The racing 911 has been overshadowed
Efuels car runs more power than the race car
Porsche just revealed a new and highly limited 911. But it has us a bit confused as to the point of it.
It’s called the Porsche 911 GT3 R rennsport (with a lowercase r) and it is based on the GT3 R version of the latest 911. That’s the racing version, meant to compete in GT3-series ruleset events like the 24 Hours of Le Mans and others.
The GT3 R rennsport, though, isn’t eligible for those series. The company’s engineers wanted to know what they could do without worrying about pesky racing rules designed to make a series competitive.
Only the roof and hood are shared with the standard GT3 R. The rest uses its own bodywork designed by a pair from the Style Porsche team. All of the aero bits are different, and it has what we can only call bumpers. Porsche calls them visual accents that are “framed by a side cowl and protected against damage caused by external impact.”
That means it is street-legal, right? Absolutely not. This is a race car through and through. It doesn’t even have exterior mirrors, since Porsche has replaced those with a camera system. It also has a positively massive rear wing that was inspired not by the wind tunnel, but by the Brumos Porsche 935 that won the 1978 24 Hours of Daytona.
The rennsport uses the 911 GT3 R’s 4.2L flat-six. Unlike the 557 hp it makes in that car, the rennsport does 611. It’s also tuned to run on E25 bioethanol and Porsche’s efuel. The naturally aspirated engine can spin to 9,400 rpm and it doesn’t have the restrictor plates that the FIA demands on the race car.
Buyers can get the rennsport fitted with an unsilenced racing exhaust, though there are two versions with mufflers and cats for tracks that require such things. The suspension is a five-way adjustable system from KW, and the car will get an exclusive tire from Michelin. Porsche also cut the AC, which they can’t do on the real race car.
So what’s it for? It can’t be driven on the road and it can’t be driven in competition. Just 77 copies of the 911 GT3 R rennsport will be built, so it’s not a major problem. Plus with a price tag of a little over $1m, any of the car’s buyers can rent all the track time they want. If they don’t already own a circuit to call home.
