In 2021, Brett and Jessica Nelson were a few months into running Midtown Autohaus - an automotive storage facility and social club in Midtown, Oklahoma City - when a friend called Brett about a car. There was a yellow Porsche, the friend said, in a storage unit down in Ardmore, two hours south on I-35. The owner had stopped working on it sometime in the early nineties. It had been there ever since.

A few days later the Nelsons were in Ardmore meeting the owner, a retired physician and former Baja 1000 class winner from the late nineties. His nephew had once decided to help the doctor restore the 356. The nephew had taken the car apart. The nephew had then run out of momentum, and the car - disassembled, in pieces, no longer recognizable as the thing it had once been - had simply sat there.

Werks 11 sits in central Texas. Julian Avent has been working on Porsches since he was seventeen years old. The shop became a brick-and-mortar operation around 2015 or 2016 - air-cooled work, predominantly 911s, 912s, and 356s - with engine building, body and paintwork, and upholstery all handled in-house. They were the right shop for the project.

The first major decision in any 356 Outlaw build is what to put in the back. The conventional move - the one that lets the build clear sixty in low-fives and feel like a modern car doing it - is to drop in a six-cylinder 911 motor. It works. It also changes the car.

Julian and the Nelsons talked about it at length. They didn’t go that direction. They built a detuned Type 4 race motor instead - derived from the 914 race engines Werks 11 had been running for seven or eight years - with modern fuel injection on individual throttle bodies and a Link ECU. Output: somewhere north of 150 horsepower, in a car that weighs just over 1,800 pounds.

Every Outlaw 356 has its signature gesture. On this car, the gesture is the chop. Werks 11 cut the top of the car, lifted it, raked it forward, and welded it back. They built the new top using an A-front windshield and a C-rear windshield - both pieces of original Porsche glass, sized for different cars, married into a single profile.

Open the engine lid and the first thing visible is the four-vent treatment - necessary heat management, but also a clue to what’s underneath. The motor is built from Werks 11’s 914 race-program DNA, detuned for road use, with individual throttle bodies in place of the old carburetors and a Link ECU running modern injection. The headers are custom; the exhaust is a Porsche 997 center muffler, modified to fit. The note is muscular but not loud.

The Nelsons leaned, initially, toward the typical 356 Outlaw palette: black, silver, gray. Julian had painted a lot of cars in that palette. He pushed back. He wanted to see something else. What broke the deadlock was a photograph. Brett and Jessica were in Europe. The email arrived from Germany with a single image attached - the Salzach River, the water carrying a particular kind of mineral green-gray that shifts depending on the light.

The interior is where you most clearly see that this build was not the work of a single shop in isolation. It was a network. Werks 11 designed the architecture. Sean - an expert CNC machinist and longtime friend of the shop - designed and made every knob in the car. Christian, a good friend Brett had met at Hill Country Rally, donated the steering wheel. Brett and Jessica brought a center console request - Jessica wanted cup holders, plural. Werks 11 designed the center console around her ask.

The suspension is a hybrid: Bilstein, KW, Elephant Racing. The KW units sit at the front, where their adjustability allowed the team to get the ride compliant despite the car’s low stance. Most 356 Outlaws use Lexan side windows. Julian didn’t want Lexan. He wanted real glass - tempered, frameless, safe. It took three sets to get there.

A car like this one - chopped, lowered, custom-glassed, ITB-fed - could easily have ended up as a trailer queen. Pristine at the show, useless on the road. The Nelsons explicitly didn’t want that. They run multi-day rallies with their Midtown Autohaus clients across Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. They wanted a car that could go. Werks 11 spent the last year of the build testing - suspension setups, tuning, drivability - putting about twelve hundred miles on the car before turning it over.

When the build was complete, Werks 11 and the Nelsons started showing the car. The first major outing was Rennsport Reunion 7 at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca - the most respected gathering of Porsche owners and Porsche history in the world. The car was selected to be in a special paddock dedicated to Outlaw 356s. Approximately fifteen cars were chosen across the country. The Werks 11 / Midtown Autohaus 356 was one of them.

The car lives now at Midtown Autohaus in Oklahoma City, where it joins a rotating collection of stored cars belonging to the facility’s members. It still gets driven. It still gets shown. The relationships that produced it - between Brett, Jessica, Julian, Sean, Christian, and the rest of the network of contributors - have outlasted the build itself.