The New Porsche 935 Spotted

Over the weekend, MotoIQ had a chance to check out the annual Porsche Rennsport Reunion hosted at Laguna Seca Raceway.  With over a thousand Porsche cars on display, we spotted the world premiere of the new Porsche 935!

Based on the Porsche 991 GT2 RS platform and inspired by the Le Mans racer from 1976, the all-new Porsche 935 will be sold for a whopping $817,000 to 77 lucky customers.  The new reissued 935 is an odd deal.  It is based on the GT2 RS street car but it is a sort of race car, meaning it has some of the accouterments of being a race car like a roll cage, air jacks, Recaro race seat, six-point harness, fire system, 3-way adjustable Motorsports shocks, Cosworth/Pectel dash display, and a fuel cell.

However, it has a nicely trimmed interior, functioning climate controls, standard Porsche PSM (although with a more aggressive calibration) and a PDK transmission. However, it is not street legal nor is it homologated for any race series as well!

This means that the new 935 is sort of a bastard cool car that cant be on the street nor can it be raced except perhaps as a really rare and expensive track day car.  Because of this, all 77 cars are most likely going to end up in collections and the 935 re-issue is simply a marketing exercise making a toy for the uber-wealthy.  Still, Porsche will sell all 77 of them for a pretty penny no problem!

While the 700 horsepower twin turbo 3.8L flat six on the 935 remains identical to the powerplant on the GT2 RS, the Porsche 935 gets its own unique set of carbon fiber body panels that widens and lengthens the overall body.

We feel that the rear diffuser is probably less functional than the one found in the GT2 with the titanium megaphone/mufflers running through it and what looks like a too steep angle toward the rear that will cause all sorts of flow separation.

The rear underbody aero seems like a un Porsche like styling exercise rather than a functional part.  The large rear wing probably makes up for loss of underbody downforce but with a greater drag penalty!

Interestingly enough, we noticed where the arrows point to, where the turbo-fan style wheel covers were zip-tied onto the face of the forged center-lock BBS wheel behind it, while the massive 6 piston front calipers and 4 piston rear calipers were covered up with what looks like aluminum foil tape…? The rotors are steel, not the famous Porsche CCM carbon ceramic rotors. 390mm front and 380mm in the rear, smaller than what is found on the GT2 RS! This is probably to accommodate the smaller 18″ wheels.

I guess Porsche is part of that zip-tie life!  This must be a temporary thing for the show as the zip ties can be pretty badly stressed with heat under hard driving and we can’t imagine that they would do that intentionally.  Porsche probably covered up the calipers because the spec is not finalized for production yet. The wheels are shod with Michelin Slicks, for sure not street car stuff!

You’ll also notice that the traditional headlights have been deleted, replaced with 4 element LED units and relocated to the front air dams and paired with the turn signals. A race car with turn signals?  I do wonder if the sexy hood of the 935 would be compatible with other 991 models.  I wouldn’t be surprised if replicas started surfacing on the market soon. The front splitter is not a large full race sort of part and it looks like it was designed to be streetable rather than to make a balanced amount of downforce.  Again more of a styling exercise than a functional race part.

Although the car is a neat styling and marketing excersise if we were wealthy we would probably just want to buy an actual 991 cup car and race and do track days with that, taking advantage of a fully developed and mature factory race car that has excellent parts and service support.  We could probably buy a cup car and a GT2 RS street car for the price that this limited edition toy car will fetch!  Do we dare say that the new 935 is the ultimate ricer car? Firesuit on!

What are your thoughts on the new Porsche 935?  Let us know in the comments below!