I’ve had 911 on the brain for a couple of years now. Driving a friend’s gorgeous 911 SC early last year pushed me over the limit, so much so that I literally put my Mitsubishi EVO IX up for sale on that same night. With the money sold from the EVO my intentions were to just go out and buy one, but it turns out the hunt for a classic isn’t as easy as I thought it would be.
Sydney based JDM enthusiast Kevin San (aka Babalouie) has owned one of the cleanest 964’s around and has been a true champ in helping me find the right car. That’s a car which has had a lot of recent mechanical work done so that I don’t have to fork out $25k+ on getting it working nice straight off the bat. Whilst the mission was a 964 for years I’ve fallen in love with the shape of the previous models but I have my doubts about whether or not I could live with no power steering on a daily basis, that and the expensive upkeep on these older cars.
At some point I gave up (it was all just too hard!) and I put my money into a supercharged R32 Golf which has been great to own, but it’s no 911.
An opportunity came up for me to write this feature on Autohaus Hamilton for Performance Garage Magazine. Kevin always insisted that whatever I do, to make sure I get a pre-purchase inspection done at Autohaus Hamilton. It’s wasn’t to be an option, but something I just absolutely HAD to do if I wanted to be sure I was buying the right car.
I sat down with Grant Geelan & Nathan Murray to get an insight into the Porsche marque from the mouths of the experts who have seen everything. I wanted to know where they’ve come from and to try and understand why they loved these cars so much. I also wanted to try and tease out as much information as I could in regards to the few fears I’ve had about 911’s.
Justin: Autohaus Hamilton has been around since 1970 and Grant, you took over the business in 2000. Could you share a little history behind how you got started?
Grant: It goes way back to high school. In 1985 I was in year 10 and I did work experience at Scuderia Veloce Motors (now Porsche Centre Willoughby). I loved cars. For the week I’d get to work by train and be on their doorstep early every morning, overly excited and impatient for them to open the doors up to let me in. At the end of the one week work experience I basically asked them if I could land a job there as I loved every minute of it, they asked me to submit my resume. I did and they hired me.
Justin: Wow, that just would never happen these days!
Grant: No! So I finished up school on the Friday, had a break Saturday and Sunday and I started work at Scuderia Veloce Motors on the Monday.
Justin: Wow! That’s amazing. So back in year 10, were you specifically mad about Porsche’s already?
Grant: No, what got me specifically into Porsches was when I went to work experience for the week. In year 10 I was into cars in general. Going to see the touring cars… I just loved cars. Pulling things apart, I was right into that, but when I did my week’s work experience at Scuderia Veloce Motors, and sat my backside in a couple with Tim Andersen, who now works for me, he was one of the head mechanics there at the time. We went out and road tested a 911 Turbo, my head was pinned against the seat, and man I went… this is just insane!
Back in the 80s, being from a reasonably poor family, I’d never experienced anything like it. To hop into something like that, this is bullshit, it’s like riding in an aeroplane!
Justin: What was your role specifically at Scuderia Veloce Motors?
Grant: Apprecntice Mechanic. My apprenticeship lasted 4 years. I was with them for 11 years, from 1985 to 1996. In 1996 I got married and moved from Willoughby (Scuderia Veloce Motors became Porsche Centre Willoughby in 1990) and bought Autohaus Hamilton, which existed since 1970.
Justin: So was Ian Hamilton from Autohaus Hamilton the very first person to import Porsches into the country?
Grant: No, the Hamilton family was the first to import Porsches into the country, but Ian Hamilton, who used to own my business, he was a cousin of the Hamilton family in Melbourne.
Justin: So why did Ian sell his business?
Grant: Ian was close to 60, he actually had a heart attack and his wife had cancer, so they were going through hard times. Ian had been trying to get me to go over and work for him for about 4 years. He was running Porsche Cup race cars back in the day, and they were always coming down to Porsche Centre Willoughby because we had a dyno there and we’d have to dyno the Porsche Cup cars for parity reasons.
