A new start after 60: At 26, I saw my dream Porsche. At 68, I built one from scratch

Bill Drysdale could never afford the sports car he fell in love with as a young man. So when he retired, he went to night school to learn welding, and began assembling it, bit by bit ...

When he was 26, Bill Drysdale saw a Porsche 904 at Silverstone racetrack and fell in love. “One day,” he vowed, “I will have one of those.” As the years went by, the price of Drysdale’s dream car rose above £1m. “I realised I was never going to be able to buy one.” But when he retired, still harbouring the dream, he thought: “Why don’t I make one?”

Drysdale grew up in Wigtown, Scotland, and cars were in his blood – his grandfather was chauffeur to the local creamery manager, and he first saw a race with his father, when he was 12 – around the time that his mother went into hospital with multiple sclerosis. Drysdale, an only child, grew close to his father. At 14, he taught him to drive. Together they’d huddle in the kitchen to listen to the Le Mans 24 Hour race on the radio.

Drysdale was only 21 when his dad died; his mother ended up staying in hospital for 23 years. “That made me very independent,” he says. Determined? “Pig-headed, some would say.”

After studying maths and physics at the University of Glasgow, he joined a brake manufacturer as a graduate apprentice engineer. “Oh, it was tremendous,” he says. “As young chaps in the company, there was always this interest in cars and racing and competition.” His favoured form was “sprinting – racing against the clock, competing against yourself”. It was while playing mechanic to a friend in the pit at Silverstone that he saw the Porsche 904 and was floored by “the sound, the look, the line”.

Drysdale married and became father to a son and a daughter, at which point he stopped motor racing. While his wife stayed at home in Warwickshire, England, he travelled widely for work – India, South Africa, Brazil, Japan, Argentina, Europe, Australia. By the time he retired at the age of 58, he was international president for a Canadian company, and moved back to Scotland. It was here that he had the idea to build his own version of the famous Porsche.

Drysdale went to night school for six months to learn how to weld. Through a friend of a friend of a friend, he got a blueprint of the original Porsche 904. He made the shape of the body in his garage, first from wood, then plaster of paris. From this he made fibreglass moulds; his wife, Lucia, helped him to make the resin. Next came the doors, a bonnet, front and rear wings, the interior and instrument panel.

“Once I had the body, I could concentrate on the engineering, fabricating the chassis, designing the suspension. That was all from scratch,” he says. He bought a secondhand engine and transmission – “then started to put all the parts together”.

The children “thought I was off my rocker”, he says. Sometimes, the project would defeat him. “For a couple of months I would not go into the garage at all. Then the enthusiasm would come back … I’ve always been interested in broadening myself.” After eight years, the car was finished; Drysdale was 68. He calls his car a Porsche 904FF. The double Fs stand for “effing fake”.

When it was done, he transported the car to test days at race tracks, where he did laps to set up the handling. In Scotland, England, France and Switzerland, he competed in speed hill climbs and sprints, right until February this year, when at 87 a stroke affected his sight and put paid to driving.

“I’m coming to terms with it but it is very difficult,” he says. Meanwhile, the car continues to compete, driven by friends, while Drysdale takes part as “entrant”. He is already planning the next season. “I intend to be in the paddock, in the pit, next year with my race car, with someone else driving it.”

“I think my dad would have said: ‘Yep, that’s my son,’” he says. “The car has given me a dream. I’m a great believer that you must have a dream. A dream to me is something you really would like to do but don’t know if you ever will. That’s my philosophy in life. Look forward. And do the things that you want to do.”