Sneek Peak: A Look Inside Magnus Racing’s ALMS Porsche GT3
By Mike Kojima
While we were at this year’s Long Beach Grand Prix, we had an opportunity to get a close look at the Magnus Racing Porsche GT3 ALMS GTC race car. A little known fact about Porsche is that you can buy a turn key race car from the factory, a highly competitive fully developed race car at that. A good part of the appeal of running a Porsche is that instead of developing a car for the series, the well heeled can simply buy one without the risk of being uncompetitive.
 |
| The stock Porsche body in white is seam welded and fitted with a cage that ties the entire structure together. This fan device feeds fresh cool exterior air to the driver’s helmet. The bar that the harnesses attach to and the horizontal bar behind the seat are additional bars added for racing in the USA. The cage is FIA approved with a few additional bars for ALMS and Grand Am specs. |
For the Long Beach race the Magnus car was sponsored by the legendary Rosco’s Chicken and Waffles chain of fried chicken restaurants, hence the interesting livery on the car as shown. The factory Porsche ALMS racer is roughly based on a street going 911 GT3 RSII. In fact in Germany this car is street legal and some hardcore people actually drive them as street cars. The factory had a publicity stunt at last year’s 24 hours of Nurnburgring where a car was street driven from the factory to the track, raced and driven back to the factory.
 |
| Another look at the cage construction. The cage is installed by the factory. |
The race car starts with an off the shelf 911 body in white. The rear wheelhouses are enlarged for bigger tires and the body is also widened for bigger tires. The unibody is seam welded and a fully integrated cage that ties the whole body structure together including the suspension pick up points is fabricated. For ALMS and Grand Am rules compliance a few more tubes are added to the cage vs the European version of the car.
 |
| The upper door bars are the additional bars installed for ALMS and Grand Am approval. This gives additional side impact protection. |
 |
| Straightforward and tidy but not unobtanium. The GT3 is somewhat reminiscent of nicer time attack and drift cars in the layout and level of technology. It’s kinda cool to see that this is something in the realm of what we build ourselves! |
 |
| Gutted stock dash, OMP steering wheel and Motec ADL2. |
 |
| This box contains the water and ice for a cool suit. This helps keep the driver cool. |
 |
| We think that this cannister is one of the new CO2 cooled dry cool suit systems. We wonder why this car seems to have both, perhaps driver preference? |
