The racing season once again began with Daytona, where FIA and IMSA shared some rounds on the calendar. Racer/car owner Ted Field had worked his way up from 911s to Carrera RSRs to 934s to a 935K3 over a period of years, establishing a solid reputation. For several years he teamed with former drag racer Danny Ongais, and they ran black-painted well-prepared cars. Everything came together for them at Daytona, where, with past-winner Hurley Haywood, they started eighth and finished first by never putting a footstep or a tire patch wrong. In the 22nd hour, they slacked their pace because they had built up a 50-lap lead over second place. Ironically, ten minutes before the checkered flag, their turbocharger blew up. Ongais limped the car around, trailing smoke, and he coasted over the finish line to victory. Six weeks later at Sebring, Field and Ongais failed to finish and the honors went to Dick Barbour’s 935/77A. The WMC spent the rest of the season commuting between Europe and the States, where either Georg Loos, the Kremer brothers, or the American Whittington Brothers, Don and Bill, claimed the wins. In the IMSA series Peter Gregg and Brumos had their way with the GTX class again, winning eight of fifteen starts and claiming the title again. For the SCCA Trans-Am title, John Paul Sr. took honors, making it a clean sweep for the 935s in all the major series. The SCCA enforced a new set of rules for 1980, initiating an engine displacement-to-weight ratio that steered the competition away from the 935s. IMSA’s 15 rounds started and ended with Daytona again, visited Road Atlanta twice, again, and stopped at some of the same venues from 1979: Sebring; Riverside in southern California; Laguna Seca at Monterey, California; Lime Rock; Brainerd; Golden State (near Sonoma, California); Portland; Mosport outside Toronto, Ontario; and Road America in central Wisconsin. Dick Barbour, running a 935K3, won at Sebring, Riverside, Laguna, Daytona (the Paul Revere 250-miler,) Golden State, and Mosport. John Paul (father and son) won at Lime Rock driving for Preston Henn and then in their own car at Road America. Gianpiero Moretti took the final two victories, at Road Atlanta and the Daytona GT 250 finale. In North America, any hope at winning made a 935 inevitable.

In Europe, Italian carmaker Lancia, which had made tentative steps in 1979, fielded a two-car team for the 1980 full season. Lancia added variety to what racing audiences saw on the circuits. Longtime Porsche loyalist Reinhold Jöst introduced his own 935 variation for 1980 and wasted no time establishing its credentials. With co-driver Rolf Stommelen, Jöst’s new 935J won Daytona with a decisive margin of 33 laps over Al Holbert and John Paul Sr. in Preston Henn’s 935K3. Ted Field and Danny Ongais, in the Interscope K3, came in third. In a quirk of scheduling, the WMC series jetted off to Brands Hatch for a six-hour round after Daytona and before Sebring, where new Lancia Beta Monte Carlos announced to race goers that they had arrived. They finished first, second, and fourth, ahead of the best-placed 935K3 from Charles Ivey. At Sebring the results sheets looked more familiar with Dick Barbour winning over Ted Field, the Whittingtons coming in third, and Preston Henn taking fourth, in 935K3s all. Mugello, not surprisingly, bounced the ball back in Lancia’s court, with their Beta Monte Carlos again claiming first, second, and fourth, although this was a round the K3 racers chose to pass. Monza proved a better mix with Alain de Cadenet taking the six-hour checkered flag in his own Ford-Cosworth-powered Lola-chassis “de Cadenet.” Jürgen Barth and Henri Pescarolo chased him on the same lap to finish second, ahead of third-place Lancia, one lap down. Racing in Europe offered variety, where in North America it remained a K3 show. The WMC title for cars greater than two-liter displacement again went to Porsche while Lancia claimed the distinction in the smaller displacement group. John Paul Sr. took the top driving title.

