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The undisputed King The Porsche 917, conceived in the late 1960s, emerged from Porsche’s strategic intent to conquer the World Sportscar Championship, particularly the 24 Hours of Le Mans. This ambition materialized through exploiting a loophole in the homologation requirements, allowing the creation of a vehicle with unprecedented speed and...
Porsche Penske Motorsport will once again field three Porsche 963 race cars at the Circuit des 24 Heures du Mans in the 2024 season. The organizer, ACO, confirmed that the Porsche works team will campaign a third car at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. French works driver Mathieu Jaminet...
One of the most colorful episodes in the history of Porsche was their 13th Le Mans victory in 1994 with the racing version of a road car derived from a racing car. This hubris served the car company well and less so a participant. This was the car that Porsche...
Invitation to race from Charles Faroux Charles Faroux was a car enthusiast, a racing official, a leading French motor-publication editor at La Vie Automobile and a charmer. Europe’s major automobile manufacturers entrusted their engineering secrets and newest models to him in hopes of a favorable review. Everyone respected his opinions....
The stage was set Having just celebrated its 75th anniversary, Porsche was ready to put another overall win in the books a few days later during the Le Mans 24 Centenary. But for those that follow racing, you know all too well that it’s a cruel sport, and no amount...
The No. 8 Toyota (closest to the camera) leads the Hypercar class across the start line
Race day dawned with a blanket of morning mist covering the area. It was a crisp morning as I departed my accommodation to the east of Le Mans at around 07h15, and making my way towards the circuit, the pockets of mist became more sporadic. Approaching the airfield which lies...
Official group shot of the cars showing the full starting grid at Le Mans 24H
Without doubt, this race is recognised as the most important, the most charged and the one that everyone who is anybody in endurance racing wants to drive in or watch from the stands. In particular, this year, being the 99th year since its inception, there are great expectations and high...
Le Mans 24 Hours, 14-15 June 1969: On the final lap, the No. 64 Porsche 908 LH of Hans Herrmann/Gérard Larrousse swapped places with the No. 6 Ford GT40 of Jacky Ickx/Jackie Oliver as many as five times. The two cars were so evenly matched that what the Ford lacked...
Mr. Le Mans: Tom Kristensen by Tom Kristensen with Dan Philipsen © Glen Smale The interesting thing about racing is that nothing is certain. You can prepare yourself and the car perfectly, but then another car hits you or pulls out in front of you, and there is little if...
Le Mans 24 Hours, 19/20 September 2020: The #57 Team Project 1 Porsche 911 RSR GTE Am driven by Jeroen Bleekemolen, Felipe Fraga and Ben Keating waits on the starting grid ahead of the race The Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO) revealed just yesterday, Tuesday 9 March 2021, the 62-strong entry...
ACO Museum, Le Mans 16 September 2020: As it was the 50th anniversary of Porsche’s first win at Le Mans, a special display was set up featuring several of Porsche’s winning cars In 1971 the first ever Starbucks coffee house was opened in Seattle, Washington. That same year, the fourth...
Porsche 904/8 (chassis #008) photographed in the Porsche Museum, September 2020 F.A. ‘Butzi’ Porsche, the eldest son of Ferry and Dorothea Porsche, joined the family business in 1958 having shown great interest in the field of industrial design. Working under the direction of Erwin Komenda, F.A. Porsche set about learning...
Autosport 1000 km, Silverstone, 14 September 2008: In the fifth and final round of the 2008 Le Mans Series season, the #34 Porsche RS Spyder was driven by Peter Van Merksteijn and Jos Verstappen and finished first in the LMP2 class and fifth overall, ahead of a brace of LMP1...
DBR 9 – The Definitive History by Christoph Mäder and Thomas Gruber © T.A.G. Motor Books GmbH At Porsche Road & Race, we receive many books for review, and these include books on all manner of high performance roadgoing sports cars and motorsport. So, when the Aston Martin book, DBR...
This large poster announced the 50th anniversary of the first victory by the Porsche 917 at the 1970 Le Mans 24 Hour race It all started back in early March of 2020. I had a trip planned to visit the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, to conduct another extensive photo shoot...
Le Mans 24 Hours, 19/20 September 2020: The pre-race grid was a busy place despite the presence of the Covid-19 pandemic – note the empty grandstand The 2020 motor racing season will undoubtedly go down in history as the most unusual and disrupted year on record. Only twice has the...
Kremer Porsche 935 K3/80 (chassis #0013) In the mid-70s, Porsche developed the 935 model, a race car homologated on the 930 road car and aimed at the Group 5 ‘silhouette’ series created by the FIA for the 1976 season. As the records will show, the 935 was a formidable race...
Ferrari 333 SP – A Pictorial History 1993-2003: by Terry O’Neil © Dalton Watson Fine Books I first caught sight of the Ferrari 333 SP at Kyalami in Johannesburg, South Africa, in December 1998. It was hot, as Johannesburg is at that time of the year, but the track action...
