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28 Top six modified 911s: Nine Excellence
“Saying a car has 800bhp is one
thing, but how fast is that car?
0-300kph in 17 seconds shows the
real-world performance”
NINE EXCELLENCE
SPECIALISTS IN HIGH PERFORMANCE MEASURED AGAINST THE CLOCK
‘Game
changer’. It’s a
pretty strong
introduction,
wouldn’t
you say?
But as we’ll
explore, in
many ways it’s perfectly apt for the impressive
Nine Excellence. You may not have heard of Nine
Excellence, given the nature of the way it operates
– a relatively small business based in Horsham, UK,
focused on providing the highest-quality work and
highly specialised tuning packages. You won’t see
its cars publicised in monthlies several times a year
(something we hope to change a little!). No, Nine
Excellence – led by founder Ken Napier – prefers to
focus on working closely with their well-established
network of happy customers, creating supremely
driveable cars which deliver huge performance with
proven reliability.
The company was founded in 2011 with the
objective of providing servicing and maintenance
as well as restoration abilities. But the plan from the
get-go was always to provide tuning packages focused
primarily (but not exclusively, as we shall see) on
water-cooled Turbo cars. The clear goal was not to be
purely a tuning company, but to offer all the services
that a Porsche specialist should.
So what makes Nine Excellence different? In their
own words, “Our philosophy is to create an enhanced
version of an already great car, that can be used as
it should be. Most of all we make sure we are tuning
well within the limits of the hardware, and although
we could make the car faster on a drag strip, we are
looking for safe, repeatable performance, giving our
customer a reliable car that they can use any way they
like without the fear that can come with a tuned car.”
This can be seen in the rather unusual approach
9E has to naming its packages. While most companies
find it hard to resist the temptation to create a
hierarchy for their cars by using ultimate power
outputs, 9E instead names its cars by its minimum
0-300kph acceleration time. So you can imagine how
quick a 9e17 would be…
This is absolutely in line with a philosophy of
providing useable, repeatable performance which an
owner can expect to access. “We thought this was a