When I grow up, I want to be Jeff Zwart.
Name not ring a bell? Here’s a quick bio: filmmaker, photographer, racing driver. Has worked for the likes of BMW, Porsche, and Mercedes-Benz, shooting some of the most memorable automotive commercials of the modern era. (This one, for example. And this. And this.)
He’s a national champion rally driver. He believes that cars are built to be used, and he’s driven a 1950s Porsche 356 sideways on dirt to prove it. He’s shot air-to-air photography for Northrop Grumman, which means he’s spent a lot of time strapped into a Martin-Baker ejection seat in foreign lands. If that weren’t enough, he’s a seven-time Pikes Peak hill climb champion, having competed on the mountain twelve times in nine separate Porsches. (One of them was a 911 GT3 Cup car, which is just as bonkers as it sounds.) This past summer, he drove a mostly stock 911 GT2 RS from California to Colorado for the hill climb, hammered it up the course, and set a record in the process.
So Jeff Zwart is solid-gold great. Happily, he’s also the Porsche geek’s Porsche geek—knowledgeable, down-to-earth, and possessed of some pretty cool cars. We spent a few moments with him at last weekend’s Porsche Rennsport Reunion at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Yes, he is as chill as he sounds, and no, he will not adopt you. We asked.
First things first: Why Porsche?
In my case, it’s kind of a funny story. Growing up, you aspire for your first driver’s license and first drive before you get your driver’s license. In my family, we had two cars: a Volkswagen Beetle and a 911. I remember the morning my dad said to me, “OK, today’s the day you learn to drive. We’re going down to an empty parking lot.” And I figured it’d be the Volkswagen. But that morning at breakfast, he said to me, “We’re gonna take the 911. It has more power, you won’t stall it so much.”
To make it even more meaningful, that was chassis number 35—911 number 35. We all are ingrained in different ways for that first drive. For some people, it’s a pickup truck; in my case, it happened to be a 911 that my dad had gotten second-hand. It just connected me from that point on. The sound, the shape, the experience, first gear being way back there [mimes shifting into first], all of that was unique.
Naturally, as I [grew up and] aspired to do things beyond becoming an astronaut, I was attracted to photography because I went to races. Porsche as a brand and the 911 in particular were always focal points. My first jobs out of school were with Road & Track to shoot covers, and they were mostly Porsche stories because of people like Joe Rusz. I really had a connection, even if I wasn’t trying for it, and I ended up doing the majority of Porsche’s advertising over the last 30 years. That’s very special for me, because it’s been ingrained from the beginning.
You have a history of doing really cool things with unlikely machinery—taking a road-racing-spec 911 GT3 Cup and a virtually bone-stock GT2 RS up Pikes Peak, for example. What draws you to these things? These seem like normal-guy ideas, ridiculous and glorious things you’d dream up over beer in a garage.
I was attracted to rallying because of the adventure, and because [laughs] my best friend was Rod Millen. We built a rally car, and I was national champion in 1990, and I kinda got hooked. But what it became was, rallying was held at night, in the middle of nowhere, and we had this one event every year that wasn’t, and that was Pikes Peak. And that one event was funny, because it’s twelve-and-a-half miles long, with 156 turns. It’s like doing one lap of the Nürburgring, only it’s uphill and finishes at 14,000 feet.
I think because of my background, I look to tell different stories—unexpected stories with everyday things. And for me, working with Porsches every day, driving them . . . the racing didn’t come naturally, but I really concentrated on being a good rally driver. So I had that ability to go quickly on the dirt. It was good timing. In 1994, I was driving a Carrera 4 in the U.S. ProRally championship, and that was unique—no one else was doing it. But little did I know, just less than a decade later, we’d have a Cayenne. My dirt specialty really paid off, because I did the Panama-Alaska rally—25 days and 10,000 miles in a Porsche. And when the Trans-Siberia race came along, [late Porsche PR man] Bob Carlson asked me to head the U.S. team. So I put together the three cars for it, and we drove the Trans-Siberia, and the sister car won, with Rod Millen driving. That was a big event, but I kind of fell into this position through my background.
You drove to the Reunion in a 1953 356—it’s heavy on the patina and looks wonderfully lived-in, but it’s a very early car. You don’t see that combination often. Where did the car come from?
Well, that’s kind of an interesting story. When I did the [launch film] for the Cayenne, I needed a 356 to drive on snow and ice. I wasn’t going to find someone who would let me slide their 356 around, so I looked around on the Internet and basically found this car for a really cheap price [laughs]. It was probably restored once in the early ’70s, but it’s about as correct, and the experience of driving it is as correct, as possible.
We bought it for the film, and the whole time I was driving it, I was thinking, “you know, this thing really drives nicely.” So I decided to keep it. Back then, a ’53 wasn’t as desirable as the later [356s]. Now they’re all the rage, but then . . .
Your cars seem to carry a common thread—they know dirt, and they get used.
I have five cars here. Even though it doesn’t seem like it, all these cars are a little part of me. The 906 Carrera 6 was a hillclimb car for years—I’ve got the logbooks, they ran hillclimbs all over, the flugplatzrennens, the airport races in Germany. So for my background, it fits. With my rallying background, the Monte Carlo 914-6, that’s the factory works Monte Carlo Rally car from 1971. And then over in the [Porsche competition display] is the 1971 East African Safari car, the 911.
What’s the 906 like to own? From the outside, you just seem like an ordinary guy that actually drives the hell out of his 906—no big, shiny trailer, no pampering. And license plates?
Well, the 906 is my favorite car. It was the first model of a race car that I ever built. I’ve had the car for 15 years. I have it street-licensed; we actually drove it to Laguna Seca one year for a story, from Southern California. And because of my schedule, never quite knowing where I’ll be next week, racing doesn’t work for me unless I really commit to a championship. So having a car that can be street-licensed, that’s a big thing.
The 906 was the last road-going plastic-bodied Porsche prototype. It even has an FIA trunk in the back of it, because you had to have a certain amount of luggage space to race in an FIA race. So it was a road car, and the same goes for the rally cars. Everything I have is street-licensed, which wouldn’t work well for a road-racing car. But this is a car where I drive for two minutes and it’s . . . it’s a new day. It’s so wonderful.
So you’re drawn to cars you can drive, and you’ve got an awful lot of seat time in an awful lot of Porsches. Are there any of them that surprised you with their behavior? Is a Cup car or a GT2 RS at all spooky on dirt?
Pikes Peak is an interesting event. I’ve run it twelve years in nine different Porsches. And it’s funny, because generally with Porsches, you sit down, you bring your hands up in front of you, you move your right hand down, there’s the shifter, and everything feels the same. But they change so much from car to car. The office is the same, but the feedback is different with power and drive configuration.
There are cars I’ve driven at Pikes Peak that have been quite intimidating, but what’s fascinating is, this year’s car, the GT2 RS, that’s the most power I’ve ever had there, but it’s also one of the most comfortable cars I’ve ever driven. The evolution that shows—it’s really pretty incredible how they do that.
But, you know—most of my racing’s done on gravel and dirt. When you scare yourself, it’s not the car. [Laughs.]
No comments:
Post a Comment