The engine for the 991 Carrera, still 3,614cc displacement, developed 350 horsepower at 7,400, while the S engine, at 3,800cc, turned out 400 at the same engine speed. Both the 991 coupe and cabriolet achieved their best acceleration times with the seven-speed PDK—making the 0 to 100 kilometer-per-hour run in 4.6 for the Carrera and 4.3 for the S. With Sport Chrono Plus, it was possible to shave another 0.2 seconds off each acceleration time. The new seven-speed manual, based on the seven-gear PDK, provided the greatest top speed potential, taking the S up to 189 miles per hour and the Carrera to an even 180. The cabriolet, introduced in the fall of 2012, provided equally sensational performance, achieving another of Porsche’s targets—to close the gap between closed and open car capabilities. Another target for Style Porsche staffers was to further improve the looks of the cloth top when it was raised. With this convertible, the look was nearly Speedster-like as the arc from windshield to rear deck lid was the smoothest—and most reflective of the coupe lines—yet. The tendency to use magnesium in the convertible top systems went further with this new system, as not only the front frame, but also the panel bows were die cast from the lightweight metal. Conscious decisions in spring and damper rates—meaning using exactly the same ones in the coupe and the convertible—provided slightly softer handling and slightly more understeer for the open car, a combination that Porsche learned over nearly thirty years of convertible production fit its open car buyers comfortably. Porsche followed along in its now-traditional path and introduced the Carrera 4 and 4S models at the end of 2012 for sale throughout the world as 2013 models. The carefully planned proliferation of models included 991 GT3 introduced at the Geneva show in March and a 2013 Fiftieth Anniversary model and Turbos throughout the year

RACING THE 911

It was inevitable. As soon as the new Porsche reached its customers, they felt the urge to test it, to compare it against the other makes out there. Neither the factory nor privateers wasted much time. Barely four months after production and deliveries began in September 1964, Peter Falk and Herbert Linge ran a factory-prepared 160-horsepower 911 on the Monte Carlo Rally, starting from Frankfurt on January 15, and finishing in Monaco on the 20th. From the start, they kept pace with another Porsche entry, a 904GTS, with Eugen Bohringer driving and factory racing mechanic Rolf Wütherich as co-driver and navigator. When the results were tallied, the Bohringer/Wütherich 904, No. 150, finished second overall and the Falk/Linge 911, No. 147, came in fifth, giving the new model its first international class win. Ferry Porsche liked his cars competing in rallies. The multi-day events usually drove through several countries and brought attention to the cars from spectators and newspapers. To anyone with doubts, events such as the Monte, the Liège (Belgium), Rome-Liège, and other long-distance runs demonstrated the versatility of these cars and their durability and tractability on hard pavements as well as on dirt, ice, or snow. The next year, Günter Klass and codriver Wütherich took first in the German Rally and first in the GT class on the Alpine Rally, and they finished well enough through the season to win the Group 3 European GT Rally Championship for 1966. Porsche 911s first appeared at Le Mans in 1966 as well. French distributor August Veuillet, founder of SonAuto, begged Zuffenhausen for cars to race and Ferdinand Piëch sent a prototype 911S for the 24-hour endurance run. Drivers Jean Kerguen and Jacques Dewez finished 14th overall, covering 2,369.3 miles averaging 98.7 miles per hour. They stayed clear of the Ford GT/Ferrari battles and won the under 2.0-liter class. Dewez drove it from Veuillet’s dealership in Paris to Le Mans and back after the race. To prove this was not some fragile prototype, Veuillet put it on sale in his 16th Arrondisement showroom on Rue Paul Valéry the following morning. The company had long supported hillclimbs as well, and since the inauguration of the European Hill Climb Championship in 1957, Porsche cars and drivers had won the outright title in either Sports Cars or GT every year since. These uphill sprints not only earned newspaper space, but also provided engineers opportunities to explore extremes of power development and weight reduction. Eberhard Mahle won the GT class championship in the seven-event series driving a factory-prepared 911 in 1966. Across the Atlantic, in early February at Daytona during the first race of the International Sports Car Championship season, Jack Ryan, Linley Coleman, and Bill Bencker finished 16th overall and first in two-liter GT class. This was the car’s first significant North American victory. They took second in class at Sebring six weeks later. In southern California, former Porsche racing mechanic Vasek Polak had become a Porsche dealer, but he never lost his roots in or love for competition. Polak teamed up with Jerry Titus, onetime jazz trumpeter–turned-mechanic-turned-racer-turned–Sports Car Graphic magazine editor. In 1966, Titus drove a Polak-prepared 911 to win the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) D Production national championship.

