Porsche has unveiled a triptych of new special-edition 911s celebrating three British racing drivers who have taken Porsche to the top step of the podium at the Le Mans 24 Hours. The British Legends series honours Richard Attwood, Nick Tandy and Derek Bell.
British Legends: Richard Attwood
Richard Attwood helped claim Porsche’s first Le Mans victory in 1970. Driving a theoretically outdated 4.5-litre 917 in the Porsche family colours of Salzburg Racing, Attwood and partner, Hans Herrmann, outlasted many other competitors including the newer 4.9-litre 917s to reach the finish first. Just sixteen of the original fifty-one starters took the chequered flag.
Herrmann – a Porsche factory driver from the early 1950s – had promised his wife that a Le Mans win would be his last ever race. After the race, he kept his word and retired, much to the surprise of his Salzburg team bosses. Attwood raced another 917 at Le Mans in 1971, finished second and retired at the end of the season. Attwood currently features in a Porsche 928 racing video.
British Legends: Nick Tandy
After a blistering early career in Ministox and single seaters (Formula Ford and F3), Bedford-born rockstar and Porsche tart extraordinaire, Nick Tandy, first blipped on Weissach’s radar with an exceptional Carrera Cup debut at Dijon for Konrad Motorsport in 2009. Despite no testing beforehand, Tandy finished second in this round of the highly competitive Carrera Cup Germany, so Konrad invited him back for the Abu Dhabi race, where he impressed them again and earned himself a full season Carrera Cup drive for 2010.
Tandy went from strength to strength in 2010, narrowly missing the title to Rene Rast, who was insanely quick: the pair were the class of the field. The championship was Tandy’s in 2011, at which stage he shifted to the world stage, ending up in Porsche’s LMP programme and taking his first Le Mans win for Weissach in 2015 alongside Earl Bamber and Nico Hülkenberg. He continues to be a key part of the Porsche works driver squad.
British Legends: Derek Bell
Born in leafy Pinner in 1941, Derek Reginald Bell went on to claim five wins at Le Mans – four of them with Porsche – and remains Britain’s winningest Le Mans racer.
Bell’s first Le Mans 24 was in 1970: the same race won by Richard Attwood in a Porsche 917. Driving alongside Ronnie Peterson in a works Ferrari 512S, the duo was forced to retire from the race, but Bell stayed on afterwards to help his friend Steve McQueen film the classic: “Le Mans”. The 512 used in the film caught fire with Bell in it, and he narrowly escaped with minor burns.
DB’s most memorable successes at La Sarthe came when teamed with Jacky Ickx. The pair claimed victory for Mirage in 1975 and then for Porsche in 1981 and 1982. Bell’s other Porsche Le Mans wins came in 1986 and 1987, alongside Hans Stuck and Al Holbert.
Carrera GTS ‘British Legends’
The ‘British Legends’ 991s are based on 991 Carrera 4 GTS models and come with options including LED headlights, Sport Design body styling and satin-finish mirrors, lots of carbon and a Union Jack badge on each car with the driver’s signature alongside. Porsche says:
“Using the design of the winning race cars as the starting point of each car, joint workshops between Porsche Cars GB and the drivers ensured their passion was built-in to each 911. The ideas were then taken forward by the design team at Style Porsche in Weissach and the craftsmen at Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur in Stuttgart.
“Each British Legends Edition is finished intricately by hand in the new Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur workshop. Special features such as the Satin finish black door mirrors, carbon floor mats with Alcantara edging and a steering column casing in Alcantara make their first appearance on this 911.”
The 911 Carrera 4 GTS British Legends Edition is on sale from 9 October, priced at £122,376 inc VAT for Attwood Red – add an extra £900 for Tandy White or Bell Blue paint. A bargain! Whatever about the cars, there is no doubt that all three drivers are proper Porsche legends so it’s great to see them get the hat tip of a special edition. Watch the video below – it has some nice archive stuff in it:
Leaked pics of the new Porsche 991 GT2 RS are currently doing the rounds online ahead of the car’s official release, which apparently is happening this weekend. Presumably that will be at Goodwood.
Some people get very excited about new top-end Porsches. While the car looks great, I see what happens with these cars after they are delivered and a life of rarified storage is nothing to freak out about. For a few months after launch, journos rave about them, snappers glorify them, magazine readers drool over them but what does it all add up to? Ultimately this is just another quick Porsche in a world of quick Porsches and most will never go far.
