959 is beautiful

953 winning against Pajero in Dakar to me is amazing achievement.

So crazily advanced for the 80s. I love it

These videos are phenomenal.

Talk about a unicorn!?! Porsche hasn't done anything like that before or since. The 959 was WAAAY ahead of it's time. Great vid.

There are very few cars that give me lowkey chills (and ironically many of them are Porsches) but with the 959, the chills aren't lowkey at all. It still amazes me how crazy and ahead of time the 959 really was. To think, almost all other supercars from this era were still stuck with mostly 70s technology and construction, and here you have humble-looking sports car with technological innovations that would not be seen in normal family cars until decades later.

I was taking a walk to the local park in London and saw a Porsche dealership which I recognised from photos - It was actually the original John Cooper workshop (of mini fame). Taking a walk over the road to take a closer look, I spotted a 959 in the window. A few months later on another walk to the park, I saw that the workshop was open. I had a chat with the floor manager (I presume) and he welcomed me in to take a look at the cars. Very awesome and rare car.

Where to start with the 959? Not only it was a breakthrough for super-cars as it proved they could be reliable and daily-driven (The 959 even has a specific gear to drive in snow, that's how much they wanted these cars to be driven) It also marked the future for the 911. The modern 911 owes more to the 959 than it seems, even the base models are turbocharged and offer all wheel drive now. The problem is, in the process, it truly bankrupted Porsche. They didn't sell it at a moderate loss, the cost of each 959 was a bit more than twice the price Porsche were charging (The cost was around 300K, Porsche spent 720K building each one) To make matters worse, a few years later there was an economic crisis where sales of sport-cars tanked. This is why the 964 and 993 generations were developed and built in tight budgets, which meant little room for innovations. Porsche was so desperate for cash that they built a final run of 6 959s in 1992 out of spares they had laying around for two customers. It is unknown how much these cars were sold for, but it is said Porsche made money with them for a change. Also I love the footage you have sourced for this video!

You need to cover out the Story of the BMW M3 GTR someday. the fact that FIA and ALMS had to change the rules to ban the car from racing is still hilarious til this day.

Hope your feeling better mate. Thanks for another awesome video!!

Great video, mate. I made one of these in the summer. The comparison between this and the F40 is quite striking especially when you consider one was a 4 seater (sort of) whilst the other didn't even have interior door handles!

These documentaries are very fun to watch for some reason and it’s simplified anyways yes 959 is legendary

Hey, it was more of an icon than quite a few Group B cars from the era. I'd say it's more recognizable than the RS200 at least. You do a great job. I enjoy your use of footage from the era.

man id love to see something on the Pajero!

Glad that you touched on the 961 - people rarely talk about it when discussing the 959. To be frank, there’s next to no discussion about Group B road racing in general, which I suppose goes to show how it failed. Thank goodness for Stephane Ratel and Group GT1!

Another great video. I would like to suggest an obscure supercar for the next video. Although it wasn't put into production, the story of it is very interesting. Jiotto Caspita is the name of the car

Pls make a video on the Chrysler 426 HEMI engine or the cars that it powered. Its an interesting story cause it made Chrysler incredibly competitive in NASCAR and NHRA drag races

"The driver perfectly executed a money shift."... You cannot hear the sass by the tone, but you can feel the sass by the dialogue...

People may think of it as just a "Porsche" but true petrolheads know it from the heart to appearance.

Very cool do one on the Ferrari 288 GTO, another mystical "could have been" of the group B era.

Awesome video. Great video production. You are making great documentaries. Keep up the good work.

Ahhhh group B what a glorious times of WRC

Your videos are Motorsport History for Dummies. One after another, brilliant. Thank you!

Amazing video, amazing car, what a legend

love these types of videos

you definetly deserve more attention and you will get it, I am sure! thanks for the content. many videos have been mindblown to me (Mclaren F1 probs my favourite :))

Great video, loved the 959 as a child and the Paris Dakar rally looked so exotic back then, 961 looks great too. Love how the engineers got the Group B project away by pitching as a test bed for the next 911 and they were right with 4wd going into the 964

I miss that original opening tune, gave me those Gran Turismo vibes on this channel.

It doesn't even look like it's from the '80s, looking almost a decade newer!

Awesome content! Just found you recently

Please, if you mention something in imperial system, do not forget about the metric system aswell. Would be appreciated.

Fantastic video thank you 👏👍

Back again with another banger video

The 959 was a gorgeous car. I was lucky enough to stand talking to the driver of one in 1992/3 (can't remember quite which yaar).

Great footage

I only just discovered your channel but I absolutely love it and think it's a really cool channel

Thoroughly enjoyable. Great work!