THE 911S AND THE 911R Two new models arrived for 1967 that sharpened the competitive edge for many 911 racers. The S entered dealer showrooms as a high-performance production model that many buyers took out and raced, and a much smaller run of 911R models established a pattern for special racers to come from Zuffenhausen for the next half century. Ferdinand Piëch, who ran the company’s versuchabteilung, or experimental department, developed the R (for rennen, or race) to determine 911 performance maximums and weight minimums, similar to hillclimb cars but constructed and tuned for endurance events. Compared to the fully equipped 911S, the R weighed 502 pounds less, at 1,764 pounds. Compared to the standard S 160-horsepower engine, the aggressively massaged R engine developed 210. Piëch was less interested in producing the car than learning from it, but racing and press chief Huschke von Hanstein imagined broader enthusiast interest and he worked to convince marketing and sales that Porsche could sell as many as 500 of these cars. They never agreed. After working through a series of four development prototypes during 1967, Piëch commissioned 20 preproduction cars from Karosseriefirma Baur, Karl Baur’s body manufacturing operation in Stuttgart with a reputation for uncompromising quality. Baur and Piëch left the basic 911 steel unibody unmolested, recognizing that its inherent strength was crucial for any race car’s handling. But Baur skipped body undercoating. It replaced steel body panels with thin gauge fiberglass for the front fenders, front and engine deck lids and bumpers, and doors. Baur used aluminum hinges on doors and deck lids. The exterior door handle was plastic, as was the T-handle used inside. Side and rear windows were extremely thin Plexiglas, and the windshield was half as thick as a production version. Dozens of other tiny features differentiated the R from production S models. For months racing mechanic Rolf Wütherich had a full-time job drilling holes everywhere to eliminate extra grams of weight. Once the car was lightened, the engine was the next crucial element. Frustration with the performance limits of the twin-fan Typ 745 flat six led engineers Hans Mezger and Piëch to develop the production 901/01 engine and its racing version 901/20 that used a magnesium crankcase and saw most use in the 906 race cars. The engineers evolved a special version for the R, 901/22, using aluminum cases and feather-light titanium connecting rods on its forged steel eight-main bearing crankshaft. To create the 1,991cc displacement, Mezger specified 80 millimeters bore and 66 millimeter stroke. A dual-spark plug ignition helped achieved the high horsepower output. Engineering choices for high-speed racing gave the engine radical camshafts with extensive lift and overlap between intake and exhaust open and closure. Another choice, the large Weber 46 IDA 3C carburetors, used short throttle arms that made accelerator pedal throw extremely quick. The car was meant for flat-out driving. Weissach finished assembly of the 20 Rs in fall 1967, making them 1968 models with appropriate serial numbers. Because “preproduction” and production ended with the 20 cars, it remained a prototype during its competition career so the company used it most in rallies and endurance events where its rarity was no drawback. In August 1967, drivers Vic Elford, Jochen Neerpasch, and Hans Herrmann won the 84-hour Marathon de la Route around the Nurburgring in a 911R with the Sportomatic transmission. The Marathon relocated the former Liège-Rome-Liège rally off public roads as speeds grew too high to ensure public safety. Two months later, a marathon of a more private sort engaged factory driver Jo Siffert and three colleagues, Dieter Spoerry, Rico Steineman, and Charles Vogele. The four drivers launched an officially FIA-authorized distance record attempt in a long-tail 906 that Siffert and Spoerry owned, circling the oval track at Monza. But the old concrete surface on the high banks broke their race car’s rear suspension, and when they called Zuffenhausen for help, Piëch dispatched 911 R-001 and 002 to the rescue. Loaded with spares, 002 went on ahead while engine chief Paul Hensler, chassis boss Helmuth Bott, and testing director Peter Falk supervised a few changes and upgrades to 001, including replacing the engine and fitting two identical fifth gears, one in the fourth cog position anticipating that days of wear might fatigue the other.

