The photo shows Mike Rogers with Lisa Voigt and Ted Voigt at the start of the MBR Wildflower Tour on April 1, 2017, which featured stops at two wineries and a private car collection before ending at a restaurant.
Ted Voigt, who is leading the 2026 Springtime Sojourn, has been an active member with Monterey Bay Region since the 1980’s. The first mention of him in the Montereyan that I found was in the June 1986 edition, where he is listed as taking first place in the 924, 928, 944 street class with his 928 in the Le Concours de Monterey held at the Monterey Fairgrounds.
A profile of Ted in the July 1991 Montereyan gives us the following:
After being taken for a ride in a time trial with an instructor in a 914, he knew he had to have one.
“Ted has taken a lot of kidding about the way he eventually got a 914, but the stories about his mugging an old lady in a parking lot and stealing her car do have a very, very slight basis in fact. The OFFICIAL story is that he was leaving the pick-up dock at the Sears store in the Northridge Mall just as the lady in question drove up. Ted, knowing a good thing when he saw it, struck up a conversation and eventually asked if she would consider selling. Strangely enough, that was what she was trying to do, with little success. They arranged a meeting, and Ted arrived, armed with Dave Terdy’s used car check-off sheet, to find a freshly washed 914 waiting an inspection. After much pokeing and prying, a sudden case sellers remorse, and steadily increasing offers from Ted, the participants decided on a cooling-off period. The next day, sufficiently cooled off, the lady agreed to sell the car to Ted for his original offer! Ted had already decided that he was going to be a serious competitor, and wanted to have his car prepared to a level where he couldn’t use it as an excuse. With this in mind, he took the car to Dwight Mitchell in Sacramento, the West Coast ‘guru’ for competition 914s. Dwight’s shop, Auto Sport Technology, is responsible for the total preparation of the car. Ted says that it isn’t the most powerful 914 competing, but he thinks that it is the best prepared. His ideas seem to be justified, considering the results.
Ted wasn’t always a Porsche nut, in fact he says his first one, a 356B normal, was a very narrow winner over an Austin-Healey! The deciding factor, it seems, was that one of his fraternity brothers had a Speedster, and had regaled him with stories about what a wonderful, reliable and fun-to-drive car it was. That was in May of 1961, when he was a 2nd Lt. and had the good fortune to be stationed in Germany. He had the advantage of being able to pick up his car at the factory, and has stories about driving the course at the Nurbergring, blasting all over central Europe in his limited spare time and becoming an ardent fan of some of the greats of auto racing at very close range. The early sixties was a wonderful time to own a sports car, and Ted still says that this was the ‘most fun car he ever had’. He does admit to a down side to the story; when he was making $222 a month from Uncle Sam, and the car payments were $90 a month, and he still had to buy food…things got a little strained at times. He recalls almost getting divorced over whether to buy a set of KONI’s or a couch! Since he is still married to Lisa, I assume that they bought the couch.
As time went on, the normal demands of a growing family dictated that the 356 be traded in for something with a larger back seat. Ted never really got over Porsche fever, so one fine day in 1985, when he suddenly realized that he didn’t need that back seat any longer, there never was any choice as what brand of car to buy. Ted says he was only too glad to dispose of his Chevy Nova and slip into the gleaming Burgundy colored 928 that he drives now.”
