Porsche Built A Road-Legal Le Mans Car Just To Show It Still Could

If there’s one cliche worth burying in the back garden, it’s the whole “race car for the road” trope. Sure, some of today’s track day specials are properly ruthless instruments of speed, but few of them actually see competition in a form anything like their roadgoing counterparts. However, every so often, something true to the phrase appears. Porsche just turned its Le Mans prototype racer into a one-off road car called the 963 RSP, paying tribute to an exceptionally special road-legal Porsche of the past.

Gregorio Rossi di Montelera was more than just a Martini & Rossi heir, he had a penchant for speed. Powerboat racing? Check. Bobsledding? Check. Porsches? You bet. He’s part of the reason why the iconic Martini livery adorned Porsche race cars, and when it came to his most famous personal Porsche, Count Rossi set his sights higher than a 911.

In 1975, the Count decided that a Porsche 917K would make a great road car. You know, the fearsome flat-twelve-powered sports prototype racer that won Le Mans and the 24 Hours of Daytona twice. Conceptually, driving a 917K on the street is a bit like using a SCUD missile to remove a hornet nest, but Porsche obliged, so chassis number 30 was fitted with road-spec lights, mirrors, a more streetable exhaust system, and a luxurious tan Hermes leather interior. However, minor concessions alone aren’t enough to guarantee legality, and that’s where a transatlantic connection came in.

Legend has it that no European jurisdiction would approve such a savagely quick machine for the roads, so Count Rossi looked to America for some help making this thing seem legit. Once converted to road specification, 917 chassis number 30 wore an Alabama licence plate. Hard power, soft power, horsepower, same thing, right?

Fifty years since that particular Porsche 917K hit the streets, Porsche and Penske Racing decided it would be a cool thing to do again, so the two firms teamed up to create something called the 963 RSP. In essence, it’s Porsche’s LMDh hybrid hypercar with a twin-turbocharged V8, a 205-plus-MPH top-level weapon of speed that’s already racked up two World Endurance Championship titles.

Obviously, most race cars are terrible on the road. They’re too stiff for potholes and expansion joints, slicks are interesting in the wet, and many of them don’t have horns, which is a problem considering the shift to crossover utility vehicles has already made roadgoing sports cars harder for other drivers to see. However, by softening the dampers and raising the ride height, modifying the bodywork to provide better coverage against spray from the tires, fitting grooved rubber, and doing just enough to make the French government happy, the 963 RSP is technically road-legal.

The result is magnificent, a tan-leather-lined silver instrument of carbon kevlar that’s utterly alien in the context of modern road cars. Sure, Aston Martin has the Valkyrie, which offers an endurance racing variant and a road car variant, but its Cosworth V12 is a little more conventional than this new-breed force-fed hybrid Porsche. Plus, Porsche’s moving in the other direction: Aston Martin turned a road car into a race car, Porsche reversed that formula. It’s even tuned to run on pump gas.

After completing a tour of Europe from Le Mans to the Porsche Museum to the Goodwood Festival of Speed, don’t be surprised if the 963 RSP ends up in Roger Penske’s collection. Unsurprisingly, Penske Racing nominated him as the customer for the car, so there’s a chance we might see this one-off creation stateside at some point.

Top graphic image: Porsche

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