I was one of the dyno operators, so we got talking and Ian would say “you should start working for me, come down and work for me one day”. I went in and said look, I’m really not interested in coming to work for you just as an employee, if I ‘m going to leave where I am, which was pretty good, I’d want some ownership.
That didn’t suit Ian for a number of years, but then they started to run into hard times which was when Ian rang me. So I went there in 1996 and I’ve been there ever since. I worked with Ian, who stayed on for a few years, in 1999 he left because the government was about to introduce the GST. Ian couldn’t get his head around it all so he retired to Port Douglas. He’s a great guy, lovely person, absolute enthusiasts for Porsche, he eats, sleeps, breathes the marque.
Justin: Obviously Ian would be absolutely wrapped with how the business has gone since he’s left?
Grant: It’s far exceeded both our expectations. Where Ian had a little business with a couple of hundred clients, and just 3 partners, to now being huge. Ian keeps saying I’m mad, and he doesn’t understand how I cope, but that foundation has led to where we are today. I never dreamt in my wildest dreams that we’d be where we are today. And of-course, it’s not just me, you’re only as good as the people you have around you and I’m really blessed to have an amazing bunch of people.
Justin: You guys are so niche, and there’s so much history, and it’s really fascinating to have built such an amazing team. Other workshops probably don’t have the same opportunities as you’ve had.
Grant: I think you’re right, it’s difficult in different markets to try and capture what we have. We’re very fortunate that Porsche is an aspirational brand. So a lot of people aspire to own them already. When I was a young kid, back in the 70s, you either had a picture of a Porsche or a Lamborghini on your wall, thats a majority of people right there and they already aspire to own one, it’s ingrained.
My business I would say is just an evolution of what’s been in demand, all of a sudden people would come in and ask where can I buy this? Or how do I get that? Same with the Motorsport guys who would ask can you build this or that. I was into motorsport. At that point in 1996 I did a stack of rallying in Asia, New Zealand and Australia. I did 18 world championships as co-driver. I’ve worked with Hyundai Factory Team and the Mitsubishi Ralliart Factory Team.
Justin: You mean you were driving marques other than Porsche?
Grant: Yes! Mate I’ve had some weird cars. Shocking cars too. I drove a Mitsubishi L300 van for years, rally tyres, 400 litres of blooming AVGAS. I had a Mitsubishi Starion, loved that car.
Justin: Was the Starion a wide-body and did you get airborne in it? Apparently you’re meant to get airborne in Starions (laughs all round).
Grant: Yes a wide body. I actually got it stolen, and got it back 2 years later with nothing inside it. I’ve had Ford Lasers. My first car was a Ford Escort RS2000 which I went nuts on. A 2.1 litre engine, the works.
Justin: So you’ve always been a modifier.
Grant: Yes, from the get go. I was always pulling things apart and making things better. It’s always been about making it better. If you told me I can’t do it I’d bust my ass to prove you wrong.
Justin: So would you say you have a stubborn streak in you?!
Grant: 100%! Happy to admit it! Look I’ve had a lot of non-Porsches but to be honest most of them were just modes of transport. I’ve always been working towards having a Porsche, but at the same time I was really into rallying too.
I started rallying in the 80s. My passion was rallying. I was sitting in the lounge room of Former Australian Champion Wayne Bell of Hyundai Motorsport, at his home and he offered me a 12 month contract as co-driver. It was either that, or I was going to buy into Ian’s business, and Wayne said to me; “Mate, if I was you I would go buy that business. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have you, but I don’t want you to come with me because I can only offer you a one year thing, and that’s (Autohaus Hamilton) a lifetime deal. You’d be mad not to take it.”.
Every time I bump into Wayne I tell him it’s the best advice I’ve ever had. Definitely a definitive moment in the life and times of Autohaus Hamilton.
Justin: So when and what was your first Porsche purchase?
Grant: For a long time I couldn’t afford one really. I didn’t buy a Porsche until 2000, which was the year after Ian had left Autohaus Hamilton. I bought one and I’ve still got it.
Justin: That’s cool! So what is it?
