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Car and Driver
6 days ago
- Automotive
- Car and Driver
Kremer K3 and Other Famous Le Mans-Spec Porsches for the Street
The 963 RSP is just the latest in a long line of Le Mans-spec Porsches taking to the public roads. Whether it's the roar of a flat-12 or the hiss of turbocharged boost, these cars are monstrously powerful. Here are three of the best to escape the bounds of the Circuit de la Sarthe. Part of the great charm of the Circuit de la Sarthe, where the 24 Hours of Le Mans is held each year, is that sections of the course are actually public roads. You see the top-level endurance racing monsters roaring around, the twilight of early dawn just beginning, and you can't help but wonder what it would be like if one of these beasts should escape the circuit and be driven on the road. It's a thrilling thought, and it seems to happen pretty consistently. The latest Le Mans race car for the road is the Porsche 963 RSP built specially as a one-off for Roger Penske. It's a wonderful machine, but it does come with an asterisk, as driving it in France is restricted to a set route. How street-legal it'll be back in the United States is up for some debate, though someone like Roger Penske has pretty effective leverage. Porsche And this isn't the first time a Le Mans-grade Porsche has been released onto the road. In fact, the 963 RSP is part of something of a tradition of racing-spec Stuttgart endurance racers hitting the public tarmac. Here's a look at three times it has happened before. Count Rossi's Porsche 917K In 1974, Count Gregorio Rossi di Montelera arrived at the factory gates of Porsche with an unusual request. One year earlier, Porsche had released the monstrously powerful 917/30 as the final iteration of the 917 available, and the automaker was moving into experimenting with a different chassis for racing. Might one of those old racing 917s be available for conversion to street specifications? Porsche Yes, one was: specifically, test chassis 030, as used for shaking down the then-new anti-lock braking systems. It had qualified in an Austrian endurance race but had been sitting around in storage since then. Porsche removed the fins and fitted a huge muffler to try to keep the 5.0-liter flat-12 to a bearable roar, the interior was covered in tan leather, and side mirrors were added. Porsche Were the European authorities ready to accept this barely modified racing machine as street-legal fare? They were not. Instead, Count Rossi somehow managed to talk officials in Alabama into sending him a registration as an antique vehicle. So-equipped, he hopped in the car and drove a 620-hp, sub-2000-pound race car from Stuttgart to Paris. What a hero. Walter Wolf's Kremer K3 Le Mans Speaking of heroes, the 1979 running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans was abuzz with the presence of actor and racer Paul Newman in the pits. Part of the Dick Barbour racing team campaigning a turbocharged 935, Newman very nearly won the race, but a stuck wheel nut meant a second-place finish. The winning car was a Porsche 935 prepared by the Kremer brothers of Cologne, Germany. Kremer Racing That same year saw Walter Wolf winding down his F1 racing efforts and looking for new adventures. If you've not come across Wolf before, he's basically the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World, but for real. He came up from post-war poverty to multimillionaire status, starting as a diver on deep-sea oil rigs. He once won a Ferrari on a handshake bet with Enzo on the outcome of the 1977 Monaco Grand Prix. He's the reason the Lamborghini Countach got its wing and huge rear tires. He even had his own cologne. After owning a series of prototype Countach models, Wolf saw the results of the '79 Le Mans and thought one of those 935 K3s sounded like a pretty good commuter. So he commissioned one, complete with a full leather interior and air conditioning. It rode higher than the factory racers and ran on shaved wet-weather tires rather than full slicks. It ran a turbocharged flat-six that made 740 horsepower at 8000 rpm. Kremer Racing Eight years before the Ferrari F40 debuted, the Kremer K3 went 210 mph on the unrestricted autobahn. Wolf said that he used to have a small aircraft fly ahead with spares when he drove between Cologne and his home in the south of France, as it would burn through a set of rear tires on the trip. Schuppan Porsche 962LM In 1984, Australian/British racing driver Vern Schuppan won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Porsche 956. At the same time, he won the All Japan Endurance Championship in, you guessed it, Japan. Soon