At the end of 96 hours, the drivers finished their 20,000th kilometer and had established five new world and 11 international records in the process. During the entire time, Hensler was on edge because as they left Zuffenhausen for Monza he learned that the engine he had chosen for installation was not a fresh rebuild as he believed but one that just had finished a 100-hour bench test. That engine got them to Monza, sped the four drivers around it for four days, and powered the car back to Stuttgart for celebrations. Such accomplishments helped build the legend of the R models and set the stage for the production-based 911 racers that followed. To many American racing enthusiasts, 1967 will remain the year that a great episode of creative writing changed Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) competition rules. It had the fine hand of racing manager Huschke von Hanstein all over it when the SCCA reclassified the 911 as an under 2.0-liter sedan. This interpretation allowed 911 racers to enter the one-year-old Trans-American Sedan Championship, a series with a class each for engine displacements greater and less than two liters. The judgment stunned Alfa Romeo, BMW, and Ford Cortina owners. It became a significant decision to Porsche because the SCCA established the Trans-Am as a manufacturer’s championship, awarding the cars and not the driver’s finishing points. This presented the winning carmaker significant advertising advantages among enthusiasts. Alfa had won in 1966; Porsche (in particular, Peter Gregg in a Brumos-prepared 911) took the title in 1967. As 911S production passed 500 and then 1,000 units, Porsche homologated the coupe as a Group 3 Grand Touring racer. It did the same with the lighterweight 911 T model. Fitted with the S engine tuned to 170 horsepower, lightened body panels, and sport seats, these models weighed in at 2,031 pounds. Many of the special engine and chassis parts developed for the R and the 906 race cars ended inside, on, in, and underneath these lighter models. Some of these cars became known as ST models, although Porsche used that designation officially a couple years later. Other variations including 1968 911L models with S or R running gear and T models with R engines and drivetrains, the 911TR models, were factory-invented and/or factory-encouraged cars for rallies throughout Europe. No one inside Porsche doubted the value of extensive road and endurance testing, and it’s likely that by the end of 1968, any manufacturer who was not following such a regimen regularly lost to 911 models. Even for some of its drivers, this reliability initially stretched their faith. Vic Eford had signed on to drive a factory 911 at the Tour de Corse. When the car arrived, on an open trailer behind a van, Elford met von Hanstein and had a look inside the van. It was filled with tires and wheels. “That’s great. Car looks great,” Elford told him. “But where are the spare parts? And Husckhe said, ‘We don’t have spare parts. Porsches don’t break.’” It didn’t and Elford finished third overall. A loophole in the British Saloon Car championship rules, perhaps inspired by the allowance in Trans-Am, classified the 911 as a saloon, and Elford won two of the series events in two-liter class while Dutchman Toine Hezemans claimed second in another of the series contests. In April at the Monza 1,000 Kilometers, Dieter Glemser and Helmut Kelleners finished eighth overall to win twoliter GT class in a 911T with 911s in three of the next five spots. A month later, another 911T won two-liter GT in the Targa Florio, the highest finish of any production-derived car. Two weeks after that, another T took two-liter GT honors at the Nurburgring 1,000 Kilometers, then again at Spa a week later, and again at Watkins Glen in mid-July with Peter Gregg and Bert Everett in a 911T. Everett won the 1967 Trans-Am two-liter title in his 911T for Porsche.