Awsome Video

Add it to the depressingly long list of depressing automotive what ifs.

Bro amazing footage you have gold footage every video.

Good info on the 959 👍👍👍

Amazing video

Seeing their rally cars makes me want to take a modern AWD Porsche and make a Baja inspired build.

Love that haynes thumbnail! 👍🏻

Man this my fifth video smh I had to sub big bro keep this knowledge coming I need all that

Very good video

Hope to see a Patreon soon, would love to support the channel

The first true hypercar.

A video about the de tomaso pantera could be cool, an Italian car mainly sold by ford and competed in Le Mans and IMSA for a while

Helmut Bott. Great name. Even greater KZfaq Channel!

It was an amazing machine when it first came out

Only one second into the video and I would like to give you 10 times thumbs up. For the correct pronounciation of Porsche!

Probably my favorite Porsche besides the 917... I wish they could have raced the 959 in group b, that would have been epic!

Hey nice GT music man

oh yea that perfectly executed money shift👌🤣

I don’t think people understand how impressive ANYTHING beating the Pajero at the Dakar is.

I always think that Nissan copy the 959’s concept to make the R32 GT-R. High-powered twin-turbo engine with variable traction AWD system.

What a monster of an engine

Who needs “high performance road cars”, especially when you’re not in Germany?

group b found its footing in rally, yes, but i often heard that the 959 precisely *wasn't* designed for rally. group b was supposed to be a versatile class and compete on and off track, and the 959, like, for example, the 288 gto, was developped for the *track* variant of group b. group b at that time was supposed to remplace group 4 in endurance racing (most notably the world sportscar championship, racing alongside group c). the only group b cars we'll end up seeing in wsc, though, would be "converted" group 4 cars like the bmw m1 and ferrari 308 gtb. incidentaly, the 959 and the 288 gto were *far* too heavy for wrc. they had much bigger engines, and gave like 200kg to the audi quattro, almost 300 to the peugeot 205 ! i mean, it never even was hidden that track was the idea behing the 288 gto : everybody remembers it as "ferrari going rally", but the car was purposefully rear-wheel drive with track racing in mind, and would only have competed in tarmac events in the wrc for testing purposes. porsche can indeed be a little more confusing, as they did build a four wheel drive car, but the thing is helmut bott wanted a *road* car, a group b one, yes, but a road going one, and he did think that four wheel drive was the future for the road, as well as track racing (as audi would prove in the late-80s and early-90s by dominating every track competition it entered, from transam to dtm to btcc, and building awd supercars now). as they needed reliabilty for endurance racing, porsche went to test its four wheel drive system in the dakar because, well, it's the most difficult race on earth, the group b regulations had proven their worth off-road, and most importantly...you can run prototypes, there ! the dakar rally didn't (and still doesn't) need homologation, just "rules compliance", so it was the perfect test bed for a purpose-built racing car not yet in production. as for the le mans participation, well, *after* group b was banned (a general ban, for rally and track racing), porsche found itself without a way to enter the 959 in the wsc, so they went to the imsa gtx regulations, that would allow them to run at le mans (as it was a joined imsa/wsc race at the time). again, this is all "i've been told", i have no source and i couldn't find any reliable one (most papers on the 959 on the internet are fan made and made by fans of rally group b, nobody ever talks about the - admitedly failed - track racing part of the regulation), but i've always found this "alternative" take on the 959 history a lot more sensible.

Well time to get the popcorn ...If I had any

Hey my friend amazing stories about 80s and 90s cars racing in lemans but i hope a video about the story of the Mercedes clk gtr and the end of Mercedes in 1999 in lemans with the 3 clk gtr destroyed

can u do one on the ford gt in 1966 vs 2016?

Great video! But .. win in it's class, where it was only two cars)

Still advanced today, in ways. 35 years later we can get a Toyota Yaris GR with variable traction control, torque vectoring, electronically controlled suspension and so on. Very cool. But it’s also a sort of limited run, rally-bred feat of engineering that Porsche put together all those years ago (albeit for a much higher price etc compared to the Toyota) that can almost never push the 959 aside as a relic of the past, given the other advances in car tech we’ve had since. Many new SUVs can out-drag a Ferrari 308, but that speaks more about the 308 being a relic whilst the Porsche 959 remains timeless.

I Heard Porsche 959 was 187mph By some sources But it was Definitely 197mph 😈

Have you ever ate a Whopper?

*Deletes first message so as to not look as if I had known you had done this vid*.....Bloody amazing, a wee turbo for low speed and a large one to kick it all off!....This thing would have eaten the Audi's for lunch .....

