I had it completely wrong yesterday: Porsche was not testing a new 991.2 RSR at the Nürburgring. Instead, it was gearing up to run the new-for-2016 Porsche 991 GT3R in a test under racing conditions at the Nürburgring in the Rowe DMV 250-Meilen-Rennen, with works drivers, Nick Tandy and Fred Makowiecki.
At the ninth round of this year’s VLN Nürburgring Long Distance Championship, the pair ran amongst the race leaders at a cold and foggy Nordschleife, eventually finishing the four-hour race in third place overall. The winner was the polesitter Black Falcon Mercedes SLS, which qualified P1 on an 8:01.443 and turned a fastest race lap of 8:02.786. In comparison, the fastest lap set by the new Porsche 911 991 GT3R was 8:10.828. It finished on the lead lap, 4 minutes behind the Mercedes.
Porsche 991 GT3R test ends with Nürburgring Podium
“We didn’t come here specifically to race, but I’m happy to be on the podium,” said Tandy. “The car was fun to drive.” “Balance was good and it was fun to drive at the Nürburgring,” echoed Fred. “A couple of areas need optimising, but that’s normal in testing and development.”
The new GT3R features an improved aerodynamic package compared to its predecessor, as well as improved driveability and further optimised safety. The engine used in the Nürburgring tests was the proven (current) power plant, but an all-new direct fuel injection engine generation is currently undergoing test bench runs in Weissach and further testing in the USA.
“The first test outing of our new 911 GT3 R was promising,” says Head of Porsche Motorsport Dr. Frank-Steffen Walliser. “Pure performance was not the only priority today. We are also looking at being able to offer our customers a reliable car that runs well in all conditions. The Nürburgring Nordschleife is excellently suited to put the chassis, body and systems under a stress test. And this works best under race conditions.”
I’ve been working on the legendary Tour de Corse rally all weekend, where the Tuthill Porsche team has just won its class and the inaugural R-GT Cup with the exciting Porsche 997 R-GT rally car.
Victory on Tour de Corse – Round 11 of the 2015 World Rally Championship and the fourth round of the FIA R-GT Cup – is the second win for Tuthill’s Porsche R-GT car this season, following a proper result on January’s Monte Carlo Rally, opening round of WRC 2015. Four-time WRC winner, François Delecour, has driven the R-GT Porsche all season, but brought a new driving partner to Corsica in the form of Sabrina de Castelli: a Tour de Corse veteran with numerous class wins and podiums to her credit.
Pairing Frenchman Delecour’s experience on the Tour de Corse, including a win in 1993, with de Castelli’s considerable expertise on this historic WRC event proved an unbeatable combination on a Tour de Corse blighted by the worst weather seen on the Mediterranean island for more than thirty years. Torrential rain washed away some rally roads and led to multiple stage cancellations.
François Delecour Porsche wins WRC Tour de Corse
Starting the second day of the rally just twelve seconds behind season-long R-GT rival, Romain Dumas, Delecour was prepared for the slippery first stage of the day. As Dumas suffered a puncture and then car damage in the treacherous conditions, Delecour rocketed past to seize the R-GT lead. Dumas failed to arrive at the following stage, later announcing retirement from the Tour de Corse rally.
Losing Dumas did not hand Delecour a guaranteed win, as the Corsican landscape with its unforgiving stone walls, sheer rock faces and 500-metre vertical drops can always bite back. The Tuthill Porsche crew and its drivers still had to get the car to the finish, which it did with delight on lunchtime on Sunday.
A New Chapter in Porsche Rally Heritage
“Rallying is not about getting one thing right,” said our friend Richard Tuthill at the end. “This is a sport where any one weakness will damage a team’s ability to compete and to finish. Just as in the historic rallies where we earned our reputation and continue to excel, it is our team’s ability to build Porsche 911s that perform and finish rallies that has really made the difference.
“We fought a long battle to bring GT cars back to WRC rallying, and our first season with the Porsche R-GT has been much harder work than anyone expected. Winning the FIA R-GT title before the last round is satisfying and it is also terrific to add Tour de Corse to our team’s list of victories. This rally looms large in Porsche folklore, after Jean-Luc Therier’s memorable win here three decades ago. We’re proud to have written an entirely new chapter in Porsche rally heritage.”
