooled engines before the company switched to water-cooled engines in the late 1990s. So many people told me that I needed to have an air-cooled Porsche to really experience what it meant to be a Porsche enthusiast.