Did I see a 959 running on a dyno, only running it’s rear wheels? Thought the torque split was 20/80%, F/R? It was white, like their development car, could have been that one.

It's a real motorsport tragedy that this car never competed in Group B rally. Of course it was probably a good idea to ban Group B but 1987 would have been an amazing year with Porsche as an official rally manufacturer against Lancia and Ford.

I like to believe that Nissan got the pop out fender style from the Audi group be rally cars and put it on the R32 Skyline

The 959... what todays 911 should be.

The 959 had the highest top speed. RUF said, “hold my beer.”

Porsche didn't toss the guts of the 959 into the 930 chassis and sent it to the Paris-Dakar Rally because they couldn't make the 959 in time but because the Porsche mechanics were rather skeptical about it as it wasn't tested properly yet and they can't afford to trash the prototype chassis there. So they came up with a ingenious idea. Since the 901 and 930 chassis 911 were pretty awesome in road rally events already, why not just stuff whatever the 959 could take and shove it into spare 930 chassis laying around in the factory and send them as test mules to the rally? Besides, it's still a flat-six thus it didn't require much cutting and hacking to make everything fit. Porsche did just that and when they clinched the manufacturer win and driver's win at the same time, the engineers and mechanics were then convinced that it worked and continued with the project.

Video on mitsubishi pajero?

Hey when can we get a vid about ruf

I think you misspelled "ruined" in the title. The 959 was an engineering marvel, and a great car, no doubt, but it started the trend of these bloated, computer controlled monsters we have as supercars and high end sports cars now (though, to be fair, the R35 GT-R takes the brunt of the blame). Light, fast, and simple is much more interesting and exciting to drive then something with a billion horsepower and a computer taking all your inputs into consideration while IT drives the car. I'd take the 959s contemporary, the F40, any day over the Porsche, just like I'd take a GT3-RS with a manual box and "only" ~500 HP over the modern Ferrari V8s.

top

I have a tamia model of it I have to build

the Porsche 959 has some sort of device built in to automatically inflate and deflate the air in the tires without extra touching the tire. i think its well usefull to have the right ammount of air in the tires depending on how much weight is on the vehicle and the temperature of the tires. for driving on loose ground it will be usefull for deflateing the tires much, to have a bigger contact surface to sink in less, the hummer 4x4 has something like that too. then when getting or solid ground again, the vehicle would fill the tires with more air by itself again while driving. useful thing. why dont todays vehicles commonly have that ? they have all all sorts of gimmicks and features, but why no such automatic air pressure regulation for the tires ?? beside that technology, that Porsche 959 looks so ahead of its time, like from today and not from the 80s and 211mph is very fast even by todays standards, crazy fast back then, that technology is aswell ahead of its time aswell as that look. alot of todays sportscars suffer from transformers diseasse, but that 959 looks straight and clean, just right for all times back then till today and i guess in the future too.

The owner of KREEPY KRAULY DANNY CHAVOUIR bought a red one ! He emigrated from SOUTH AFRICA 🇿🇦 to the USA . Unfortunately he had to fly the 959 to Europe every year because of the emissions law in the USA 🇺🇸 😕

Bro imagine money shifting on a 959!! Gotta be the biggest L anyone can ever achieve LOL 😂

959: the God car. If Mercury had a driver's license, he would drive a 959.

And then the NSX came out...🤣

then came the Acura NSX.... redefined again

Are you good bro?

Another mythical thing is the jagaur xj13 it was supposed to race 1966 Le Mans but was cancelled while on the truck to France

Song @ <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="120">2:00</a> ?

Even if the 959 would've had the opportunity to compete in Group B it was never going to be a rally icon. Rallying is the people's motorsport with folk heroes rather than superstars driving supercars. Imagine Porsche competing in NASCAR - they would be shunned and hated no matter the results - they just don't belong in that category. The Škoda Fabia is the ultimate rally icon. A Porsche? Just not going to happen.

Oh man do I hate the 959

Air cooling don’t seem that advanced. Getting that beetle engine vibe…

Looks like a 911 that melted.

Porsche 959 redefined 'Sportscar' Ferrari F40 redefined 'Supercar' McLaren F1 invented 'Hypercar'

Potato

F40 > 959

Porsche are great to races and terrible to own, very complex and expensive to fix.

The Ferrari F40 was far a better car...

Whoever spends the most wins. You're all reacting to marketing and advertising like it's sport. So sad. Time to get off the couch or out of the car and try sports.

Technical - YES. But it looked sooo ugly! Best looking Porsche ever: Porsche 918 Spyder

Porche has never won a single WRC event ever and it has tried many times especially on tarmac events. Roundy round stuff may be but the real cars and drivers are to be found in WRC imo.