enough, he had set up his own racing team and was building a carbon-fiber variant of the 962, the 956's successor. One day, a Japanese racing enthusiast inquired if a road-legal version might be possible. It was, and here it is. Boutsen Classic Cars Built in 1991, the 962LM received a carbon-fiber chassis and used a turbocharged flat-six with quad cams and four valves per cylinder. It made around 600 horsepower, slightly detuned from the racing variant but plenty for punting its approximately 2000-pound curb weight down a billiard-table-smooth Japanese freeway. Boutsen Classic Cars Schuppan planned to sell multiples of the 962LM and the more GT-styled 962CR that followed, but the financial state of things in the early 1990s was more than a little wobbly. A handful were built, and this 1991 example was quite famously pictured parked up on street plates in front of one of Japan's ubiquitous Family Mart convenience stores. Pure Le Mans, totally street legal. Brendan McAleer Contributing Editor Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He grew up splitting his knuckles on British automobiles, came of age in the golden era of Japanese sport-compact performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between humanity and machinery, whether it is the racing career of Walter Cronkite or Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki's half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his young daughters how to shift a manual transmission and is grateful for the excuse they provide to be perpetually buying Hot Wheels. Read full bio
Top Gear
11-06-2025
- Automotive
- Top Gear
Porsche 963 RSP review: road legal Le Mans prototype driven! Reviews 2025
Well it's all a bit murky, but Porsche is clearly having fun here, so let's play along. What we have here is a genuine one-off Porsche 963 sports prototype hypercar that's fitted with legitimate numberplates and can drive on a public road. However, to do so you will need just two small, trifling things: a full house race team and a very understanding local authority. Porsche drove this 963 around the town of Le Mans. I suspect local authorities that don't happen to have a legendary 24 hour race in their town will be less understanding. Advertisement - Page continues below Because history. There's another car in some of these pictures (keep scrolling), the infamous Count Rossi Porsche 917. The story goes that the heir to the Martini drinks fortune (and the man responsible for arguably the coolest motorsport livery of all time) decided it would be fun to have a road-going 917. The world needs more people like this. Porsche, somewhat unbelievably, got on board with this plan, took 917 chassis 30, which had barely raced and then been used as an ABS test mule, fitted it with mirrors, indicators, exhaust mufflers and a horn, painted it silver and shipped it out the door. On 28 April 1975, Count Rossi picked it up from Weissach and drove it the 600km (373 miles) to Paris. It's still owned by his family, has never been fully restored, and is apparently still driven from time to time. Does the 963 have such a cool backstory? Of course not. That was creating history, this is just trading on it. Do the maths and you quickly work out that it's 50 years since Rossi's 917 first turned a wheel on the road, so Porsche is just connecting the dots and reminding everyone of its long endurance racing legacy. The idea this time round came from Porsche themselves, rather than a client. So Porsche itself owns the car? No, in another bit of neat collaboration, the RSP name is taken from the initials of its new owner, Roger Searle Penske. Yes, that Roger Penske, legendary team owner with a Porsche motorsport history dating back to 1972 that included running Mark Donohue in a 917/10 in the Can-Am championship. Advertisement - Page continues below Whether he has been gifted this 963, or has had to pay for it, Porsche isn't saying. But if you wanted to buy a 963 customer race car it would cost you around £2.5 million. And let's just guess the conversion work has cost at least half a million on top of that. It's been painted. This is more remarkable than you might think, since it's the first 963 ever to have been painted. All others just wear decals and livery on top of the naked composite bodywork, while this has been painted in the exact same shade of Martini Silver as the Rossi 917 – a paint to sample match was made. It looks utterly alien without logos interrupting the lines. The shape is insectoid, no concession to beauty has been made. A few of the riskier aero flicks have been removed to lessen slicing injuries to pedestrians and the open tops of the wheelarches have been covered with vents, but that's about it. Inside, some luxury has been added. Tan leather, for one: On the 917 this was added later, sourced by Count Rossi from Hermes, while for the 963 the seat has not only been reclad, but also gained a load more padding. Would have been great to see an extra seat a la 917 as well, though. Yes, it's very clever that you've 3D printed a cupholder Porsche, but being able to take someone else along for the ride is the step onwards we were looking for. Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Look out for your regular round-up of news, reviews and offers in your inbox. Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox. Skip 7 photos in the image carousel and continue reading After that, it's the little things that help road legality: it already had indicators, so a horn was added. Like people won't have heard you coming. That raucous is it? Oh yeah. There's a level of intensity to the car, and a level of concentration from the driver that puts this in a realm far beyond the most extreme road-going hypercars. It doesn't, you'll be amazed to learn, start on a key. Instead it requires a team of people, several laptops and a lengthy sequence before the engine fires. After it thrashes rowdily into life it needs to warm through for a while. And then you've got to get going. Using hand clutches. This isn't actually too tricky once you get the hand-eye right as the electric is always there and the clutch just connects the idling twin turbo V8 when you want the fun to begin. Tell me more about that twin turbo V8. Has Porsche used it elsewhere? The V8 started life as a 3.4-litre in the super successful RS Spyder LMP car, and after a bit of work – including being enlarged to 4.6-litres – found its way into another hybrid, the 918 Spyder. Around 80 per cent of the components from the road car incarnation are carried directly over for the 963, although it's no longer naturally aspirated, having gained a pair of Van der Lee turbos. Combined power is capped at 680bhp, obviously restricted by regulations, and the 963 can balance that between petrol and electric sources. The hybrid is actually one of the few mechanical changes that have been made: the race car's more aggressive, potent e-celeration has been toned down for the road, delivering no more than about 70bhp. Doesn't sound like the 963 RSP is going to be that fast. Assuming weight hasn't ballooned too far from the 1,030kg race version, we're looking at about 650bhp/tonne. Which is a better power to weight ratio than a Ferrari SF90, level pegging around the Pagani Utopia and GMA T.50 mark. Plenty, in other words. You get it rolling on the electric, drop the clutch at about 30mph, the engine clatters and rattles into life, but the moment you bury the throttle the sound hardens and focuses in and the 963 explodes forward. Lights flicker on the race wheel, you pull paddles, vibrations buzz through the chassis, the steering twitches and caught in the midst of all this, your adrenaline spikes as you realise the attention the 963 requires. Simply managing it on a public road would be full on. I guess you didn't drive it on roads? Ex-Porsche racer and brand ambassador Timo Bernhard had that singular pressure. Sorry, pleasure. Given he's the chap who piloted the 919 Hybrid Evo to the fastest ever Nurburgring lap time, this excursion was presumably child's play. My experience of it was up and down a runway at Le Mans airport. A bit of slalom along the lines and a full lock hairpin at either end. The steering is super direct and responsive, digging eagerly into direction changes way faster than any road car I've driven. And this with the ride height as high as it will go and the DSSV spool dampers softened off completely. Initially the brakes were so unresponsive I thought there must be another clutch pedal in the footwell, but once they had heat in them the stopping power was so immense that I was glad to be held in by a harness rather than a three-point seatbelt. Is there any point to this 963 RSP project? Besides reminding people of a very cool chapter in Porsche's history? Not really. This isn't an homologation special like the GT1 Strassenversion, it's a gimmick, a bit of fun. There was no need for it to exist. But fair play to Porsche for investing in it and seeing it through – it could just have been a colour and trim job and remained a conceptual show pony. It's more than that, and if Penske has the guts to get authorities on board and take a race team around with him, he could do some great stuff with this car. More likely it will do fewer road miles over the course of its life than Count Rossi did in one journey.