Delecour’s Dream of WRC Porsche wins
“What a place to win a rally and the FIA Cup,” said François Delecour. “My dream was to bring Porsche back to the WRC and let fans of modern WRC see how exciting rally used to be. This year with Tuthill Porsche has been a huge challenge, but the team is really born to rally, so we fit together perfectly.
“Tour de Corse is magical: everything a great rally should be. It is fast, spectacular, beautiful and completely unforgettable, just like our Porsche R-GT. Thanks to Richard Tuthill and his hard-working team, my co-drivers Dominique and Sabrina and all the great fans of rallying who have made this year one of my favourites. I am so happy to win this: it is just a dream come true.”
The final round of FIA R-GT 2015 is ERC Rallye du Valais at the end of October. After that, the Porsche team heads for Kenya and the Safari Classic Rally. A busy end of year for all of us rally fans!
Amongst the cool projects I’ve been party to this year is the latest reproduction from EB Motorsport: a flat-fan kit for air-cooled Porsche engines. Under development for the last two years, engineering for a flat fan kit started in the same way as most of the EB Motorsport product range: there was nothing else out there that did the job properly.
Porsche 911 RSR Turbo Replica
I’m not quite sure when EB’s Mark Bates decided he had to have a Porsche 911 RSR Turbo, but we definitely had a conversation about building a 2.1-litre Turbo replica soon after we started working together more than five years ago and the bodywork for the project is well under way (pic below). Since our first conversation, the EB Motorsport product range has expanded to include a lot of products that cross over from RSR to RSR Turbo, but the flat fan is all on its own when it comes to cool Porsche kit.
“If I could have bought a flat fan kit that looked correct and worked well at a sensible price, I wouldn’t have gone down the road of making it myself,” says Mark. “We did buy one kit but it was not what I was looking for, so we ended up doing it the long way.
Mark’s ‘long way’ would be most impossible for most of us, but nothing phases EB Motorsport. When your company has more than sixty years of experience manufacturing food-grade handling plant, including 30-metre-high composite silos that can hold tons upon tons of raw material, the minor details of re-manufacturing unobtainable throttle bodies, complex fuel pressure regulators and flat fan drives are not a big deal.
Flat Fan Components and Testing
That said, all high-end manufacturing takes time to do properly, and this has been done properly. The first step was to find a period composite fan, as making the tooling to replicate an air-cooled flat fan blade is not the work of a moment. That search came up empty handed, so a high-quality carbon fan was obtained that would hold up for testing. “Our own fan is in development, but it involves the most complex tooling we have ever designed,” says Mark. “It will take a while to get this bit right.”
The next step was the fan drive. The obvious way to recreate one of these was to buy an original 935 drive and reverse engineer it, so this is what happened. The process took six months, and the first test device was fitted to a static long block test rig earlier this year, connected to electric motors and tested for hours on end. EB measured details like noise, durability, horsepower consumption, backlash, shim dimensions and airflow with different internal diverters fitted to the custom EB fan shroud.
Flat Fan Horsepower Consumption
Testing revealed lots of interesting data, particularly in the areas of air flow and horsepower. “It’s long been rumoured that the flat fan costs a lot of horsepower due to the convoluted drivetrain, but a vertical fan will also cost horsepower,” says Mark. “Our testing proved that flat fan horsepower consumption was not linear but instead it increased exponentially. At 4k fan rpm, just 1.5 horsepower was lost, but at 12k rpm fan speed which is roughly 8k rpm engine speed, 32 horsepower was lost, mainly due to the volume of air being moved by the fan. Given the increased thermal protection to cylinders 1 and 4 offered by the flat fan installation, we’re comfortable with the test data.”
Tuthill Porsche Flat Fan 911
The video below shows the flat fan fitted to EB’s 2.5-litre ST engine on carbs, in a 911 supplied for road testing by Richard Tuthill. Tuthill Porsche will build the engine for the RSR Turbo replica and there’s even some discussion on building a short run of four RSR Turbo replicas, including EB Motorsport’s own car, all running flat fans and fun-horsepower big turbo engines. Now that would really be cool.