I know a couple of people who buy these things and drive the crap out of them (fair play, and I look forward to the passenger rides), but it’s also the case that lots of the people who manage to acquire one of these upper-atmosphere supercars tell me they are ultimately bored by them. Once they’ve had it delivered and done a few miles, they are just new cars with too much driver-isolating technology to be consistently interesting at regular speeds. Hence all the low mileage examples sitting around in showrooms five years down the line.
Much of the time, the thrill was in the chase: getting one’s name in the order book. The car eventually arrives, sits around going up in value and comes back to the market at double the price, then another manufacturer releases their latest and greatest new model, prices for the older toys start to go soft and the whole game starts again.
Some people eventually get fed up with it and want to get off the dealership treadmill. It’s a bit like the iPhone upgrade cycle. Eventually the gains are so marginal and the upshot in ownership experience so minimal that you just stay where you are, or maybe even go backwards. Dump the new tech for old tech: Apple Watch goes for a Rolex, GT2 RS gets sacked for an early 911 instead.
I get regular emails asking about the ideal spec for a light, fast, no-frills early 911 and am currently involved with a 911 hot rod build for a chap who has owned just about every hypercar you can imagine. He has all the money a person could want – certainly much more than I would ever want – but finds nothing in new cars to hold his attention. Now he just wants something with character and an old Porsche is the ideal first step. After that it might be a trick little Alfa, old BMW or maybe an E-Type with muscle car running gear.
The true thrill of driving does not need a new GT2 RS. A person can find it in plenty of other places without needing to do the order book rain dance. But as there is no doubt that it is a badass automobile, here are some pics!
Porsche has been showing its 991 GT2 RS to a select group of journalists in Germany. Auto Motor & Sport put out a video showing the launch control in action, but it seems that no one actually got to drive it; everyone rode in the passenger seat. Gone are the days when Porsche gave Kacher the keys to a prototype for the weekend.
The fastest production 911 ever has not yet been fully homologated, so the numbers are vague. For the sake of discussion:
0-60: under 3 seconds
0-124: under 9 seconds
Power: more than 650bhp
Weight: under 1500kg
Weight savings include using smartphone Gorilla Glass
Lightweight Weissach pack lifts 30 kilos and will cost a small fortune
GT2 RS will cost more than the house I am writing this in
Looking at 911R/GT3 RS trends and allowing a bit for the GT2’s rarity, we can roughly predict what will happen with prices.
Say the GT2 RS sells at £250k including Weissach pack, it will top £450k within 6 months of release, probably over twice list price for a while. There is no doubt of this. City traders are earning well over a million quid a year now in the City of London and a GT2 RS will be the big thing. The hunger for GT2 will be strong, so £500k is totally happening.
Once they’ve gone through a 12-to-18-month honeymoon, prices will settle somewhere around £100k or so over list, as the next big thing will be out. If you don’t buy one of these cars brand new, you will probably never be able to buy it for list price. So why should you care about this particular example?
Well, look at the photos. This is a mule: a GT3 RS finished in Lava Orange with a tweaked engine from a 991 Turbo S installed. Engineers hacked the tail about a bit, vinyl wrapped the whole thing in black then screwed some bits to the sides to cover the turbos, drilled a load of heat holes in the rear bumper, made a swanky exhaust and the boss ragged it back and forth from home to work for a few months. It is sweaty, scratched and slathered in duck tape: everything a production GT2 RS will never be.
The new GT2 RS in a showroom will just be another unobtanium Porsche that gets professionally detailed twice a year to take the dust off and occasionally turns up at cars and coffee meets to entertain those who don’t get proper old cars. But the GT2 RS development mule – that is a hot rod from Stuttgart and these are the sex kings.
The Gen 2 991 GT3 PDK has just had its first public hot laps around the Nürburgring and set a time 12 seconds quicker than the outgoing model. 7 mins 12.7 seconds is between 2 and 3 percent quicker than the old car, so will such a modest increase hurt sales of Gen 2s?
Autocar magazine released its first drive of the Gen 2 991 GT3 Manual earlier this week and Greg Kable was quick to point out that the Gen 2 PDK is substantially quicker on track. “But as spectacularly good as the manual version of the new Porsche 911 GT3 is – and it really is stunningly effective – I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who intends to do an intensive amount of track day running…In ultimate performance terms, the PDK model is king.” This being the case, how much slower than a Gen 1 GT3 PDK would one be around the Nürburgring in a Gen 2 Manual? And would a slower Gen 2 Manual matter?