Through 1980 and 1981, most of Porsche’s racing engineers spent their time and effort designing and testing a new mid-engine water-cooled race car, the Typ 956, meant for FIA Group C and for the GTP or prototype classes. But they still found time to develop improvements and upgrades to the five-year-old 935s. As Janos Wimpffen reported, “The engineers did produce a much more robust engine package. Its principal features were bigger everything.” Larger oil pumps, turbos, and intercoolers, and improvements in aerodynamics, body, chassis, and suspension advanced the benchmark that 935 performance and reliability represented. The Kremers, and Jöst, as well as John Paul Sr., Gianpiero Moretti, and John Fitzpatrick who acquired Dick Barbour’s K3 after Barbour retired, each made significant modifications to their cars to present the GTPs a challenge for 1982. The 935s performed consistently through 1981, winning seven of the fifteen WMC rounds and giving Porsche and Porsche driver Bob Garretson their championship titles. Owners who raced 935s did not park them with the arrival of FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) Group C and IMSA GTP regulations. IMSA found the premise of FIA’s Group C consumption regulations stifling to competition and, except for Daytona and Sebring, they contested no other races in common. What’s more, nearly all entries in both these Florida races came from North American teams. Initially there were few of the prototypes anyway, so the FIA Group 5 entry lists remained robust while IMSA GTX cars became GTPs. So it’s little surprise that both Florida races went to GTP 935s that John Paul Sr. and his son built and raced. In some of the European WEC events, no 935s started, though at Le Mans, John Fitzpatrick in a Jöst 935-78/81 finished fourth overall and first in GTX. Charles Ivey’s 935K3 took Group 5 honors. Out of a field of 55 starters, only six were 935s. By the end of the season, 935 entries could be counted on the fingers of one hand. This suited Weissach well. Peter Schutz’s arrival at Porsche had allowed Helmuth Bott to follow some instincts that he had hidden while Ernst Fuhrmann still ran things. Bott was fascinated by the work Ferdinand Piëch’s engineers at Audi were doing with four-wheel drive, especially for international rallying in FIA Group B. FISA, Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile, the sanctioning organization for rallies, legalized all-wheel drive in 1979, but few manufacturers embraced it, wary of its costs and the weight it added to their race cars. Regulations for Gruppe B, modified sports cars that encompassed the former Group 4 sports cars, took effect in 1982. They encouraged experimental technology, but FISA needed 200 examples to prove it was modified from something already existing. For rallies, Porsche felt it had some advantage with its rear engine/rear drive. But within Weissach, a group of Bott’s engineers advocated a different configuration.

“My racing engineers wanted to do a mid-engine car,” Bott recalled in an interview in 1992 after he retired from Porsche. “They wanted to take a car on the base of the 914 and make a race car, as a Gruppe B car. And I was fighting against them. I said, ‘We do so many mid-engine cars. We cannot learn anything.’ And the second thing that we don’t know is if any other company is making a Gruppe B car. If not, what can we do with our Gruppe B car? We build a very expensive car, we spend a lot of money, and what do we have, nothing. You had to build 200 cars. That’s a lot, much too much for Porsche from the money side.” Bott argued that the requirement for 200 cars could serve as a development run for 1,000 or 5,000 series production models. With Schutz’s commitment to reinvigorate the 911, Bott saw an opportunity to look into its future. “Let’s take all the electronics systems and all the knowledge from today,” he said, “and let’s take a very powerful engine to see the limits of the chassis and the road holding and the fourwheel drive and all these things. So, it was a goal, a task much greater than to build a race car. You see our concept with the 911 has always been that it’s an all-around car. With very few changes, you can drive a rally, and then go to the racetrack at Le Mans, and to win the long distance.” But, starting as late as 1981, he never could get 200 examples funded, let alone built in time to compete. “Well,” he recalled, “there was no other race we could do because the homologation was not done. We had to race that car where prototypes are free to take anything.

“We can convert this car to a rally version. So we did the Paris-Dakar. The idea was not only to show the people that this car would win Paris-Dakar, but that would also show that it’s a good long-distance car. So we built the 961 for Le Mans. And in the first year, we had placed number seven, behind the very most powerful sports cars. The first race went through with no problem. The second, that was a driver’s mistake. We had an engine with nearly 700 horsepower in the 961 race version at Le Mans.” Bott asked Manfred Bantle to develop the all-wheel-drive prototypes and he tagged Roland Kussmaul to create a group of four-wheel-drive 911s, designated Typ 953, for a series “where prototypes were free to take anything.” Jacky Ickx, who won the Paris-Dakar desert raid in 1983 driving a Mercedes-Benz Gelandewagen, knew Porsche reliability. By this time he had won Le Mans six times, four of them driving Porsches along with hundreds of other wins in 935s and RSRs. He approached Bott with the idea of taking a 911 to the desert. “I thought at the time it could be possible to do it with a 911,” Ickx explained in an interview in 2012. “And the reason was, I saw already a 911 from the East African Safari from 1978. Porsche was doing it at the time with Waldegård and maybe a few others. “When I offered to do it, Porsche was preparing their first integral transmission. That was really a matter of timing. Although Porsche really didn’t want to be involved in the Paris-Dakar, officially, it was a car made in Weissach.

