Porsche 911 GT1

Tony Hatter styled all three, working to Norbert Singer's engineering, and the brief was a legal fiction executed convincingly. The 1996 car borrows the production 911's headlamp and tail-light assemblies and nothing else, over a body 4,890mm long, 1,990mm wide and 1,140mm tall. Next to a 993 it is half a metre wider and a foot lower. The 1997 Evo did something unusual with that fiction. Its new nose carried headlamps that previewed the 996, a car Porsche had not yet shown, so for a season the racing car was the public preview of the next road 911 rather than the other way round. The 1998 GT1-98 abandoned the pretence. It looks like a sports prototype because it is one, and underneath it carries the first carbon fibre shell Porsche ever built. Only the badge and the general silhouette connect it to the two cars before it. The road car's interior is the tell. Recaro buckets from the 964 Speedster, switchgear off the shelf, and a chassis tube through the door aperture that no production car would ever have tolerated.

This is the part that came first, and everything else on the page exists because of it. The GT1 debuted in the BPR series at the Brands Hatch 4 Hours in 1996, where Hans-Joachim Stuck and Thierry Boutsen won comfortably but as an invitational entry, ineligible for points. Wins at Spa and Zhuhai followed. At Le Mans that June the two works cars finished second and third overall and first in GT1, Stuck, Wollek and Boutsen one lap behind the winning Joest TWR-Porsche prototype. 1997 was worse. Eight GT1s started, two works and six private, the factory cars led and neither finished, and a privately entered 1996-specification car salvaged fifth overall. 1998 was the year. BMW lost a wheel bearing, the Mercedes CLK-LMs broke oil pumps, and the Toyota GT-One, the quickest car in the race, lost its gearbox ninety minutes from the end. The 911 GT1-98s ran first and second to the flag, number 26 of Aïello, McNish and Ortelli on 351 laps and number 25 of Müller, Alzen and Wollek on 350. It was Porsche's sixteenth outright Le Mans win, in the company's fiftieth year. Porsche then withdrew, and the GT1 class was cancelled.

The 911 GT1's second life is on a screen, and there is an irony buried in it. PlayStation and Porsche ran a factory-branded 1997 911 GT1 Evo, a huge PlayStation logo across the nose and Gran Turismo branding on the rear wing, and raced it at Silverstone. A PlayStation-liveried 911 GT2 ran at Le Mans. Neither ever appeared in a Gran Turismo game, because Electronic Arts held an exclusive licence to Porsche in racing games from 2000 until 2016, which is why Gran Turismo spent a generation filling the gap with RUF. Porsche did not appear under its own name in the series until Gran Turismo Sport in 2017. So the way a whole generation of console owners actually drove one was Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed in 2000, in plain livery, at the end of a game that walked players forward from the 356. The Straßenversion has since made it into Gran Turismo 7 under its own badge. In the physical world it is a museum piece as much as a car. The Porsche Museum in Stuttgart keeps a 1996 GT1.

Owning a 911 GT1 is closer to running a historic racing car than a road car, and the people who have them treat it that way. These are stored, prepared and taken out, not driven to work. The specifics follow from what it is. The tube frame carries a mid-mounted engine as part of the structure, so anything requiring the engine to come out is a strip-down rather than a job. Bodywork is carbon and Kevlar composite, which means damage is a specialist rebuild and not a panel. The gearbox was engineered to survive twenty-four hours at Le Mans rather than to be pleasant in traffic, and it feels exactly like that. The road car's fuel tank is 19.3 gallons against the racer's 26.4, which tells you what the range is like. The genuine difficulty is knowledge. Twenty-three road cars and a small number of racers is not enough to create an ecosystem, and what expertise exists sits with a handful of firms and with Porsche's own motorsport department. None of that stops anybody. The cars run, they appear, and a properly kept one works.