Le Mans: The Official History 1970–79 by Quentin Spurring © Virtual Motorpix/Glen Smale This edition of Quentin Spurring’s fabulous series covers the 1970s in his well-known and valuable decade-by-decade history of the Le Mans 24 Hours endurance race. The decade from 1970 to 1979, certainly saw some of the most...
Porsche mourns the death of Hans Mezger – this photo was taken in 2007 It was with great sadness that the motoring and motorsport world learned last week of the passing of Hans Mezger, Porsche engineer extraordinaire. He died at the age of 90 years, having grown up and lived...
1981 Porsche Kremer 935 K4 – chassis #K4-01 In the mid-1970s, Porsche developed the 911 for racing, and in the process, it created the all-conquering 935. In 1978, Norbert Singer was responsible for building the ultimate factory 935, the Moby Dick 935/78, and although this race car had a very...
Gérard Larrousse (2017) Former Porsche works driver, Gérard Larrousse, celebrates his 80th birthday on Saturday 23 May 2020. Gérard Gilles Marie Armand Larrousse was born in 1940 in Lyon, where his father ran a textile factory. “I was fascinated by motorbikes and sports cars from a young age but my...
Le Mans 24 Hour, 17-18 June 2017: Patrick Long being interviewed at Scrutineering on 11 June 2017. He drove the #93 Proton Competition Porsche 911 RSR California may seem like the ideal place on earth to live, with its legendary beaches, surf and laid back lifestyle, but they too are...
Le Mans 24 Hour, 15-16 June 2019: Jörg Bergmeister at scrutineering in the Place de la République, Le Mans city centre, 10 June 2019 PORSCHE ROAD & RACE caught up with the amiable Jörg Bergmeister, to ask him how he has been dealing with the Coronavirus lock-down. With all major...
Ben Baker in a relaxed mood ahead of the WEC Silverstone 6 Hours, 16 August 2018 PORSCHE ROAD & RACE has been out looking for some of the Porsche drivers and finding out what they have been up to during the Coronavirus lock-down that has affected most countries around the...
A busy grid before the start of the Le Mans 24H race on 15 June 2019 – many thousands of fans and hangers-on pack the grid After the music had died down, and the last of the revellers had left the party that had just a few hours earlier welcomed...
Porsche Sport 2019 – © Gruppe C Motorsport Verlag The 27th publishing of this superb edition of Porsche Sport 2019 by Gruppe C Verlag, opens with this paragraph, “The year 2019 marked exactly half a century since a new competition sports car from Porsche was unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show....
Le Mans: The Official History 1960–69 by Quentin Spurring © Virtual Motorpix/Glen Smale This edition of Quentin Spurring’s fabulous series covering the Le Mans 24 Hours decade-by-decade, concerns the 1960s. Many will agree that the decade, 1960 to 1969, saw some of the most innovative race cars, and with relatively...
1961 Porsche 718 W-RS Spyder ‘Grossmutter’ (chassis #047) photographed at the Porsche Museum, May 2019 The word unique is a much-overused word today, as it is applied, it seems, to just about anything that is produced in small numbers, or even just to enhance a claim about something unusual. In...
Kremer Porsche 935 K3 – chassis #930 890 0021 The Porsche 935 was the Stuttgart manufacturer’s answer to the FIA’s Group 5 class regulations, making it eligible for the World Championship of Makes. The first Porsche car in this so-called ‘Silhouette’ series, was introduced for the start of the 1976...
Lined up in the pit lane before the 1994 Le Mans 24-Hours, is from the left: #36 962 Dauer Le Mans GT driven by Mauri Baldi, Yannick Dalmas and Hurley Haywood; centre is the street-legal 962 Dauer with rather appropriate Boeblingen region (Weissach) registration plate ‘P 962’; on the right...
Richard Wiley at Le Mans 24H, 2019 PORSCHE ROAD & RACE is proud to announce that contributor Richard Wiley was recently honoured by the South African Guild of Motoring Journalists. Following his passion for writing on all things motoring and motorsport related over several decades, the honour of Fellow of...
Total 6 Hours of Spa‐Francorchamps, 4 May 2019: The #56 Project 1 Porsche 911 RSR being prepped in the pit garage ahead of practice on 2 May Project 1 burst onto the World Endurance Championship (WEC) scene at the start of the 2018 Super Season. We covered their arrival on...
Pitlane exit Le Mans The more things change, the more they stay the same…someone famous once said. Perhaps the same can be said for the 2019 starting grid for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, which will kick off tomorrow, Saturday 15 June, at 15h00. With the titles decided in...
Le Mans 24 Hour, 13-14 June 2015: Lined up prior to the formation lap are (from L-R) – the #18 Porsche 919 Hybrid driven by Marc Lieb/Romain Dumas/Neel Jani (finished 5th); #17 Porsche 919 Hybrid driven by Timo Bernhard/Brendon Hartley/Mark Webber (finished 2nd); #19 Porsche 919 Hybrid driven by Earl...
