Porsche 911 Carrera RS

Information

Delivered new to Lebanon.

'I first came across the Beirut RS when I was speaking with Josh Sadler, owner of Autofarm, the world-renowned independent Porsche specialists based in Oxfordshire, England. Sadler has been in the business longer than I care to remember, and has forgotten more about Porsches than most people will ever know. On top of that, he is a true gentleman, an accomplished race driver and a total petrolhead.

He explained to me that he had received a phone call one day from James Shead, the son of Don Shead, whom he knew because he also raced an Allard sports car. It seems that Shead had classmate from his university days who was one of the three daughters of a car dealer and rally enthusiast from Beirut, Lebanon. Her father had taken delivery of a Carrera RS Lightweight in May 1973, and he drove it in local and regional rallies, a high point being the Beirut-Damascus Rally.

Then the Lebanese civil war began in 1975, and by 1980 things were really out of control. In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon with the aim of destroying the PLO. While they appeared to have achieved this, the country was plunged into an even bloodier period when the Christian Phalangist militia carried out massacres at refugee camps in West Beirut.

So the car’s owner parked the car in the building next to their house, and started driving an ambulance for the Lebanese Red Cross. But in the summer of 1985, on the very day he was supposed to finish his driving stint under pressure from his family, he never came back. Soon afterward, a mortar shell hit the building, and part of it collapsed on the car, severely damaging its roof.

When hostilities finally ceased and some semblance of normalcy began to return to the city, the family, who had long since departed the war-torn country, was contacted by someone involved in the rebuilding work. He had uncovered the car and wanted to know what to do with it. So in early 2007, many years after having graduated from university and returning home, the RS owner’s daughter contacted Shead out of the blue. She told him that their family had moved out of Beirut years before, and wanted to sell their father’s old rally car parked in the building next to their old home ever since.' - MotorTrend, 1973 Porsche 911 Carrera RS Lightweight - The Resurrection. Written by Ian Kuah on Jan 31st 2012