GOLDRUSH

Goldrush

Nick Londy talks to us about refinishing his Porsche in a mesmerising gradient of black and gold.

“There were easily 50 or more final designs we could have gone with, and a handful that really spoke to me.”

Shifting from back to front like some trick of the evening light, Nick Londy’s g body Porsche 911 is one of the most striking custom cars we’ve seen all year, even though there’s very little about it that’s actually modified. It was a project Nick took on with the help of his girlfriend Sera Trimble and Webb Bland, both of whom work together as professional designers.

“A lot of the designs we came up with were in the vein of racecar liveries” explains Nick. “This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but as someone with an actual racecar I didn’t love the idea of mixing that theme into my road car. Once we had that revelation, Webb produced a couple of gold to black gradient fade concepts, one of which included color matching the wheels front and back.

It just immediately stood out. It wasn’t just unique to the other renders, but unique to the air-cooled Porsche world here in LA. Sera was steadfast that the search was over. As my partner in life, and Webb’s partner in business, her endorsement was the watershed moment that moved us towards turning this into a reality.”

While most custom cars go on for years in the planning, Nick never bought this 911 with the intention of changing it very much at all. In fact, this really began as a standard paint correction procedure that quickly spiralled into a different thing entirely, as is so often the temptation when you set out to do the “basic” jobs on a classic car.

“When I first bought the car, it was flawless, but my intention was always to make it a dedicated road rally machine. I’ve put 40k rallying miles on the car since 2021, 20k of which were accumulated in just one year. As the car got better and better, the paint got worse and worse. My rally buddies would look at the blasted front end and compliment how well used it looked, but they weren’t the ones that had to live with it. As much as I loved rallying the car, the teenager in me that always had posters of pristine Porsches on the wall wished it wasn’t quite so beat up.”

When it came to repairing the damage that years of rallying had done to Nick’s 911, a repaint was going to be the first thing it needed, in the original factory black of course. There were no plans to stop driving it however so the fresh paint was always going to need a wrap of paint protective film to finally keep the stone chips at bay. That was when the creative spark really took hold.

“It occurred to me that the car was a fresh canvas now, not only could I add the PPF but maybe also a vinyl wrap to make the car uniquely my own. So began the brainstorming conversations with Sera and Webb.

"When I first bought the car, it was flawless, but my intention was always to make it a dedicated road rally machine. I’ve put 40k rallying miles on the car since 2021, 20k of which were accumulated in just one year."

“It occurred to me that the car was a fresh canvas now, not only could I add the PPF but maybe also a vinyl wrap to make the car uniquely my own."

I’d say the hardest part was getting the shades of gold just right. I leaned heavily on Sera and Webb for this and their experience was paramount. Finding a shade that was nether too orange nor too green took a lot of work, particularly as it faded along the gradient.

In addition, matching different mediums and surfaces was a painstaking process as well. How did it look in the sun? What shade of the body fade should we use on the wheels? How would the vinyl print match the powder coating on the wheels? What can be wrapped and what can’t?

It was a constantly evolving process but in the end I think it came out better than I’d hoped. I loved the original render, but I understood that it was just that, a render. I was prepared to make concessions with the end product, but in the end I didn’t have to.

Now it’s finished, I’m just going to keep driving it. A big part of this process was making it sufficiently durable for the way I use the car already. I’ll admit it was a bit nerve wracking the first time I took it for a legitimately long drive with friends, but ultimately this is my road car and it is absolutely not going to sit in a garage. We’ve done everything we can do to protect it, so I feel comfortable driving it knowing whatever happens, happens.”