“That car and the three years [after] it were designed by Roland Kussmaul. Because the 911 had to be adapted first to the four-wheel-drive transmission. Secondly, to the specificity of the Dakar. Because sometimes we had stages of 800 kilometers. One of the hardest challenges was to put perhaps over 320 liters of fuel with two spare wheels in a 2-2 seater car. The space is very limited. “After that, we had to adapt it to the surface, so we went in September 1983 in Algeria with a truck and a car, just for development. We went from Algiers to Tamanrasset, at the farthest south of Algeria, on tracks I knew from the Dakar. And every evening we were reinforcing or modifying those things that were not working properly or simply broke. So instead of running around on a short racecourse, we put ourselves in a situation that looked like the race. “We had all sorts of comments at the time,” Ickx recalled, “that it’s impossible for the Porsche 911 to go onto the Dakar. It is not strong enough. It doesn’t have the ability. It doesn’t have a reduction gearbox on it. There were many good reasons. But the vehicle didn’t have much power—I think maybe 230 horsepower, good torque, short gearbox. And light. “I don’t know how much the car weighed but . . . compared to a G-wagen, it was light. Really light. And although nobody expected it, we won the Dakar in 1984. It was not official Porsche because it was a ‘Jacky Ickx team for Rothmans.’ But it was an official entry. And then we repeated that three times in a row . . . . The first one was a success, the second one was a total mess. I damaged my front suspension and I retired. Jochen Mass did a mistake somewhere. And René Metge was leading, and he had an oil leak in the engine and he had to retire. But, in all, René Metge won it. René won three times. I chose him because I thought he could be the perfect solution for a team: experience, talent for the desert, more than me at the time, definitely, and he won it. The Dakar is a race made for the amateurs where professionals can find their place.” While Weissach developed and campaigned the 959s for the desert, another small group of cars mainly intended for rallies and racing appeared, a run designated the SC/RS. Jürgen Barth and Roland Kussmaul had competed in the Monte Carlo Rally in 1983 where they finished 11th behind a rash of Group B Lancia Beta 037s. Group B rules allowed that once a model had been homologated manufacturers could update it each year with a series of no more than 20 evolution models, and Barth proposed that Motorsports “evolve” a group of the G-Series coupes for competition. Designated the Typ 954, the car Barth and Kussmaul developed took inspiration from the earlier 911Rs and they started with a turbo body, retaining its brakes and suspension. They beefed up the suspension, added underbody skid plates, replaced steel panels with aluminum where possible, used thinner glass for the windshield and plastic for side and rear windows. Through relentless effort, they ended up with a 1,984-pound body, some 660 pounds lighter than a production Turbo. The three-liter engine, however, remained normally aspirated, and with modifications for reliability and durability, it developed 255 horsepower at 7,000 rpm. Barth and Kussmaul reasoned quicker throttle response and cooler cockpits were worthwhile tradeoffs, and, with no turbo, the car avoided the FIA displacement 1.4 multiplier with its higher weight requirement. David Richards in Silverstone, England, took six of them to prepare a rally team for Rothmans. Richards’ crews dismantled the cars and reassembled them in ways that expedited in-field service and repairs.

ICKX IN THE DESERT Many racing enthusiasts and most journalists put Jacky Ickx on their short list of all-time greatest drivers. He won F1 races for Enzo Ferrari in France in 1968; Austria, Canada, and Mexico in 1970; Holland in 1971; and Germany in 1972. At Le Mans in 1969, while driving a Ford GT40, he beat Hans Herrmann by barely 100 meters after 24 hours in the closest race anyone has witnessed. The lead changed hands two or three times per lap in the last hour. But it is the desert that became the turning point in his life. “Usually less than half of the people who start arrive at the finish. And already arriving, it’s a goal,” Ickx said. “For those who don’t arrive, the real adventure starts. Because if you are in the middle of nowhere, 800 kilometers away from the first city, when you have a problem with your car, to get it back home . . . ” For Ickx, the sport of the Dakar event was important. But it was not supreme. “When you go far away from any kind of cities, and you go back to the desert, first it’s a fantastic opportunity to discover yourself,” he said. “Because there is some location on this planet, like [for] these sailors who go by themselves around the world, that you can’t lie anymore to yourself. “On that aspect, you feel very small. You realize in a way how unimportant you are. Because you can be whatever you are, famous, not famous, [but] out there, you have your feet on the ground and you realize the nature all around you is totally outside. There is nobody. I think it is a superb lesson of humility. And I think a good three-quarters of the people that do the Dakar are deeply touched by that feeling. “If you ask me what is the best part of my life . . . Formula One, Ferrari, it was really nice and very rewarding. The temptation is to say, well, you are one of the best, and then you know, it’s probably a quality too. You have to be selfish. And you can be nice outside of the car, but you still are a shark in the car. It’s really two different personalities. “The most interesting part, the most amazing part of my life, is this third part, when I went into off-road racing, the discovery of Africa, the discovery of other countries, and other people. It’s what I would call a hundred-eightydegree vision. But what I’m leading to now, with the curiosity, through the Dakar . . . it was the Dakar, off-road racing took me to that view. It was not only sport. It became sport and curiosity. And at the end, only curiosity. Another way of people living.”

