Contrary to the prevailing belief that Porsche hot-rodders are a rogue faction of outsiders who challenge the establishment, the new book Porsche Outlaws: Stuttgart Hot Rodsby Michael Alan Ross, argues that the custom revolution sprang from the brand itself.

“Don’t let the costumes fool you,” Ross writes, “imagine if you will, Dr. Ferdinand Porsche and his son Ferry in white t-shirts, jeans and high PRO-Keds just like any other SoCal family of hot-rodders.” Pointing out that the first road-going Porsche, model 356/001, was a piecemeal assembly of spare parts, Ross claims that the venerable automaker’s foundation was in fact built on such souped-up examples.

The thesis continues with Porsche’s early “blurred lines” cars that went outside the orthodoxy. Examples like the 550 Spyder made famous by James Dean, the largely experimental 904 and the radically aggressive 1967 911 R marked the indie spirit at the heart of the manufacturer. The book’s subsequent chapters document the multiple microverses of deviant Porsches launched by what is widely recognized as the first ever banned Porsche: the so-called Kustom Karrera. The latter was created by Dean Jeffries in 1957 as a whimsical riff on the 356 model.

The work of leading builders like Rod Emory (Emory Motorsports), Bisi Ezerioha (Bisimoto Engineering), Rob Dickinson (Singer vehicle design), and Rob Ida joins in revealing the kaleidoscope of methods and philosophies that inspired such individualistically modified German sports cars. Several outlaw-loving drivers are also profiled, e.g Air cooled co-founders Patrick Long and Jeff Zwart, designer Carl Magnusson, musician John Oates and personality Magnus Walker.

While road-going and race-tuned outlaws feature in their stripped-down, cheekily painted, rebelliously tweaked glory, a chapter on Safari cars describes the rough-and-ready Porsches that have been beefed up, lifted and fitted with knobby tires. for dirt duty.

For Ross, a proven photographer, the transition to wordsmith was not easy. “I’ve worked with the best writers in the business, and I’ve had tremendous respect for them,” he says. “But now I have ten times as much respect because this was something that was not in my wheelhouse. My neighbor said to me, ‘You need to sit down at the keyboard and start doing it. . . just put your computer on dictation and just talk. Tell the story.’ And that’s what I did.”

Photographing the cars presented unique challenges, such as the one-off adventure with Dean Jeffries’ Kustom Karrera. Ross remembers that the car was about to be put on display Petersen Automotive Museum for a year and he only had a few minutes to photograph it before it was tucked away for the exhibition.

“I looked at the NOAA (weather report) and saw that I had a 14-minute window before another thunderstorm came in. The roof was already completely soaked and I was running around like crazy and shooting that car . . . It was like a pressure cooker off all these things that had to come together to create this incredible image that’s in the book,” he recalls. “I’ll never forget that moment.” Porsche Outlaws: Stuttgart Hot Rods is available through Quarto.

Click here for more pictures from the coffee table book Porsche Outlaws: Stuttgart Hot Rods.