Customer Car
The Motor the Porsche 912E Always Deserved
Chris Latshaw’s beautifully restored 1976 Porsche 912E arrives at PMB Performance for the final ingredient: 2.3 liters, 160 horsepower, and modern EFI.
There are some Porsches that announce themselves from half a block away.
A 1976 Porsche 912E isn’t one of them. And that’s precisely what makes it so good.
To the casual observer, Chris Latshaw’s Porsche could simply be a beautifully sorted early G-body 911. The familiar upright headlights are there. The narrow body. The simple bumpers and bright trim. The classic Porsche greenhouse. Nothing about it needs to shout.
|
Look at the badge on the engine lid, however, and the story gets considerably more interesting. The 912E existed for only a single model year. Porsche sold it in America in 1976 as the practical bridge between the departing 914 and the forthcoming 924, building just 2,099 examples. Instead of the contemporary 911’s flat-six, Porsche fitted the car with a fuel-injected, air-cooled 1,971cc Type IV flat-four related to the engine used in the 914. Output was approximately 86 SAE horsepower, delivered through a five-speed transmission. It was economical, comparatively simple, and wonderfully balanced. It was also, as far as PMB Performance founder Eric Shea is concerned, one of Porsche’s great ideas that stopped development just a little too soon. |
A 912E asks to be looked at twice. The narrow body and simple bumpers read as an early G-body 911 until you reach the engine lid. |
A 912E Built to Be Driven
Chris Latshaw isn’t new to PMB Performance, and he certainly isn’t new to Porsche.
A longtime friend of PMB, Chris has spent decades around enthusiast cars in Durango, Colorado. His public biography identifies him as a founder and supporter of Durango Cars & Coffee, while today he is also one of the passionate people behind the Stuttgart Collective, a growing Porsche community in Southwest Colorado.
The San Juan Mountains are the reason this car exists in the form it does. Everything about the build points back to these roads. |
The Collective’s mission is refreshingly simple: bring Porsche people together around the cars and actually drive them. Based in Durango and established in 2025, Stuttgart Collective embraces everything wearing a Porsche crest, from early air-cooled cars to contemporary GT machinery. Its events naturally make use of one of the greatest resources available to a Porsche owner: the roads of the San Juan Mountains, including the spectacular country surrounding the Million Dollar Highway. That makes the 912E an especially appropriate car for Chris. Light, narrow, simple, and easy to place on a mountain road, the 912E possesses nearly everything you could ask for in a backroad Porsche...nearly. |
First Stop: Haydon Brothers
Before coming to PMB, Chris entrusted the 912E to Haydon Brothers Automotive in Anaheim, California, for an extensive refresh and restoration. It isn’t difficult to understand why.
|
Doug and Whit Haydon have spent decades working on Porsches in Southern California, and their Anaheim operation has acquired the kind of reputation that can’t be fabricated with advertising. Public business records identify Doug Haydon as president and Whit Haydon as vice president of the family operation, while generations of customer comments repeatedly mention their knowledge, honesty, and meticulous surroundings. “Surgical-room clean” isn’t much of an exaggeration. Porsche owners have been describing the Haydon shop as extraordinarily clean for years. Chris already knew what they were capable of. His 1973 911E has also been under the Haydons’ care and, in Chris’s estimation, has never been better. So the 912E arrived at PMB with the important work already done. It was beautiful. It was sorted. The restoration respected what made the car special in the first place. |
The restoration arrived finished. PMB’s work began with a car that was already correct, which is the best possible place to start. |
PMB’s assignment wasn’t to reinvent it. It was to finish the idea.
What If Porsche Had Kept Developing the Type IV?
That question has driven a considerable amount of Type IV engine development at PMB.
PMB’s own history begins in the air-cooled Volkswagen world before progressing naturally into the Porsche 914, 911, and eventually the restoration and performance business it is today. Founder Eric Shea began turning wrenches on Volkswagens in the 1970s, and the Type IV-powered 914 became an important part of that progression.
So when PMB talks about the potential of the Type IV, this isn’t theoretical.
96mm pistons, big-valve heads and a stroker crank all live under this. The architecture is the one Porsche shipped; the development is the part that kept going. |
The company’s 2.3-liter, 2258cc Type IV is built around 96mm pistons, big-valve cylinder heads, a custom stroker crankshaft, and proprietary camshaft development. PMB’s emphasis is deliberately on usable torque, streetability and reliability rather than simply chasing a peak dyno number. PMB has said it before about this engine: This is what the Type IV might have become if Porsche had simply kept developing it. |
And nowhere does that idea make more sense than in a 912E. The stock 912E engine began life with roughly 86 horsepower. Chris’s new PMB 2.3 produces 160 horsepower. That’s roughly an 86 percent increase in peak output while retaining the four-cylinder architecture that defines the character of the 912E.
