Part prescriptive (one can’t help but admire the inclusion of gear ratios), it took more of a manifesto form elsewhere.
The intake needs to wail like this, the chassis balance should feel like that and so on.
The car will weigh such and such in full running order (start with an original 911 T chassis, please, rather than a commonly used 964 one, as it will save us 300kg). There was also the design, both inside and out.
The showstopping aesthetics of the European RS, down to the split-level ducktail, are mostly Walter’s handiwork. It’s hard not to be impressed.
“The guy is a bloody perfectionist. We were painting things to concours standard that you will never see,” said Thornley, who himself had a 2.7-litre RS for decades. He jokes about the hardest part of this mesmerising project being ‘the owner’ and is vindicated when his phone starts buzzing away during our chat. Guess who.
But the truth is that he and business partner Wayne Kelham are as mad about the details as Walter, and this really is a multi-disciplinary business.
It isn’t solely turning out modified old 911s, as shown by the magnificent, fully restored Lamborghini Miura in one of the workshops.
Adjacent to it was a Bugatti Type 40, and an engine-building facility sits across the road where, among other jewels, fettled 300bhp Virgilio V6s are prepped before being dropped into Thornley Kelham’s hot-rod take on Lancia’s B20 GT Aurelia.
The presence of English wheels warms the heart, so too the shell of a Citroën SM. The place is a toy box – one in which any project, no matter how whimsical, can fully materialise.
It was thus well placed to deliver something on the level of the European RS. But listening to Thornley, I still couldn’t help wondering if the reality could live up to the expectation – to the painstaking planning in Walter’s paperwork and his huge emotional investment in the project.
