Special
Next week is the 24 Hours of Le Mans and Porsche is celebrating with a very special new creation. This is the Porsche 963 RSP, a street-legal equivalent of the car with which Porsche is represented at Le Mans.
You can leave it to Porsche to conjure up a spectacular creation out of the blue, as it turns out again. We only recently received a first sign of life from the Porsche 963 RSP and now it has already been unveiled. As expected, it is a street-legal version of the 963, with RSP being the initials of Roger Penske. Porsche and Penske race together in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. With this creation, Porsche is also celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘Count Rossi’ Porsche 917, a street-legal version of the then Le Mans racer, which was built on behalf of Count Rossi.
The Porsche 917 of Count Rossi and the Porsche 963 RSP
The Porsche 963 RSP, among other things, reminds of that special 917 with its gray paint, but for the rest it is of course mainly the nose of the contemporary motorsport salmon. This does not mean that the 963 RSP, which is largely made of carbon fiber and kevlar, is also technically almost the same as the Porsche 963 that will start in the famous endurance race on the weekend of June 14. No, Porsche has hung a different but no less special power source in it.
Behind the two seats is the 4.6-liter V8 that we still know from the Porsche 918 Spyder. That is not just one on one the same; Porsche has retuned it to run on regular gasoline and the engine management has also been adjusted to be able to tame the V8 a little better. Then the biggest change has yet to come: the V8 is now equipped with two turbo’s, where in the 918 it was an atmospheric copy. Two Dutch turbo’s, to be precise, made by Van der Lee Turbo Systems. Williams Advanced Engineering has worked on the MGU, which is located between the engine and the seven-speed automatic transmission from Xtrac and can deliver up to 68 hp of electrical power to the powertrain. Precise performance figures are not (yet) available.
In the interior of the slightly raised 963, things are also a bit more luxuriant than normal
None other than Roger Penske himself is the lucky owner of this one-off creative outburst from Porsche and Penske Motorsport. What the Porsche 963 RSP cost remains politely outside the press release for the time being.