Manual transmission matters for the emotional response to total control, or so the experts say. But how many cars would one sell with the headline: “the Gen 2 GT3 Manual is ten seconds slower than the old car around the Nürburgring, but you told us you wanted three pedals for those 1500 miles a year, so here you go”?
Manufacturers need to upgrade, renew and keep pace with the competition and find the USPs that set their latest creations apart from the old ones but, at some stage, the actual users of a thing (rather than speculators/investors/collectors or whatever the latest word is) run out of real reasons to ‘upgrade’. A two year-old iPhone 6S Plus does basically the same job as the latest one, a four year-old Macbook Pro does pretty much the same job as a new one and a 17 year-old Volkswagen Polo ticks the same ‘get from A-B’ box as a new one, so why bother with new things at all?
Of course, stuff wears out when it gets used a lot and replacements are then a necessity, but few people are wearing out Gen 1 GT3s. If the upgrade path is all about egos aching for shiny, then Porsche is mining a rich psychological seam. Stuttgart delivered just shy of 60,000 cars in Q1 2017 (another record, one imagines). To make and deliver all of these cars, the company now employs 28,249 people. Profit margins have also risen and are now running at 17.6 percent on a total revenue of €5.5 billion.
No prizes for guessing that 911 GT3s are not top of the sales charts, but they must be pretty close to the top in the league table of press coverage year-on-year. The column inches guarantee all Gen 2 GT3s will be sold, so maybe it makes little difference how quick the car is. Then again, it has to be quicker or the press won’t play ball.
If I didn’t already have a Gen 1 991 GT3 and someone offered me a Gen II build slot, I would buy the manual regardless of whether it was ten or even twenty seconds slower. But, if I already owned a Gen 1 GT3 and had to find a chunk of change to get in a manual that was slower on track? That is a different scenario.
The new Porsche 991 GT3 was launched today at Geneva in a supersized Internet love-in. If you like massive sportscars weighing 1500 kilos then you are probably all over it: I hope you will pardon the rest of us for a certain lack of euphoria. It is nothing personal.
The new GT3 looks almost exactly the same as the old one, with the one big change of manual transmission. It is a small but very satisfying detail. When the 991 GT3 was first launched with PDK only, there was uproar online, but it didn’t hurt the showroom one bit. Despite the early cars catching fire when con rod bolts snapped, causing boiling oil to pour onto hot exhausts and send the cars up in smoke, Porsche sold every single 991 GT3 it could build.
And Stuttgart built lots of them: estimates suggest more than 6k cars, which is far more than any previous 911 GT3. Magazines were rinsed and repeated in PR about how PDK was the gold standard in race cars and how it was faster around the blah blah blah etc, and they all lapped it up. Driving a Gen I Porsche 911 GT3 around a car park was enough to put me off and visiting a PDK repair shop just confirmed the position. Anyone with an ounce of 911 soul might have seen the writing on the wall for the PDK-only plan, as the cars were not that nice to drive ‘normally’.
Despite the PDK-only thing and a non-stop production line, used GT3s soon hit 50% over list. Many 991 GT3ers cashed out, switching back to the Gen II 997 GT3 and RS with manual transmission and sending prices for those cars through the roof. The switch did not escape Stuttgart’s product chiefs, who then announced a limited edition 911R with manual shift, allowing them to test latent demand. When that model was oversubscribed several times over (the eternal new-Porsche battle of drivers vs sellers), it was obvious that 911R development was not money wasted. All the PDK spiel was deleted from memory and the stick shift was on its way back to GT3 land.
Now the Gen II 991 GT3 with manual transmission has been announced and I have already had calls from price-conscious insurance valuation customers, asking what various GT Porsches might be worth in part exchange: a topic for another time. More interesting is what a 911R is now worth.
We have all seen 911Rs listed anything up to £500k. The most recent car sold in public was the Slate Grey McQueen one in Paris, which went for £451,000 ($553,000) including premium. However, if you’ve spent enough money with your local Porsche dealer in the last few months, you can now order a 490bhp/197mph 911 GT3 with manual transmission for prices starting at £112k: essentially what a nice-spec used LHD Gen 1 991 GT3 example costs in the UK .
No doubt 911R is still a major collectable, but the £400k prices may have just left the building. As for 997.2 GT3 RS and 4-litre RS, we will see what happens. Maybe nothing – probably not very much.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
