03.05.26
Every once in a while, (but not often enough…) we (or I in this case) find something somewhere in our travels that totally enchants me. Whether it be an unusual geographical feature, maybe even a unique church or some ruin, today I found one of those—in Bali of all places!—that totally caught my fancy. But it wasn’t natural beauty- it was all manmade. Handmade actually!
To preface, I’m an old car guy, which means, when I was younger, I was more into cars. I wasn’t a mechanic, but growing up in the heyday of “old Detroit muscle cars” and the early days of TRUE foreign sports cars (especially the Japanese and British improvements), was a good time to be young! But it was Porsche that really caught my interest. One of my first full time jobs at age 19 (1973) was at a Porsche dealer in Pennsylvania. I knew nothing about them beforehand, but over my two years of working there I got to know them inside and out, and drove a lot of them. The owners of my dealership were professional race car drivers, and I even got to crew with them at a few racetracks. But one model of Porsche was special, not just to me, but to a lot of our customers.
It was called the 356, and nicknamed “The Bathtub Porsche” because it looked like a bathtub turned upside down. They stopped making them about 1965, but in the two decades before, they set a very high bar for very quick, very agile German sports cars. So when I toured this auto manufacturing facility in BALI, of all places, and saw they took several old foreign models—including the 356– built them from scratch from the ground up, and put in modern engines and suspension, well, I was like a kid in a toy store! The Tuksedo factory (https://www.tuksedostudio.com/), which was really too small to call a factory, made new versions of some iconic cars from decades ago, including:
• Porsche 356 Cabriolet, Speedster, and Coupe
• Mercedes Benz 300 SL gullwing (really!)
• 2000 GT (Toyota, late 60s, only 350 built)
• Aston Martin DB5 (James Bond’s car from several movies)
• 550 Porsche Spyder (1953–1956, 90 purpose-built race cars!)
These are all handmade, takes about 18 months each, and cost $150,000 USD and up. They have design rights to several old models from even before the 1950s, and on their design board is a new version of a Corvette, which looked like it mated with a Ferrari! Plus they’ll have a BMW 507 out in the future.Anyway, if you’re interested in cars and plan to be in Bali, take some time to check it out.