Nathan: Don’t tell me it’s that Targa (laughs).
Grant: Yeah! (laughs). It’s a 1973 911E Targa, a long bonnet car, Aus delivered and I’ve been restoring it ever since. When I got it, it had been in a ladies garage for 14 years. Her husband had passed away and she couldn’t deal with the car so she just left it there unregistered. She rung up one day out of the blue and said “There’s a Porsche in a storage shed. I don’t know anything about it. My husband owned it, can you drag it out for me and if you’re interested, would you like to buy it?”. I liked it so I bought it and I’ll probably never sell it.
Justin: Brilliant! Moving right along, let’s talk about your customer base. With the sudden social media boom surrounding the marque there are so many more people into Porsches than ever; Your Magnus’, RWB’s and Singers etc. I assume you would have had a certain customer base for a very long time, but now it’s changing?
Grant: 100%! Massive change. There’s a lot more public awareness.
Justin: So how was it different before, to now?
Grant: Before we were known in Sydney as the place to bring your old Porsche to. That’s carried across, we still have that customer base, they’re lifers.
Justin: 911 and “for life” is a common thread it seems.
Grant: Well it’s family, you become part of the family. When you buy a Porsche and you find the right place to look after it, it becomes a part of you.
Nathan: When you’re working on Porsche, you remember that car. It comes back 5, maybe 10 years later like an old friend. Porsches don’t seem to die, they don’t age.
Grant: It’s simply because they ran that shape for so many years, and the value of them, especially older ones now are so expensive that people are happy to spend the money to keep them going. They’re happy to spend money because its not a depreciating asset, it’s actually an appreciating asset.
Nathan: We’re actually starting to see a shift in people building car collections of rare 911’s, instead of art collections. IE: Buying cars as art.
Grant: 5-10 cars lined up, come and hang in my man cave while it’s all appreciating. So we spend quite a bit of our time these days advising what are the right cars to buy.
Justin: So there are lifers, what about other customers?
Grant: You can break our customers down into 2 lots essentially. You’ve got your old school purists that are all about the old stuff, and they’ve always been about the old stuff and they hate the new stuff because it’s now all about bean counters and blah blah blah, and then you’ve got what you would call the enthusiast who love the Porsche for what it is, and who it’s about, they’ve got an old school car and a new school car.
Justin: Awesome, so moving on, what are some stand out cars you guys have worked on over the years?
Grant: A 959, A 1969 906 Le Mans race car, the only one in the country which we worked on for a while until it moved to Melbourne.
Justin: How was the 906? Did you need to revive hardcore old school electronics to tune it etc?
Nathan: Nah you needed a hammer to start it up (laughs all round).
Justin: What about your Group 4 car?
Grant: Group 4 car, 100%. That car for us right now is probably 10 years of thought processes put into a car that we really really wanted, something that is different, special, something as a company we have wanted to do for a very long time.
Nathan: The Group 4 car is a transition from Autohaus Hamilton, for a better word, being reactive. IE: It’s the first time where we’ve asked ourselves what do we want to build, what do we think our customers want. It’s a new era for Autohaus Hamilton.
Justin: I love that it’s 100% new, but old school at the same time. So what are your thoughts on RWB, which is not old school at all, or even Magnus’ cars and Singer cars? Do you guys love them or hate them?
Grant: It’s awesome. Look, in my ideal world I’d all be sitting around a table with Nakai-San, Magnus, Rob Dickinson, having beers and talking shit, mate I’d love that.
Justin: So it’s not a competitive/hate thing?
Grant: No way, no way. It’s too small a community to not see someone doing cool things. It’s awesome. I embrace all of that.
Nathan: To put into consideration, the amount of Mazda 3’s sold in one month in Sydney alone would total the amount of road registered Porsches in the whole of Sydney. There’s just over 7,000 registered Porsches in NSW. That’s why you know every car, you know every person, you know who’s owned that car, etc. That’s how small the market is here.
Grant: It’s that small a circle that you don’t really want to go out there and hate. I don’t think anyone should really get caught up about what another dude’s doing, because you just do you own thing, that’s what I’ve done.