From its earliest days, Porsche used racing to test its engineering and to promote its products. The 84-hour Marathon at Nurburgring became particularly useful because it occurred in August, just before new model release. The 911 for 1969 introduced several innovations, including a longer wheelbase and a load-leveling hydro-pneumatic front suspension from Boge meant to be standard on the 911E (fuel injection) models. While the official entry listed Porsche’s three Marathon entries as 911E models, they were more highly developed GTS models on which engineers and mechanics had replaced everything possible, even as obscure as steel headlight buckets, with identical structures fabricated out of paper-thin aluminum. Impossibly complex rules required each car to carry its spares (except for gas, oil, and tires) and any necessary tools in the car. Pit stops for work were permitted only at prescribed times that did not allow fuel and tire changes. Drivers were allowed to stop along the racecourse to effect repairs if they were capable. Entrants developed a routine in which ailing cars limped to the pits but not into them, parking alongside the track. Drivers made repairs from instructions that mechanics shouted to them from the other side of the pit wall, a few feet away. Two of the three 911GTS entries finished first and second, and winning co-driver Herbert Linge commented decades later that his lasting memory of that endless race was that the hydropneumatic front suspension was far too soft. “On down hills and in braking,” Linge explained, “at night the lights pointed at the ground a few meters in front of the car. Accelerating or going up hills, the lights shined the tops of the trees. I could never see where I was going.” The 1968 season ended with the September running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, delayed from its typical June date by student and then civil unrest throughout France. Two Belgians, Jean- Pierre Gaban and Roger Vanderschreik, finished the season-long International Championship for Manufacturers by taking a two-liter GT class victory in their 911T. This along with outright wins in 907 and 908 models put Porsche in second behind Ford’s GT for the manufacturer’s championship but first in the Grand Touring trophy.

The Le Mans 24-hour race and even the Marathon’s 84 hours were barely warmup events to 1968’s longest slog, the 10,000-mile London-to-Sydney Marathon. Departing from London on November 24, the route took three heavily modified 911s and 57 other entrants through Paris, Turin, Belgrade, Istanbul, Tehran, Kabul, and Delhi to Bombay, where the teams sailed to Gloucester Park, Australia, for a final 2,600-mile run to finish in Sydney. The Zuffenhausen race shops prepared three private entry 911s, drastically lightened and intensely reinforced with internal roll cages and external wildlife and brush bars. European Rally champion for 1967, Polish driver Sobieslaw Zasada, and his codriver Marek Wachowski finished third overall, taking home a prize of £3,000 rewarded by the London Daily Express and Sydney Daily Telegraph newspapers, who had jointly sponsored the event. While Porsche suffered durability problems with its 908s during the 1968 season, racing mechanics eradicated those conditions and also launched a new entry, the 917 for 1969. For the 911s, the slightly longer wheelbase, the magnesium crankcase and transmission house, and hundreds of other modifications and improvements led to another season of racing and rally successes. Americans Tony Adamowicz and Bruce Jennings started the year with a two-liter GT victory at Daytona, finishing fourth overall. Gerard Larrousse, André Wicky, and Jean Sage took two-liter GT honors at Sebring in 12th overall; another followed at Monza with Dieter Froelich and Jürgen Neuhaus and still another in the Targa driven by Everardo Ostini and Gianpiero Moretti, again at Spa with Larrousse, and then at the ’Ring with Froelich and Neuhaus, all in 911T models. At Le Mans, Jean-Pierre Gaban and Yves Deprez finished tenth overall and first in two-liter GT in a 911S, as did Peter Gregg and Hurley Haywood at Watkins Glen in another 911S. The season ender at Österreichring saw Herbert Linge and Roland Bauer wrap up the Grand Touring Trophy in a factory 911T. With victories in Porsche’s ultra-reliable 908/2 Spyders and 908L coupes, the World Manufacturer’s Championship went home to Zuffenhausen, and team driver Jo Siffert claimed the driver’s title.

OUTLAWING THE SEDAN AND WELCOMING THE SPORTS CAR Dissent within SCCA ranks led to several changes in American racing at the end of the 1969 season. While Porsche took the under two-liter Trans-Am title for a third year in a row, entreaties from the other manufacturers resulted in the SCCA (and FIA for European events) reclassifying the sedan as a sports car. But that was only the tip of a large iceberg that supported SCCA director John Bishop’s frustrated departure and the organization of a new International Motor Sports Association (IMSA) with Bill France. France had founded National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) as an organization of racing drivers, not manufacturers. For 1970, Bishop and IMSA promoted a new series for FIA Group 2 and Group 4 cars, providing a North American home for the entrants that SCCA had disqualified.