The Irish Sun
08-06-2025
- Automotive
- The Irish Sun
Porsche unveils road-legal hypercar 50 years after original won world titles – but there's a catch
PORSCHE has shocked the motoring world by unveiling a new road legal hypercar. What's more is that it's spun off the a motor that's won multiple endurance Advertisement 2 Porsche has revealed a new road legal hypercar Credit: PA 2 It's based on a trailblazing motor that won multiple endurance racing titles Credit: PA The Porsche 963 RSP is unlike anything you can currently purchase - because only one has been made. It's a version of the manufacturers WEC and ISMA championship winning machine. And it's been built to mark 50 years since Count Rossi drove the trailblazing Porsche 917 from Zuffenhausen to Paris. Like that all-conquering motor, this one's been made road legal. Advertisement Read more Motors news Porsche's North American boss Timo Resch said: "How could we reimagine the 917's story in today's time? "The 917 from the story was every inch a race car – albeit one driven on the road – and we took the same approach with the 963 RSP. "It uses beautiful materials of the best quality available, but is still every bit a race car underneath." The 963 features significant changes over the car on which its based. Advertisement Most read in Motors In terms of the engine, the carmaker had to allow the 4.5-litre, twin-turbo V8 hybrid to run on regular unleaded rather than race fuel. While not an easy undertaking, the 918 Spyder-derived V8, e-motor and battery combo delivers a whopping 671bhp. Inside Taycan Turbo GT Porsche that can hit 200mph as SunSport's Isabelle Barker is taken for a spin by Formula E safety car driver The road height was also adjusted to make it suitable for general roads and the dampers softened. The control unit was reprogrammed too to allow for the headlights and taillights to operate closer to those of a motor on the road. Advertisement But its the interior that departs most from the original race car. In the entirely bespoke cabin, you'll find soft tan leather with a single piece driver's seat clad with additional cushioning and a fixed headrest. You'll find a special panel next to the driver that stores the steering wheel as well as a helmet and car aficionados will spot the nods to the 917. The biggest tribute comes in the form of the exterior colour that's the same 'Martini Silver' as Count Rossi's 917. Advertisement This one's been painted too, a unique challenge because of the carbon fibre and Kevlar bodywork. The bodywork also had to be modified to cover the wheel arches, headlights and tail lights added as well as closed-off banking plates on the rear wing and mounting points for the license plates. An enamel Porsche badge can be found on the nose and proper wet road tyres wrapped around 18 inch racing wheels. ONE-OF-A-KIND 'SPECIAL' MOTOR The 963 RSP gets its name from the involvement of American auto racing team owner Roger Searle Penske on the project. Advertisement Resch explained he called on Penske for "support" in the car's construction, with the racing expert ensuring the classic race car's character was not changed for the new model. The Porsche boss said that as Penske's involvement increased, the company realised he would be the perfect, and only, customer for the car. So while it was never intended to be a fully road-legal 963, Porsche received an exemption from the EPA in the US as it understood "how special" the car is. Despite this, it is not a fully road-registered car - and it needed special dispensation to run in France at the Advertisement For now, the car is expected to remain one-of-a-kind, with a Porsche spokesperson telling
Top Gear
06-06-2025
- Automotive
- Top Gear
Oh yes, Porsche has built a one-off, 671bhp road-legal* V8 963 hypercar
*sorta. In honour of Count Rossi's glorious silver 917 comes this glorious silver 963 Porsche has shocked the motoring world by unveiling a brand-new road-going performance car. While it shares many things with road-going performance cars – headlights, turn indicators, a horn – it is unlike almost anything you can currently purchase. Because this one's spun directly off a car that's won multiple endurance racing world titles. Welcome, one and all, to the mad, bad, and entirely brilliant Porsche 963 RSP. It's a version of Porsche's WEC and IMSA competitor built to mark 50 years since a certain Count Rossi drove the all-conquering Porsche 917 from Zuffenhausen to Paris. Like that car, this one's been tweaked so it's street legal. Sorta. 'How could we reimagine [the 917's] story in today's time?' asked Porsche's North American boss Timo Resch. The answer, as you can see, is quite clear. 'The 917 from the story was every inch a race car – albeit one driven on the road – and we took the same approach with the 963 RSP,' added Resch. 'It uses beautiful materials of the best quality available, but is still every bit a race car underneath.' A fine place to start. For this very special project, the small team in charge of the RSP - including Porsche's Sonderwunsch department - decided early on that they'd need a brand-new 963 chassis, not an existing one. To which a number of very subtle, very important and likely mind-blowingly complicated changes were made. The 963's ride height was raised from a hair's width to something more suitable for general roads, while the adjustable Multimatic DSSV dampers – designed for sports prototypes, don't forget – were gaffer taped into their softest setting. Then came one of the hardest bits: allowing the 4.6-litre, twin-turbo V8 hybrid powerplant to run on regular unleaded. Not race fuel, but the stuff you can get out of a forecourt pump. 'Not a small undertaking,' explained Porsche Penske Motorsport MD Jonathan Diuguid. Amazingly, it's in race trim, which means the 918 Spyder-derived V8, e-motor and battery combo punches out an incredible 671bhp, only here it's been treated to an ECU remap to smooth out the power delivery. Top Gear has not long forgotten what the nat-asp 918 Spyder's V8 sounds like, nor the 963's race-bred unit. This Will Be Loud. Not when running on e-power alone, which the 963 RSP is capable of for short stretches. Though Porsche has ensured its lucky new owner will want to do rather longer stretches because the interior is, of course, the biggest departure from the race car.