I’m not worried about what anyone else has been doing. I just focus on what I have to do, and what I’m doing and what I want to present and how I want to be perceived. I’m happy that others are out there, that’s great, because there’s a bit of pie for everybody, but I take the view that I don’t get too concerned about what everyone else is doing. I’d happily have a beer and talk about the brand with every singe Porsche person in the country.
Nathan: in regards to Magnus, Singer and RWB, everyones doing their own thing, it isn’t like everyone’s making the same car. You can all take the same vehicle and look at it from multiple different views. Like Singer, let’s take a modern car and let’s turn it int an old school car. Magnus is old school car, and let’s just kinda funk it up a bit. RWB is like a middle range car and let’s just go as crazy as we can. We’re really marketing our brand as a little bit of everything but with that Autohaus Hamilton old school flare.
Justin: Lets talk engines. Specifically 911 engines.
Grant: It’s so different to anything out there really, especially the old school engines which are dry sump, so it’s a bit of race technology. You know most old racers were dry sump, but this was just standard and how they came from the factory in the 60s. The componentry within the engine use racing spec materials, the finish, treatments, the way it’s been designed and made, it’s all race spec stuff.
Nathan: Thats why Porsche were so good and still are so good, they really started doing production cars as homolagation so they could enter in various race categories.
Justin: What about the elephant in the room, the 996 engine which are apparently prone to blowing up?
Grant: The 986 Boxster is what saved Porsche. They were dead in the water. In the 90s when we had the recession there were dismal sales in this country. Porsche went broke. Alan Hamilton and the Hamilton family pretty much went broke and Porsche came in and saved them. So Porsche stepped in and bought what use to be Hamiltons.
Nathan: The 996 was first variant to go wet sump, a completely new engine, first generation of everything and they did it on a budget. It was unheard of before but times were so bad for them.
Grant: They were learning to design a flat six in keeping with what they had been doing for so many years prior but now they had to have water cooling for noise restrictions and emissions.
Nathan: So that all happened at once, then people came along buying the new 911 thinking it was like the old 911, taking it to the track, doing everything you used to do with the old basically race spec engine and it just didn’t work. They’ve sorted 99% of that out with the new engines now though.
Grant: The new engine they have now is a great engine. They went through what we know (the public don’t know), as a gen 3 engine. They changed some of the internal components that they were having issues with and they’ve sorted it. Since then there have been solutions. The biggest Achilles heel was an IMS bearing that was probably under too much load for it’s design, it also comes down to our country with heat, also heat from the back of the clutch. There’s a stronger bearing available now and we’ve since done lots of these without any issues.
Nathan: At a price point, the 996 competed against BMW as a status symbol car. People didn’t understand that Porsche’s are a little bit fussy and many owners took their cars to the wrong mechanics which used the wrong oil, bad services etc. You always hear more of the negative press than positive though.
Justin: Praise won’t be heard but negative feedback is always amplified.
Grant: 100%. Unfortunately that’s just society as a whole and it’s sad that’s the case, but it’s how it is. Sometimes I want to jump on forums and have my say but I don’t go there on purpose otherwise I’d never sleep.
Justin: Your Pre-Purchase Inspections (PPI) are much talked about in Porsche circles. Anyone looking to buy a 911 will usually get advice to get cars inspected at Autohaus Hamilton. A major part of your business I assume?
Grant: It is certainly a large part of what we do, and PPI’s are Australia wide for us with many interstate cars being shipped to us for inspection. PPI’s rely a lot on certain members of our staff. Depending on what car depends on what person I get to look at it. I have guys who have been with me for a million years and I have guys that are fresh out of the dealership that know all about the brand new stuff so we’ve got it pretty much covered.
Nathan: First car that comes to my head is Brian Duff’s Slantnose. It’s a 1984 genuine Aus delivered car which came in for a PPI. As soon as Tim saw it he goes “I delivered that car when it came into the country”!
