The Cleanest 356
Native Motor City car nut encouraged by locals to nurture Stuttgart’s best.
Mally’s original ‘77 930 and his relatively new GT2 frame his racing ‘65 356, which is normally back in the single work stall.
As a 16-year-old adolescent growing up in Detroit, Lane Mally bought a strangely engineered thing called a Beetle, a 25-horsepower 1954 sedan, which he drove far more miles than he should have without ever adjusting the sensitive valves of the air-cooled engine. “I knew it was underpowered, but I just didn’t have the money,” he says. Still, the car never died. He cruised the Beetle on Woodward Avenue amongst scores of ’57 Bel Airs. “Back then the muscle car guys never made fun of me; the Japanese weren’t here. There were no Porsches; the only European cars were MG TCs,” he recalls of the historic strip between Ted’s slider joint at Woodward and Square Lake Road and the Totem Pole drive-in at Woodward and 10-Mile Road in the late 1950s and early ’60s.
He had a suction-cup-mounted two-foot wide wind-up key that he’d stick to the engine lid of the rare Beetle, poking fun at himself and the weird rear-engine machine, which philosophically was a distant progenitor to the bad-boy 930 he eventually bought in 1977. Now the real estate developer has also got a home-market Porsche GT2, the first federalized for operation in the U.S., and he races a 356 coupe so clean picky TV chef Gordon Ramsay would eat off it.
Mally was born and raised in Detroit, and he’s intensely proud of it. He doesn’t want to follow the trend to leave despite skies so perpetually grey that Walgreen’s can’t stock enough Valium and the economy mirrors Chad’s or Togo’s.
He’s proud because Detroit taught Mally to love Porsches. They’re in his blood, no matter that Mally cruised the famous boulevards of Motor City in a VW when GM’s Bill Mitchell could be spotted driving secret prototype Corvettes on Woodward Avenue, and before the crackdown by suburban cops in 1965, and the Federal government’s reigning in of American muscle cars in the early 1970s.
In 1951 Mally learned to drive in a VW microbus, and he’s not averse to finding one and restoring it now. However, he has had other passions through the years: He had a BMW, but he traded it for a ’32 Ford Cabriolet that he found in a barn in Ohio. It has a Corvette motor, the doors are welded shut, and he turned it into a rat rod. Nowadays, cruisers ride hot rods on the Woodward Dream Cruise every August, but Mally recalls that he never saw them on Woodward back in the day. Finally, by 1977 he bought the quickest street Porsche, a 930 Turbo, which he still has in his garage. He started getting into vintage Porsches in the early 1980s, when he bought a ’55 Speedster, followed by a ’65 C coupe, and then a ’57 sunroof coupe. One of his cars has a grey-market 904 engine in it, as well.
Mally bought the building he turned into his private garage after it had been abandoned. He added glass blocks to the existing windows for security, and then added a new concrete floor. “I’ll come out to my garage on a Saturday,” says Mally about his restored 1950’s suburban Detroit brake and repair shop, “and my wife calls and says, ‘When are you coming home?’ I just lose all track of time here.”
Mally’s garage is private, spacious, it has a pool table and a bar, and it has what has to be the coolest wash and detail area we’ve ever seen in a private garage. He’s got a lift and a well-organized tool corner, and despite the fact that he only keeps 10 cars in a garage large enough to accommodate 20, there is no kitchen. He loves racing his vintage ’65 356 at Watkins Glen and Road America, but he notes that the current culture of vintage racing is getting really crowded with professional mechanics, $500,000 Newell coaches and semi-truck support. A telling quote: “Some vintage racers arrive at the track with their own chefs. What fun is that?”