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Just had this photo (below) from Jeff Gamroth at Rothsport Racing in Sherwood, Oregon. Jeff is the US distributor for EB Motorsport Porsche parts and the pic shows a package of EB Porsche body panels arriving at the Rothsport workshop in time for trailering to Rennsport Reunion V, which takes place next weekend at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey, California.
Mazda Laguna Seca Raceway bills Rennsport Reunion V as “the world’s greatest gathering of Porsche race cars and the drivers who drove them to victory. Hosted by Porsche Cars North America, Rennsport assembles the widest variety of Porsche’s historic racing models from the nimble 550 Spyder of the mid-’50s through the mighty 917 and 956/962 of the ’70s and ’80s to the highly successful RS Spyder of the last decade. There are seven groups in which to enjoy the racing action as they navigate the technically demanding 2.238-mile road course and The Corkscrew.”
The previous Rennsport Reunion was held at Laguna in 2011, to coincide with the launch of the 911. I enjoyed the plentiful supply of great cars and catching up with Porsche friends from all across the USA, but the erstwhile presence of Porsche Cars North America’s marketing department and a few heavy-handed security guards was perhaps more pronounced than necessary, and there wasn’t much actual racing across the three days.
Consequently, I’m not feeling urgently in need of returning for this one, but Jeff will be there, ably assisted by EB Motorsport boss, Mark Bates, fresh from his top twelve finish in the team’s ’65 911 SWB at this weekend’s Spa 6 Hours. Make sure to say hello to Yorkshire’s finest Porsche pilot if you’re at Laguna: no doubt he’d love to say hello to classic Porsche fans from that side of the pond. 911 owner and race artist Nicolas Hunziker will also be at the festival: big boss Heather has organised a ton of merchandise to bring to Rennsport, so say hello to those guys also.
Rennsport Reunion V 2015 Schedule
Trucks will start arriving for Rennsport Reunion weekend on Thursday morning, but the event kicks off properly on Friday, with cars on track from 8am to noon as the seven race groups get their first practice sessions in. There’s a lunchbreak for track workers and plenty of VIP demo laps before practice starts again from 13:20-17:20.
Saturday starts with qualifying for all groups from 08:00-11:50. Everything on track is worth watching, but the groups most fans will aim for is Group 2 (the Gmünd Cup) for Spyders and 4-cam 904s, Group 4 (the Weissach Cup) for 906, 908 and 917 and Group 6 (the Stuttgart Cup) for 956, 962, GT1 and the hot works 911 racecars.
The first three races take place after lunch on Saturday, with Group 2 on track from 13:05. That’s followed by the classic 911s and then the first race for the GT3 Cup Challenge. Racing wraps up at 15:10, so there’s less than two hours of racing on Saturday. The day ends with a pit lane concours that goes on for two hours. This is longer than the racing, so make of that what you will.
On Sunday, the first of two races starts at 10:45 and the second is finished by 12:15. Lunch break follows, with the first afternoon race for the Weissach Cup group at 14:00-14:30. Then comes the Group 5 race from 14:45-15:15 and finally the Stuttgart Cup event from 16.05-16:35. When that final flag drops, the event is over, so it’s a long way to go for just four and a half hours of racing.
Everyone will have a great weekend and I’ll likely regret my decision not to attend this Rennsport Reunion, but such is life. Too much going on here with the builders on site and lot of work stuff happening. I note that I’m not alone in my decision, with R Gruppe friends living much closer than me also deciding not to attend. I’m heading out to Cali next spring, so I’ll catch up with all the post-event news at whatever EASY meet coincides with my visit!
I hadn’t planned on two weeks of radio silence following Porsche’s win at Le Mans, but such was the time absorbed by Le Mans and my schedule at this time of year. Having helped eldest offspring through some important exams, restarted a garage & office building project and completed a surge of Porsche insurance valuations, two weeks had passed in the blink of an eye. Suddenly it was time to go to Belgium for the legendary Ypres Rally: round two of the Delecour/Dumas rally Porsche battle.
Round one was the Monte Carlo Rally last January. There’s no love lost between these French drivers, so bundles of needle was brought to the Alps. Dumas’ advantage with the lighter, more powerful 4-litre 997 GT3 RS over Delecour’s 3.8-litre GT3 Cup was negated on the cold icy roads of the mountains around Monaco, and it almost came down to who took more risks.