Porsche 911 RSR: Porsche GT Team (#91) – Gianmaria Bruni, Richard Lietz and Frédéric Makowiecki; Porsche GT Team (#92) – Michael Christensen, Kévin Estre and Laurens Vanthoor Although the factory squad was crowned the World Manufacturers champions for the first 2018/2019 Super Season, their success in the forthcoming 24-hour race...
The Porsche 917-001 will be shown in the Porsche Museum for the first time in its original condition My 2019 European Expedition had been organised for some months, which was to take in the WEC Spa-Francorchamps 6 Hours (1-4 May) followed by almost a week in Stuttgart (5-10 May). It...
Porsche 911 ST 2.5
Porsche 911 ST 2.5: Thomas Imhof, Jürgen Barth and Michael Keyser © Virtual Motorpix/Glen Smale It landed on my desk one day, unannounced and unexpected. The package was large and covered in stickers and labels, suggesting that there was something important contained within. Indeed, a frantic exercise followed to open...
Le Mans 24 Hours, 31 May-1 June 1986: Start of the race – Porsches dominate the lead group In Part 1, Stories from Le Mans – with a Porsche flavour, our intrepid scribbler who hails from that beautiful part of South Africa, the Western Cape, shares with us some hilarious...
Porsche – The Golden Years: Leonardo Acerbi © Virtual Motorpix/Glen Smale It is always a pleasure when a top-quality book lands on my desk, so when Porsche – The Golden Years arrived at the Porsche Road & Race offices, I was especially pleased. We had the pleasure of reviewing Ferrari...
1969 Porsche 917 LH poses outside the workshops in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen © Porsche Werkfoto The world has become obsessed with anniversaries or facts that you can leverage, in order to bring your message across. And that is also true to some extent about this account of a legendary race car, but...
This angle shows the sweeping lines of the 911 GT1/98 Strassenversion The origins of the 1998 Porsche 911 GT1 Le Mans winner can be traced back to a roadgoing version of the Group C 962 launched five years earlier. In order to homologate the 911 GT1/98, the FIA required a...
Le Mans 24 Hours, 16/17 June 2018: The podium for the GTE Pro class – (centre) 1st #92 Porsche GT Team (Christensen/Estre/Vanthoor); (left) 2nd #91 Porsche GT Team (Lietz/Bruni/Makowiecki); (right) 3rd #68 Ford Chip Ganassi USA (Hand/Bourdais/Mueller) A little more than twenty four hours ago, sixty cars lined up against...
Porsche 935-78 Moby Dick (chassis 935/78.006 ), photographed at the Porsche Warehouse in May 2017 Group 5 rules offered manufacturers a great deal of freedom to modify their cars in the Silhouette class. At Porsche, Norbert Singer pushed the rules to the limit, and gave us the Porsche 935/78 Moby...
Le Mans Test day grid line-up, 2 June 2018 Well it’s official, pigs can fly! The #92 Porsche 911 RSR of Michael Christensen/Kevin Estre/Laurens Vanthoor/Dirk Werner may not have topped the lap charts on Sunday at the Le Mans Test day, but they were just 1.3 seconds off their team...
© Hurley – From The Beginning (cover) There are just a handful of racing drivers that can list the number and quality of achievements that Hurley Haywood can. True, there might be more than a handful in total, but within each discipline of the sport, there are just a few...
PORSCHE WERKS/TEAM: Porsche at the top 24-hour races – Nürburgring/Le Mans/Daytona © Delius Klasing & Co. KG Bielefeld So, what is this book, PORSCHE WERKS/TEAM, all about? Basically, renowned photographer Frank Kayser teamed up with journalist Heike Hientzsch, to capture the pain and the glory experienced by the Porsche crew and team...
Le Mans: The Official History Of The World’s Greatest Motor Race 1980–89 This edition, spanning 1980-1989, covers one of the most exciting post war periods in motorsport. The 1960s and 1970s were of course both decades that were every bit as exciting, but the 1980s perhaps represents the final decade...
#91 and #92 Porsche 911 RSR with drivers and team attend scrutineering for the 24 Hours of Le Mans at the Place de la République on 12 June 2017 Porsche aims to contest the 2018 Le Mans 24 Hour race with four works cars in the GTE Pro class, as...
#5 Porsche 908/3 – Juan Fernandez/Francesco Torredemer/Eugenio Baturone – NRF The 1972 season broke, ushering in with it a new era of racing. The Porsche 917 had reigned supreme for two years, but the race authorities (read FIA) had had their fill of Porsche interpreting the rules their way, and...
Porsche Victory in Le Mans 2017 The latest edition of the Porsche Victory in Le Mans series is out and it is as good, if not better, than any of the other editions that have gone before it. The publishing house, Gruppe C Motorsport Verlag, has a long history in...
Solitude, 15 July1962: Dan Gurney behind the wheel of a Porsche 804 Formula 1 at the Solitude Dan Gurney, the well-known racing driver, passed away on 14 January 2018. Where does one start with a driver like Dan Gurney? He was an inspiration to many, admired by both rivals and...