Motor 1
06-06-2025
- Automotive
- Motor 1
963 RSP Revealed: Meet Porsche's Street-Legal Le Mans Hypercar
For years, the difference between road car and race car was a bit more nebulous than it is now. Especially at places like Le Mans, it wasn't until the 1960s that the paths for road cars and top-flight prototypes started to diverge. Now, the stuff you see at the pointy end of the grid at La Sarthe has more in common with a Formula 1 car than, say, a 911. Which is precisely why the Porsche 963 RSP is so remarkable. This is a real-deal 963 LMDh car , tamed just enough for road use, wearing a set of French license plates. We spoke with those who turned a crazy idea into reality. Photo by: Porsche At last year's IMSA-season-ending Petit Le Mans, a group of Porsche folks got together to talk about how they could commemorate the 50th anniversary of the company's creation of a roadgoing 917. Porsche made the car for Count Rossi, heir to the Martini & Rossi liquor fortune. Despite a fully-trimmed interior, Rossi's was a full-on Le Mans-winning race car for the road. The Italian managed to get a license plate from the state of Alabama, of all places, and actually enjoyed the car on the street. 'October 12th was the very specific day where a couple of people sat together and we were brainstorming. 'How could we reimagine such a story as of today?'' recalls Timo Resch, CEO of Porsche Cars North America, in a virtual media roundtable. 'And we started on that day project where only very few people were involved.' They created what in Germany is referred to as a submarine project—one involving as few people as possible, existing beneath the visible surface, only emerging when absolutely necessary. The team quickly deemed creating a fully road-homologated version of the 963 impossible. A car like this is just too far divorced from the requirements of street cars, so Porsche would have to alter it to an unrecognizable state to get it homologated. Instead, Porsche would create a one-off that hewed as closely to the race car as possible, and a car that could get special dispensation for very limited road use. Photo by: Porsche Obviously, Porsche would have to work with Porsche Penske Motorsport to make the car a reality, and the team decided that Roger would be the car's ideal owner. The name RSP are the captain's initials, Roger Searle Penske. Porsche Motorsport in Germany prepared a new chassis for the 963 RSP—this is not a reused tub from a race car. Under designer Grant Larson, Porsche Exclusiv Manufaktur did the design work, but the car was actually put together at Porsche Cars North America's headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. There, it was worked on behind temporary walls, so the other technicians wouldn't know what was going on. 'A lot of changes have been made to suspension and systems to make it more tame and more like a road car, but still keep the pedigree of the 963 race car,' says Jonathan Diuguid, managing director of Porsche Penske Motorsport. 'On top of this, what the restoration group in Atlanta has been able to bring forward is a level of quality that is not aligned with the race car at all, whatsoever.' This isn't to say the race cars aren't Penske Perfect. But the finish on their carbon-fiber body panels is rough, and wrapped simply with vinyl. Here, PCNA craftspeople sanded down the carbon fiber bodywork and painted it in the same Martini Silver as the Count Rossi 917. They also trimmed the interior in Alcantara matching the tan of the 917 as well, and there are other nods to road usability. There's leather on the steering-wheel grips and even a 3D-printed removable cup holder. Photo by: Porsche There are some bodywork changes, too. Racing rulebooks require huge vents over the wheel wells to prevent the car getting blown over in the case of a spin. For the RSP, Porsche created pieces that close in gaps, while still allowing for some ventilation. Also, the team had to make accommodations for front and