At the end of three days, Delecour emerged as the winner, but not on great terms with his rivals. Despite more than five months to go round two, there was absolutely no way that things would calm down in the interim. So it was that Team Tuthill arrived in Ypres last Monday, with a dry weather forecast and an opponent keen to redress the balance.
Imagine the tension before the rally got started, and you’ll still be nowhere near how knife-edge it was over two days of racing. Delecour is mercurial: completely electric to be around. A proven rally winner, but always in the background lies that legendary temper. Dumas is also an exceptional talent: a world-class endurance racer with pitch-perfect poise in a rally car.
These guys are at the very peak of driving ability, so watching them literally go to war in two 911s across a rally stage is incredibly powerful. FIA rally radio revelled in each driver’s desperation to know the times at the end of a stage.
In qualifying, Dumas went quickest. This gave him a nice early slot in the running, out of harm’s way amongst the ERC front runners. But as the rally got started, it was clear that running up front was a double-edged sword. Dust and gravel strewn across the roads was not being cleared quickly enough for the wide 911s.
Running straight on at a junction on stage three wiped out Romain’s early advantage and handed the lead back to François. Dumas was apoplectic on radio at the end of the stage: not the sort of talk your mother wants to hear. Delecour set a quicker time on stage four, but after that it proved impossible to stay the four-litre. Delecour dropped back down to second, and Dumas claimed the overnight lead.
With four R-GT cars entered in Belgium, Ypres was the strongest round yet for the fledgling GT rally car series. Former Ypres Rally winners, Patrick Snijers and Marc Duez, had also entered R-GT Porsches. Snijers had not been able to test his car ahead of the event, so made a slow start, but his skills soon freed up more speed.
Day two was ten stages: one hundred and seventy kilometres of rallying. The pace was absolutely flat out: none could have made those cars go any faster. On the first stage, Dumas went straight on at a junction: advantage Delecour. Until the stage end, where we found out that François had done precisely the same. The stage times were identical.
Delecour then had another small off, and Dumas stretched his lead. Then disaster for Delecour: the Porsche cut out mid-stage and could not be restarted. Eight minutes passed before Delecour and co-driver Dominique Savignoni used the proper reset sequence to get the car going and finish the stage.
Delecour in Tuthill Porsche R-GT
Victory was now out of the question, but all was not lost in the championship. The FIA R-GT Cup has the same points structure as all FIA series’ including Formula 1, so there was still plenty to fight for. R-GT leader Delecour had to keep going. Francois returned with his war colours on, chasing Marc Duez for third position. Snijers was more than three minutes ahead, but Duez could be caught with some luck.
Then, as so often happens in motorsport, the wrecking ball swung away from the chaser and back to the leader. On the penultimate stage, Dumas’ Porsche overshot a junction and went head-on into a wall of hay bales, causing immediate retirement (video below). All Delecour now had to do was finish to earn fifteen points towards his championship lead. In the end, there was no stopping François, who powered past Duez to second.
“Hats off to Romain Dumas for a lion’s drive this weekend,” said Tuthill team boss, Richard Tuthill. “We would rather have won head-to-head, but survival is all part of rallying. Second place is a good result for the R-GT championship. Our cars have taken wins in both Ypres historic rallies, so we leave here satisfied.
“Now we look towards round three: WRC Rallye Deutschland. Tuthill Porsche brought the first R-GT car to this rally last year, and we’re delighted to see R-GT growing, with four cars fighting in Ypres. This series has just started and the energy this weekend has been incredible.”
While much of the Porsche glitterati rested on its laurels in Goodwood, polishing museum exhibits and reminiscing past winners, the diehards were racing. Dumas, Delecour and the Tuthill Porsche team were flat out in Belgium. Tandy, Bergmeister and co were on the US campaign trail, and the Falken Porsche RSR claimed another Porsche win in a series it departs this year.
Winterkorn’s Volkswagen may build, sell and discount all the new Porsche luxury it can produce, but the root of this Porsche cult is in competition. That will never be lost while the real racers stick with it. Ferdinand Piëch personnifies this connection, just as his uncle did, as do Delecour, Dumas, Tandy, Enzinger and so many more. Kudos to the motorsport brethren: you are the heartbeat.
Here’s some Delecour in-car video: watch the eyes.
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