Porsche 911 GT1 996: white copy with 690 hp
The Porsche 911 GT1 is a car designed and developed by German automobile manufacturer Porsche AG to compete in the GT1 class of sportscar racing, which also required a street-legal version for homologation purposes. The limited-production street-legal version developed as a result was named the 911 GT1 Straßenversion (Street version).
With the revival of international sportscar racing in the mid-1990s through the BPR Global GT Series (which then morphed into the FIA GT Championship) Porsche expressed interest in returning to top-level sportscar racing and went about developing its competitor for the GT1 category. Cars in this category were previously heavily modified versions of road cars, such as the McLaren F1 and the Ferrari F40. Porsche originally modified the 993 GT2 into EVO version and homologated it as a GT1, but it was completely uncompetitive compared to the supercars in its class.
The GT1 had very little in common with the 911 (993), only sharing the front and tail light assemblies of the production 911.
In spite of its 911 moniker, the car actually had very little in common with the 911 of the time, only sharing the front and rear headlamps with the production sports car. However, its frontal chassis is based on the 993-generation 911, while the rear subframe was derived from the 962C along with its water-cooled, twin-turbocharged and intercooled, 4 valves per cylinder 3,164 cc (3.2 L) flat-six engine fuel fed by Bosch Motronic 5.2 fuel injection, which was longitudinally-mounted in a rear mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout, compared to the rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout of a conventional 911.
The engine generated a power output of about 600 PS (441 kW; 592 hp). In comparison, the 993 generation 911 GT2, which was otherwise the company’s highest-performance vehicle at the time, used an air-cooled engine with only two valves per cylinder.
The 911 GT1 made its debut in the BPR Global GT Series (the FIA championship’s predecessor) at the Brands Hatch 4 hours, where Hans-Joachim Stuck and Thierry Boutsen won comfortably, although they were racing as an invited entry and were thus ineligible for points. They followed up by winning at Spa and Ralf Kelleners and Emmanuel Collard triumphed for the factory team at Zhuhai.
The 1996 911 GT1 clocked at a top speed of exactly 330 km/h (205 mph) on the legendary Mulsanne Straight in the practice sessions of the 1996 Le Mans 24 Hours Race.