Grant: Tim and I have been doing all of this since 1985, there’s not too many guys out there still from the 80s that are still doing it.
Nathan: The amount of times Tim has gone “I delivered that car, it was custom ordered with these seats, someone has changed changed this and that , this car went from this owner to that owner” etc. It’s amazing.
Justin: New owners hearing these background stories on their cars would surely be ecstatic! So on average how many PPI’s do you do per week?
Grant: I’d say, 3-5 on average.
Justin: Care to share any nasty PPI’s gone wrong?
Nathan: You name it, we’ve seen it. Two cars welded in half, special badged cars that aren’t the real deal.
Grant: We’ve seen cars that are re-birthed cars and yes, we’ve literally seen cars where one half is one car, the other is another car.
Nathan: Tell the story of Ian’s RSR (laughs).
Grant: (laughing) Ian Hamilton had bought a 1974 RSR, now this car is frikkin cool. It would be worth over a million dollars today if he owned it still. Back in the 80s he had this car, and it was kinda registered but wasn’t, he took a journalist out to West Head and fired it off the road, backwards, and a tree went through the back window which just stopped at the back of Ian’s seat. The car caught fire and burnt to the ground.
Ian brought the shell back. There wasn’t much left it it so he cut the chassis number out and he’s still got the chassis number to this day. Anyways, in America at the moment, there’s a car for sale with the exact chassis number, right now.
Nathan: Someone got wind, rang Ian to confirm if he had sold the car, Ian said ” Well that’s funny as I’m looking at that chassis number on top of my fireplace right now!”. (laughs all round). So that’s the kinda of stuff we see a lot of.
Justin: There’s a lot of discussion out there in relation to G50 gearboxes, avoid the 2.7 litres, etc. Which 911’s are trouble? Which should be avoided?
Grant: I don’t think any of the models are trouble, My advise to anyone looking to buy a Porsche is to seek advice from people who are knowledgeable. It’s really about what you’re expecting. People have varying comfort levels.
Nathan: Often people buy a 911 not understanding what they want to do with it, that or that their goal posts change. Also, most mechanics don’t understand it until they get to an old 911. On a 911 everything’s adjustable. You’ve got to set it up so that it all works in harmony, if you get one little bit wrong, say you take it to another garage who don’t know how to set it up, they pull the gearbox out and all of a sudden the gear selectors are just slightly out of alignment and it’s going to feel horrible.
Grant: That’s exactly right. Everything has to be perfect. That’s what a lot of people don’t realise and all of a sudden say “oh it’s crap”, but the only reason it’s crap is because somebody has fiddled with it and it’s not how it should be.
Nathan: We don’t ever think it’s crap. It’s just out of adjustment, that’s it.
Grant: Add to that, sometimes with some of the old Porsches, bits just aren’t made for them anymore so you’ve gotta then go and hunt for it, maybe Hans in Germany has 5 of them because in the 70s he bought 5 of them and stuffed them on his shelf, and because Hans knows that no one else has them Hans want 3000 Euros for that part, but because you’re emotionally involved in the car and it has to be perfect, you end up paying the cost.
I think the prior proper planning is the best advice I can give to anyone wanting to buy a Porsche. Come and talk to me or Tim or Scott so that we can understand what it is you want, what you’re expecting and all that.
Justin: So what’s the next mark in the wall for Autohaus Hamilton?
Grant: Our next step in the company is to build world wide partners so that we can help anyone around the world source the right Porsche. It’s why I’m really keen to go meet Magnus (who we email with all the time) and RWB and Singer.
Nathan: Our dream scenario would be maybe a TV show where we all build a car together!
Grant: End of the day; Every morning I get up, jump in the car and I’m excited to go to work. That’s the place I’m trying to build, where everybody that works at Autohaus Hamilton jumps out of bed and says, you know what? This is going to be another cool day. That’s the culture you want to have.
Visit: http://www.autohaushamilton.com.au
Units 15 – 16 / 222 Headland Road
Dee Why, NSW 2099 (Nth Curl Curl)
Australia
Phone: (02) 9905 1455