Take a Look Around Porsche Santa Clarita's Wünderground Museum
At Porsche Santa Clarita, you can see the sky from the basement. Not that you'll spend much time staring up through the showroom. Not when there's a 700-hp 935 clubsport race car, plus another 15 Porsches displayed as reverently as the Mona Lisa. Not to mention assorted historical materials and the full sweep of the 911's design history brightly illustrated on a nearby wall.
Not bad for a space that was once underground parking for a Saturn dealership. Branded the Wünderground Museum, the space was the brainchild of Beau Boeckmann, president and COO of Galpin Motors, a Southern California-based dealer group with a history of wild custom cars, motorsports, and spiffing up the customer experience.
For help with this project, Boeckmann turned to some of the same people who helped create "The Porsche Effect" for the Petersen Automotive Museum in 2018. Many of the cars on display are on loan from collectors, and none are for sale. "It’s a win-win," general manager Joe Allis said. "They need to put them somewhere, and we like to display unique sports cars."
What replaced that underground garage isn't some new and glorified parking area for rich owners, nor is it an extension of the showroom reserved for certified pre-owned stock. Nothing here's for sale. There's a dealership for that. And a gift shop.
This is a bona fide museum containing Porsches dating as far back as 1948. There's also a glass-enclosed meeting room that sits in the middle of the museum. And there is still room for more fun stuff, Boeckmann said, teasing the possibility of adding a bar, driving simulators, and a client lounge.
"We asked ourselves, 'As a Porsche enthusiast now, what would be the ultimate place to go to?'" Boeckmann said. "We wanted to get into the soul of Porsche—what makes a Porsche special.’ Because In pretty much everything Porsche does, they seem to do it in an exceptional manner. It’s what every brand aspires to be."
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