Beyond
the
Horizon

A History of the Hill Country Region
of the Porsche Club of America
The 1970s: Birth of a Region
Part One of Five

_{Written By Ravi Govind, Club Historian and Archivist}

Long before the Hill Country Region ever existed, Central Texas was already a hotbed of Porsche enthusiasm. Our story does not begin on July 18, 1977, the day our charter was officially granted, but years earlier, in the garages, racetracks, and shared camaraderie of a club whose Austin-area members had simply grown too numerous and too spirited to remain under someone else’s banner.

The Porsche Club of America itself was born on September 13, 1955, when twelve enthusiasts met at a steakhouse in Arlington, Virginia. Affectionately called the “gripe group” for their constant complaints about the lack of parts, manuals, and service support for their German cars, they were led by commercial artist Bill Sholar, who proposed something novel: a club devoted exclusively to one marque. That evening the PCA was founded, with Sholar as its first president and a vision to spread the gospel of the flat-engine, rear-drive sports car across the country.

The first edition of Panorama — the club’s newsletter, dated December 1955 — was mailed to members that winter. Fourteen Regional Directors were assigned to spread the word in major metropolitan areas, including one for Texas: Henry “Tom” Donaldson, an Austin resident who was already active in the regional sports car scene. His name appears in Panorama as early as August 1956, when he navigated for driver Allen Fine to win the Gymkhana at the first-ever Porsche Parade.

Donaldson helped organize the first PCA region in Texas in 1957, named Gulf Coast and based in Houston. It was an enormous territory, all of eastern and central Texas plus the entire state of Louisiana, and the distances proved insurmountable. After three years of sparse participation, Gulf Coast disbanded. A reorganized group received a new charter in 1961 as the Lone Star Region, and Dallas and San Antonio quickly followed with their own clubs: the Maverick and Longhorn regions, both in 1962.

Remarkably, Austin itself fell within none of the three Texas regions. That anomaly persisted until February 1965, when Travis and Hays counties were formally annexed into the Longhorn Region, based in San Antonio. Austin Porsche owners were now officially part of the family, even if that family’s center of gravity lay a hundred miles to the south. C.B. Smith Motors, a popular Oldsmobile dealer on North Lamar, had become Austin’s first official Porsche representative in 1960. Its arrival helped seed a growing community of Porsche owners around the University of Texas and Bergstrom Air Force Base, where pilots and airmen, precision-minded and performance-hungry, were among the car’s earliest and most passionate adopters. The airfield at Bergstrom had hosted SCCA road races in 1953 and 1954 before a budget-conscious Congress banned all racing from U.S. military bases.

Even without official PCA representation, Austin motorsport thrived. The annual Hill Climb at Mansfield Dam on Lake Travis drew Porsche competitors from across Texas, where the little 1600 cc cars earned the nickname “Giant Killer” by routinely defeating the more fashionable Triumphs, MGs, and Alfa Romeos of the era. The event was popular enough to warrant a feature in the 1962 Panorama.

The Austin Aqua Festival, inaugurated in 1962 as a sailing regatta and quickly grown into a weeks-long summer celebration, added a street road race in 1963, known variously as the Carrera de la Capital, the Austin Grand Prix, and the River City Road Races. For nearly two decades it was one of Central Texas’s most beloved motorsport events, drawing enthusiasts from across the region. Its eventual closure in the late 1970s, a casualty of political and environmental disputes, left a gap that would not truly be filled until the arrival of the Circuit of the Americas half a century later.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Austin-area members balanced enthusiasm with geography. The Longhorn Region held board meetings alternately in San Antonio and Austin, then sought compromise at New Braunfels, centrally located and home to the beloved Wurstfest celebration, but no arrangement fully satisfied either group. By the mid-1970s, with half or more of Longhorn’s membership residing in Austin, the idea of a separate club had become less a wish and more an inevitability.

The Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 had rattled the automotive world, quadrupling oil prices and spawning the despised 55 mph national speed limit in 1974. Porsche purists were not amused, the club’s records from those years fairly bristle with indignation at what members called the “double-nickel”. The 914 model, too, divided opinion: Motor Trend named it Import Car of the Year while traditionalists grumbled about its Volkswagen connections. But enthusiasm for Porsche driving endured, and the case for Austin having its own club grew stronger with each passing year.

No one knows who first formally proposed the idea of a separate region, but talk had been building for years. The catalyst arrived on March 17, 1977, when Lacy Seybold of Austin addressed a letter to the PCA President in Alexandria, Virginia, accompanied by twenty-five signatures. The petition cited the “alarming number of members not renewing because of the distances one has to drive” and formally requested recognition of a new region to be called Hill Country. Months of letters, boundary negotiations, and bylaw drafting followed.

On July 18, 1977, the reply came from Virginia: the Hill Country Region was officially chartered as a region of the Porsche Club of America. Lacy Seybold became the first President; Henry Henze, Vice President; Leo Muller III, Secretary; and Don Prater, Treasurer. The three surrounding Texas regions, Lone Star, Maverick, and Longhorn, had each graciously relinquished territory to help the upstart club succeed.

Austin in 1977 was a city crackling with possibility. Willie Nelson was putting it on the national map, the University of Texas was drawing free spirits from across the Southwest, and the automotive world was slowly shaking off the malaise of fuel shortages and strangled performance that had defined the early decade. Twenty-six Porsche owners had decided they needed their own club, and Central Texas was, as it always had been, a magnificent place to drive. What those twenty-six founders had set in motion would grow, over the next fifty years, into one of the largest and most celebrated regions in the entire Porsche Club of America. But that story belongs to the decades that follow.

Next issue: The 1980s — Little Le Mans, Porschedillo, and the volunteers who built a club worth keeping. ■

Note from Ravi Govind: With grateful acknowledgment to Hans Falk, whose original research and writing form the foundation of this series.

Sources
1. Falk, Hans. Beyond the Horizon: The History of the Hill Country Region, Porsche Club of America. Unpublished manuscript, 2020. Primary source for all pre-1977 history and founding-era detail.
2. Wilmoth, R.J. PCA National Historian. Materials and correspondence referenced in Falk, 2020.
3. Hill Country Region PCA. Our Legacy: 49 Years Strong. hcrpca.org/club-history, updated 2026.
4. Porsche Club of America. Club history and Panorama archives. pca.org.
5. Hill Climb at Mansfield Dam. Panorama, Vol. 7, 1962. Referenced in Falk,