86 horsepower to 160. Roughly an 86 percent increase in peak output, with the flat-four architecture left exactly where Porsche put it.
But horsepower only tells part of the story. The real transformation is torque.
More displacement, improved breathing, and PMB’s camshaft development give the engine the kind of midrange response that matters when you’re climbing a grade, exiting a second-gear corner, or simply rolling into the throttle without needing to punish the gearbox.
That’s exactly the kind of power a street-driven 912E deserves.
Vintage Looks. Modern Fuel Control.
Sitting atop the new engine is another important part of the equation: Jenvey Heritage Series IDF electronic fuel injection.
|
At first glance, the induction system looks reassuringly old-school. That’s intentional. Jenvey designed its Heritage throttle bodies to retain the visual vocabulary of classic Weber-style carburetors while concealing modern EFI hardware inside. The Heritage IDF incorporates fuel delivery and throttle-position sensing into a package designed around the traditional IDF mounting pattern. |
The Heritage IDF keeps the shape of a Weber and hides the injector, the fuel rail, and the throttle-position sensor inside it. |
PMB offers the system specifically for Type IV-powered Porsche 914s and 912s. For a car like Chris’s, it’s difficult to imagine a more appropriate solution. Open the engine lid, and the car still looks like a vintage air-cooled Porsche. Turn the key, and you gain the precision of electronically controlled fuel delivery.
No choke ritual. No changing jets for altitude. No accepting a compromise because a carburetor was tuned for one set of atmospheric conditions and the car is now several thousand feet higher in the Colorado mountains.
The MS3Pro ECU can meter the fuel the engine actually needs.
For someone based in Durango, and someone who intends to use his Porsche on mountain roads, that isn’t just technological novelty. It’s genuinely useful.
Modern EFI also allows PMB to extract more of the energy available from the fuel while maintaining drivability, cold-start behavior, and consistency that are extremely difficult to duplicate with a purely mechanical fuel system.
The idea isn’t to make a 1976 Porsche feel like a 2026 Porsche.
It’s to make the 1976 Porsche work as well as today’s technology allows without removing the things that made it worth owning in the first place.
Why Eric Loves the 912E
Ask PMB founder Eric Shea about dream Porsches, and the 912E comes up remarkably high on the list.
Open the lid and the period is intact. The car looks the way a 1976 912E should look, right up until it moves. |
It makes sense. It has the understated appearance of an early G-body 911 without advertising what is underneath. It has a Type IV engine with roots in the same air-cooled Volkswagen/Porsche world that helped shape Eric’s own enthusiasm. And because the four-cylinder powerplant carries less mass behind the rear axle than a contemporary flat-six, the entire car has a light, uncomplicated character. |
Porsche essentially created a lightweight, economical G-body road car and then stopped after one year. For Eric, the PMB 2.3 completes the sentence Porsche started in 1976. The original 912E was about efficiency, simplicity, and accessible performance. The PMB version doesn’t abandon any of those principles. It simply adds the power the chassis always seemed capable of handling.
160 Horsepower Changes the Equation
A stock 912E never needed to be fast to be enjoyable. That’s part of its charm. But 160 horsepower in a light, narrow-bodied G-series Porsche changes things considerably.
There is now enough power to exploit the chassis rather than merely preserve momentum. Enough torque to attack a mountain grade. Enough acceleration to make the straights between corners interesting.
Yet there isn’t so much power that the engine overwhelms the experience. That’s important.
This isn’t a six-cylinder conversion trying to turn the 912E into something else. The Type IV remains. The flat-four sound remains. The simplicity remains. The car just finally has the motor its chassis deserves.
PMB has already demonstrated the same 160-horsepower neighborhood with its own EFI-equipped 2.3 Type IV engine build, reinforcing that this combination isn’t a one-off science project. It’s a developed package. And for the 912E, it may be the sweet spot.
One More Drive Before Durango
Soon, Chris will take his 912E home. Back to Durango. Back to Stuttgart Collective. Back to some of the finest mountain roads in the western United States. But before he does, we’re going to enjoy it. Because cars like this deserve to be shown in motion.
The finishing piece. PMB’s 2.3 cover sits between the two Jenvey throttle bodies. It’s the one part of this engine bay that doesn’t pretend to be period.
The Haydon Brothers have given Chris a beautifully restored foundation. PMB has added 2.3 liters, 160 horsepower, and a modern EFI system that brings the Type IV firmly into the twenty-first century without making the engine bay look like it came from it.
The result isn’t a 912E pretending to be a 911. It’s something we like even more. It’s a 912E allowed to become the car it always could have been.
Lightweight. Understated. Efficient. Mechanical. Modern where it matters.
And now, finally, properly fast. For Eric Shea, the equation couldn’t be much better. A one-year-only Porsche. A great friend behind the wheel. A Type IV behind the rear axle.
And 160 very good reasons to take the long way home.