Group C remained the endurance series throughout Europe and IMSA provided a variation as its counterpart in its GTP category. Beginning with the 1986 season in Europe, FISA initiated several shorter rounds of racing, 250–275-mile events compared with earlier six- or nine-hour endurance trials. They changed the series title as well, renaming the World Endurance Championship as the World Sport-Prototype Championship. Thereafter, 935s and even 911s of any description almost completely disappeared from entry lists through the mid- and late 1980s. Daytona and Sebring remained the exception, where the massive start lists saw a few old warhorse 935s or RSRs. FIA regulations took effect in 1989, accompanying management changes at IMSA, and these phased out turbos because the costs of cars and annual campaigns forced out competitors. As Porsche had done before with its RSR and 935 models, it withdrew from factory participation at the end of 1988, though it continued backdoor support of Reinhold Jöst’s efforts. In late 1988, the ever-creative Jürgen Barth happened on an inventory of spares from the 1984 Typ 953 four-wheel-drive 911. He conceived an ultra-lightweight Carrera 4, and when word leaked out, customers materialized. To assemble these cars, Zuffenhausen shipped car bodies to Weissach, where technicians fitted thin aluminum doors and deck lids from SC/RS parts leftovers, as well as the simplest turbo whale tail rear wing. Because he executed it as a minimalist homologation model, Barth kept everything out of the car. Even with a twin-plug 3.6-liter engine tweaked to develop 265 horsepower at 6,750 rpm, and with five-speed all-wheel-drive hardware, the car weighed 2,425 pounds compared to 3,200 for the road-going C4 coupes. Known as the C4LB or leichtbau for light body (C4LW in English), Customer Motorsports assembled 22 of the cars. Because no road racing organization accepted four-wheel drive in its classes, the cars trickled out of Weissach through 1990 and 1991, destined for garages of savvy collectors who seized another fascinating Porsche invention when they saw it.

During the same time, Porsche converted the existing 944 Turbo Cup series into a 911 Carrera Cup to promote the new 964 models. Unlike Barth’s C4 platform, this set of cars, executed by Roland Kussmaul and Helmut Flegl, used a stripped C2 lightened to 2,470 pounds with chassis, suspension, steering, and wheel and tire modifications, as well as hyper-tuned engines. The company delivered the first 20 in December 1989, and another 30 followed over the next two months. Kussmaul urged Porsche to keep the series exclusive to Germany initially, simply to satisfy customer demand. The engines, match-tuned for output between 268 and 272 horsepower, were sealed, and the series provided entertaining and closely matched races that supported longer endurance contests. Herbert Linge emerged from retirement to manage the 10-race series. Roland Asch, driving for longtime Porsche racer and dealer Paul-Ernst Strähle, won the championship in 1991. Uwe Alzen followed in 1992, with Wolfgang Land taking the title in 1993 and Bernd Maylander winning in 1994. Porsche allied with Pirelli in 1993 to create a Supercup series for 30 cars that accompanied nine Formula One races throughout Europe. Back in 1991, IMSA had launched a similar Supercar Championship that Bridgestone Tire sponsored. This series put race-prepared series production sports cars from a number of manufacturers in a 30-minute televised race as part of the full IMSA weekend. Kussmaul developed a series of turbos for the series. Brumos Porsche in Jacksonville, Florida, got the first, called the Turbo II, and Hurley Haywood (with Hans Stuck filling in when Haywood had other commitments) won four of the seven races in the series inaugural year. This gave Porsche a manufacturer’s title and Haywood won the driving championship. When Brumos’ exclusive first-year deal ended, Kussmaul shipped a group of cars ready for the 1992 season. As production models, these debuted as the 381-horsepower Turbo S at the Geneva auto salon. Supercar homologation required a small production run, and the S was the next generation of homologation special. Listing more items on the delete pages than fitted options, the car weighed 2,822 pounds. Weissach planned to assemble only 50 examples required for homologation, but demand pushed production to 80 cars, including ready-to-race Turbo S2 models. It proved worth Weissach’s efforts once more, when Haywood and Stuck each took two of the eight wins to earn the championship for Porsche. Driving for Brumos in 1993, Stuck won seven of nine starts to claim both driver and manufacturer titles.