Like a kid in a Canepa store
Perks of living in the Bay Area: weekend visits to the Canepa museum, shop and showroom. Birthplace of the improved-on-perfection Porsche 959SC, home to McLarens in one-off colors like Canepa Brown and holding the possibility of a wild Zuckerman sighting, Bruce Canepa and his team run one of the coolest car operations in North America. Don't let the nondescript building indistinguishable from neighboring Sand Hill VC offices fool you, my first Canepa visit triggered the sports car version of a Ratatouille-style flashback to my childhood.
If you grew up in the ‘90s, the Scholastic Book Fair looms large in your memory. These traveling gypsy caravans of print sold books, non-functional erasers straight from Dr. Seuss, easy-to-lose bookmarks and the prize picks: posters. Leaned atop folding metal shelves on wheels, posters depicted wild animals, puppies and almost always exotic cars.
Emerging from the ‘80s, widely considered the “worst decade of car design”, there were really only 3 cars that were poster worthy: the Porsche 959, Ferrari F40, and Lamborghini Countach (maybe a Diablo depending on the year and how new the Scholastic stock was for your school district). Posters of forgettable Corvettes or Mustangs drew some kids out of a sense of familiarity, but the three iconic foreign exotics of the era were all that mattered to me.
These cars reigned supreme throughout the decade to the point that by the early 2000s when I played Project Gotham Racing on Xbox (on the ridiculously massive “Duke” controller somehow designed for little kids' hands), the highest rated and last cars unlocked in the game were the Porsche 959, Ferrari F40 and the cover car Ferrari F50. Sadly, Lamborghini didn’t license cars to the original Project Gotham game.
The torch later passed to "next-gen" halo cars like the Porsche Carrera GT (two available in the Canepa showroom) and Ferrari Enzo in the early 2000s, but by then I was more interested in expressing my taste in music with band posters and had moved on to grades too cool for book fairs. The Fast and the Furious hit theaters in 2001, temporarily overshadowing exotic cars like the Ferrari F355 (“more than you can afford, pal”) and revolutionized the young car enthusiast zeitgeist that put Toyota Supras and Nissan Skylines on the walls and ceilings of generations after mine.
Surviving the tuner era, cars from this era aged beautifully and a glimpse of just one in person gets my blood pumping. Multiple 959s, a disassembled Ferrari F40 and engine-out restorations galore just doesn't get old. Boasting a paint booth, parts fabrication station and a car wall (yes, like a wine wall but with vintage Porsches instead of vintage Pinots). If you get the chance to see Canepa’s inventory in person, take advice from Ben Stiller’s Detective Starsky: do it.