rear license plates. Despite such niceties, this is very much just a 963. You get a 4.6-liter V-8 twin-turbo V-8 paired with a spec hybrid system consisting of an electric motor and power electronics from Bosch, and an XTrac seven-speed sequential transmission. The battery is a small, 800-volt lithium ion unit from Fortescue Zero that bolts into the carbon-fiber tub from below. The engine is derived from the naturally aspirated V-8 in the Porsche 918 Spyder hypercar, which itself was a development of the RS Spyder LMP2 car of the 2000s. It shares about 80 percent of its components with the 918 Spyder's engine, so adapting it for road use wasn't as difficult as it could have been with a bespoke racing engine. Still, adapting the V-8 to run on pump gas was a significant calibration challenge. Porsche Penske Motorsport also tweaked the deployment of the hybrid system to be smoother, better suited for low-speed driving on the street. Porsche doesn't quote a power figure for the 963 RSP, but the race car is capable of around 700 horsepower, split between the hybrid system and the V-8 depending on balance-of-performance. Porsche 963 RSP 20 Source: Porsche The 963 RSP sits on the same Michelin treaded rain tires the race cars use in inclement conditions, and they're wrapped around 18-inch OZ wheels. Porsche set the ride height as high as it could, and put the dampers in their softest settings to make the car drivable on the street, though one imagines the ride quality will be a bit firm still. And yes, the 963 RSP has turn signals and a horn. Famously, the 917 starts on a key drilled out to save weight. Starting the 963 is a bit more complicated—it requires a laptop, and the assistance of a race team that knows how the car works. So, Penske will need to do a bit of planning ahead if he wants to exercise the car, though as Porsche points out, he owns a race track and a race team, so using the 963 RSP won't be too difficult. Porsche got special permission from French authorities to drive the car on the roads around Le Mans, and the license plates it wears are for automakers testing prototypes. Longtime Porsche works driver and current brand ambassador Timo Bernhard drove the car on the roads near the circuit alongside the Rossi 917 earlier today. 'That was an experience that will stay with me for a lifetime,' he said in a statement. 'Driving down a public road with a 917 beside me—it felt unreal. The car behaved perfectly—it felt a little friendlier and more forgiving than the normal 963—and felt super special and a lot more comfortable, especially as I was not needing all my safety gear.' Penske will have to wait a bit before he can take the car home. It will be on display at Le Mans, and then at the Porsche Museum. Next month, Porsche plans to take it to the Goodwood Festival of Speed to run it up the hillclimb. Then, the car will head to California for Monterey Car Week in August for more road drives, and the final handover to the Captain. For now, at least, Porsche doesn't have any specific further plans for another roadgoing 963, but that doesn't mean it might not make one. 'Of course we will not build exactly the same car again because of the nature of the project… but as I said before, never say never,' says Urs Kuratle, head of the Porsche LMDh project. 'As Porsche, we like to sell cars first of all, and if there is an opportunity or possibility to do it again at a later stage, why not? But at the moment, there's nothing planned.' So if you want one and you've got oodles of cash to spend, get in touch. More on Porsche Is the 911 Hybrid Still a True Porsche? Video Review Porsche Shifts Course, Leans Into Hybrids Instead of EVs Get the best news, reviews, columns, and more delivered straight to your inbox, daily. back Sign up For more information, read our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use . Share this Story Facebook X LinkedIn Flipboard Reddit WhatsApp E-Mail Got a tip for us? Email: tips@ Join the conversation ( )
