Driving a Porsche 911 GT1 & driving a Porsche 911 GT2 Evo. Peter Klutt reflects on how the market has developed for both the Porsche 911 GT1 & Porsche 911 GT2 Evo.
Worldwide sports car racing and the interest for such disciplines hit a spike as the 1990s were in full swing. Porsche’s eye for opportunity opened wide and the company’s next (obvious) step was to jump the BPR Global GT1 Championship (which would become FIA World GT Championship later on in 1997) bandwagon. Thing was, their 962 GT racers weren’t fit for the job anymore - having lost in 1995 against the voracious McLaren F1 GTRs. Therefore, a new car was needed.
And it came six weeks later as the Porsche 911 GT1. The 911 GT1 was mid-engined - a step in a different direction from the rear-engined 911s - but another aspect stood out: instead of being derived from a street-legal vehicle, it was brewed from the off as a full-blown race car.
To better paint the picture, McLaren, for example, built the F1 as a road car only to morph it later into the track-only F1 GTR, as opposed to Porsche, who went straight for the race prototype first.
In charge of the 911 GT1 development was Porsche engineer Norbert Singer, who had concise orders: build as fast as possible a car that retains the 911’s soul.
So what Singer basically did was take the front end of the 911 993 and mount it to the rear end of the 962. The whole build was held together by a tubular frame that allowed both mid- and rear-engine positioning.
Speaking of engine, the choice was a 3.2-liter, water-cooled flat-six making 592 hp with the aid of two KKK turbochargers nicely hid under a luscious carbon fiber body.
Anecdotes say that Porsche’s initial aim was to match the McLaren F1 GTR’s weight but eventually Porsche engineers settled for 1,050 kilos, which allowed them to fit the 911 GT1 with a larger air intake and bump the horsepower.
The 911 GT1 made its debut in 1996 at the Le Mans 24 Hour Race where it finished 2nd and 3rd overall and 1st and 2nd in its class.
As the FIA World GT Championship was born in 1997, a new rival was shaping on the horizon: the Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR. In response, Porsche came up with an improved version of the 911 GT1, which added the Evolution suffix.
Visual changes included 911 996-style headlights while other tweaks resumed to better aerodynamics and retuned suspension.
1997 didn’t bring the victory for the 911 GT1 but Porsche kept the project’s heart pumping by introducing a carbon-fiber chassis that shed significant weight off the GT1’s hips and lend a hand to its 1-2 finish at Le Mans 1998.
Some say it’s the 911 GT1’s reliability that made the difference, as it was slower then the Mercedes and the Toyota GT-One, its main rivals - the CLK GTR ( now powered by a V8 replacing the initial V12 engine) encountered oil pump issues while the Toyota struggled with gearbox malfunctions.
The first GT2 came in the mid-1990s, at the very end of the 911's long and storied air-cooled era. It was the roadgoing homologation version of a fearsome race car, pairing a version fo the 911 Turbo's 3.6-liter flat-six to a modified six-speed manual and powering the rear wheels. A limited-slip rear differential aided traction, and aggressive aero helped with both downforce and cooling. The numbers the engine produced today look modest, but they were eye-popping for the time: 424 horsepower and 398 lb-ft of torque. More important, it was 440 pounds lighter than the 911 Turbo, helping it squirt to 62 mph in 4.4 seconds and making it capable of a 183-mph Vmax. Already a rare bird, an even rarer uprated model was produced for 1998 only, which featured larger turbos, more power, and a higher top speed. Sadly, the 993 GT2 was made in hyper-limited quantities and never officially imported to America.
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