Welcome to the website for the Porsche 911 Steve McQueen bought on the 8th August 1969, now 50 years old.

 

 

The first of the four he owned and the one he kept until just before his death in 1980, aged just 50. Which I bought in California in 1991 when McQueen was just a fading movie star. Still fully functional, it’s been in England since 1993 but resting privately for the last 21 years. After thousands of great miles together, further use in our weather just became incompatible with it’s long term conservation in unrestored ‘as owned’ condition. Warts and all but with McQueen’s stardust intact.

 

 

It’s the car photographed during McQueen’s lifetime outside of his Malibu home in 1979 by his wife Barbara Minty-McQueen. Included in her book of 2006, ‘The Last Mile’, she recalled how McQueen used to push it to it’s limits and “drove down Pacific Coast Highway in excess of 100 mph”. As you’d expect him to.

 

 

In 2007 Matt Stone published his first book, ‘McQueen’s Machines’, now regarded as the reference on his many cars and motorcycles. He included Barbara’s photograph but admitted then it was something he didn’t understand.

Letting McQueen’s colour change and other modifications fool him into making a massive mistake. Not only about my car but the Porsche 911 owned since 1998 by Steve McQueen’s son Chad too. It’s another McQueen 911, just not the one Matt Stone told him it was. Mine is the car his father bought in 1969, Chad’s is a used one McQueen bought in October 1977 and gave to Barbara Minty-McQueen to use.

The mystery is solved and in October 2017, after many months of discussions, he finally admitted his error. Offering to correct it if ‘McQueen’s Machines’ was ever reprinted. As that’s looking increasingly unlikely, his later suggestion was,

I think the internet is the record of the future and widely accessible to all at no cost. With the facility too, for open discussions about what’s going on here.

After reviewing the evidence, Classic Cars magazine just renamed the mystery mongrel as the ‘The Car of Cool’ in their August 2019 issue, ‘Steve McQueen’s first 911 driven’.

 

McQueen's car history has been corrupted, which Matt Stone knows but won't put right. So it's time for a wider consensus about the truth and to start the process, my car's complete history file will be going online. Everything I know about the Car of Cool's past and it's current story too. What I've learned about McQueen himself as well as his other Porsche 911s. All have stories left to tell about him which Matt Stone missed.
 
Told in context with McQueen's extraordinary life, the good and the bad about him and intentionally heavy on documents, dates and verifiable references. A proper historical record but not all of it 'on message' with McQueen's rather sanitised current brand image. I know he was much more complex than that, far more interesting and when you understand him, all the more inspiring for it.

So please look this through, ask any questions and express any opinions you'd like to.

info@therealmcqueen911.com