WHAT’S IN THOSE LETTERS? TRY PERMISSION TO RACE! FIA. FISA. CSI. WCM? The AIACR started it all. A group of racers and racing promoters established the Association International des Automobile Clubs Reconnus (AIACR), that is, the international association of recognized automobiles clubs, in June 1904. This group approved and sanctioned European automobile speed events until immediately after World War II, when, in 1946, it changed its name and reorganized as the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). In 1953, the FIA created the World Sportscar Championship (WSC) as a points race series for manufacturers throughout the world. The WSC evolved into the nearly forgotten International Championship for GT Manufacturers (starting in 1966), which in 1972 had become the World Championship of Makes (WCM). The WCM opened its arms in 1976 to include Group 5 Special Production cars, such as Porsche’s 935, Group 4 Grand Touring cars, including the 934, and a prototype category that arrived at the last minute in 1976, called Group 6. This accommodated carry-over open prototype sports racers such as 908/3s and Ferrari PBs that separately was labeled World Championship for Sports Cars. That lasted only through 1977. The FIA had hoped to tame the excesses of 235-mile-per-hour Porsche 917s and InterSerie 917-30s with 1,000 horsepower in 1973, and it tried again in 1982 after years of Porsche 935s topping 220 on Mulsanne. The FIA ended the Group 5 classification and replaced it with Group C, oriented toward fuel consumption. Throughout all this, there also existed the Fédération International de Sport Automobiles (FISA). This group grew out of a 1922 decision by FIA directors to delegate automobile racing organizations to an autonomous committee known as the Commission Sportive International de la FIA (CSI). In 1978, CSI reorganized and became FISA. In 1993, the FIA board of governors restructured the organization and eliminated FISA, returning all racing to direct management from the FIA. Then there was FOCA, the Formula One Constructors Organization. This group battled FISA for supremacy in virtually every decision relating to Formula One (F1) racing from the mid-1970s until 1981, when both sides accepted the terms of the Concorde Agreement, a truce that lasted until 1987. During this time, while Porsche developed the successful TAG engine for McLaren F1 racing, the 911 had nothing to do with Formula One. However, Porsche continued to work within the rules and regulations issued to it and other competitors from the FIA.

While one set of Porsche’s racing mechanics, drivers, and engineers concentrated on campaigning the 917, another group introduced the highly evolved 911 ST model with very thin gauge steel for the rear quarter panels, roof, and rear seat pan. Countless extraneous parts fell away as engineers and mechanics weighed ounces of weight and went so far as to manage the paint mixture, decreasing pigment to save a bit more of the load. Zuffenhausen built the cars for racing or rallies, fitting either 21- or 29-gallon fuel tanks with a large filler cut through the ultra-light front deck lid. Rally customers made good use of the 2,195cc engine, tuned to develop 180 horsepower at 6,500 rpm with reliable performance for days on end. Racers received a slightly bored out (one additional millimeter, from 84 to 85 millimeters) engine that increased displacement to 2,247cc and produced 240 horsepower at 7,900 rpm. This version met FIA homologation regulations for Group 4 Special Grand Touring Cars category. Zuffenhausen mechanics modified 908 brakes for the front wheels of these cars. At Daytona and Sebring, previous-year specification 911T models acquitted themselves well, with two-liter class wins by Ralph Meaney and Gary Wright for the 24-hours, followed by Peter Gregg and Pete Harrison for the 12. Through the 1970 European season, the two-liter S models won their classes at Monza, the Targa, Spa, and Nurburgring. Starting at Le Mans, class regulations changed, opening the category to maximum displacement 2.5-liter engines in GT and privateers Nicolas Koob and Manfred Kremer took the class win, finishing ninth overall behind the company’s first outright win with Hans Hermann and Richard Attwood in the red-and-white Piëch-family Salzburg 917K. From there on, the STs ruled, claiming class wins at Watkins Glen and Austria to seal the Grand Touring Trophy once again.