For its first 20 years of its existence, Porsche built its motorsports reputation as giant killers. Porsche always did more with less, harrying cars with two or three times the cylinder count and displacement in the world’s most prestigious motor races. Ferry Porsche prided himself on this and it was consistent with the frugal mindset with which he approached business.
Although this mindset was very effective, an outright win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, arguably the most prestigious race in the world, eluded Porsche. In the late 1960s, their 3 liter prototypes were no match for the 7 liter Fords. Ferry Porsche’s nephew, Ferdinand Piëch served as Head of Development was decidedly less frugal than his uncle and initiated the development of a clean-sheet racing car intended to win Le Mans outright. The result was the 917, which was represented a significant break with Porsche’s “less is more” approach; it used a 4.5 liter 12 cylinder engine. It was costly to develop but extremely dominant, winning Le Mans (and many other races) for Porsche in both 1970 and 1971. For the 1972 season, a rule change made the 917 obsolete, leaving Porsche with an expensive orphan.
This rankled Ferry Porsche, and at the same time, in-fighting among the half dozen members of the Porsche family who held various management positions at the company was counter-productive and it was finally decided that all family members should leave Porsche and be replaced with professional managers instead. Ferry Porsche remained and brought back Ernst Fuhrmann, who had designed the famous 4-cam Carrera engine in the 1950s as Technical Director. He was responsible for racing but did not have the budget to develop a new prototype after the 917 fiasco.
The Carrera RS was his response to the question of “how do we go racing without developing a new car or spending any real money?” The 911 was coming up on ten years old and had already been significantly developed for racing but the RS took things to the next level and was based on a road car, so the racing variant would compete not as a prototype but in the GT class.
RS development was steered by what would make the racing version more competitive, so the program concentrated on weight, power, and aerodynamics. The body was made of thinner steel, soundproofing was removed, and even thinner glass fitted. The bumpers were made of fiberglass, as was the engine lid. Inside the car, the back seats were removed, and lighter carpets were fitted together with plain door panels with leather pull releases and basic plastic handles sourced from the Fiat 500 of all things.
Mechanically, the changes were surprisingly few: the engine was bored from 2.3 liters to 2.7 liters, which was achieved with thin walled cylinders with a Nikasil coating that was pioneered in the 917. The rest of the engine was more or less unchanged from the standard 911S. The suspension was upgraded with Bilstein shocks, stiffer roll bars, and wider rear wheels, which required flared rear wheel arches. The car was capable of a remarkable .91g of lateral acceleration, the first Porsche to exceed .9g, an astronomical figure in the day.
Lastly, the aerodynamics were tweaked. The front bumper was an evolution of the 1972 911S item, which reduced lift by directing air around the car instead of underneath it, while the rear tail, called burzel in German (“ducktail”) was the first tail ever fitted to a 911 and was extremely effective. Ordinarily, reducing lift comes with the undesirable effect of increasing drag, but the burzel actually reduced both, decreasing lift by an impressive 71% at speed and slightly reducing the coefficient of drag at the same time.
These changes to make the RS were relatively incremental, and most importantly, they were inexpensive to make. Porsche needed to sell 500 examples in order for the car to be eligible to race in Group 4, so they priced it at 33,000DM, just 1500DM more than the 911S. Even with such a marginal price increase, Porsche’s sales team was worried that they wouldn’t be able to sell the required 500 cars, and thus made executives promise to buy them.
They were thoroughly wrong. The first 500 cars sold out within a week of the end of the Paris Motor Show at which the car was launched, as did the second and third batches of 500 cars. Ultimately 1,580 examples were built.
The whole point of this car was to go racing, and it did that extremely well. The racing version of the car, the RSR, basically cleaned up the GT class (the class for cars based on street cars) in the 1973 and 1974 seasons, winning all but one race both years on both sides of the Atlantic.
By the way, the reason that the car didn’t win the GT class at one race in 1973 is that it was busy winning the prototype class. That’s because at the first race of the year, the 24 Hours of Daytona, the car did not yet have the homologation papers that it needed to race as a production car. So, it had to run with the all-out prototypes, all of which broke, and so at the car’s very first time out, not only did a 911 beat all the other GT cars, it won outright against the pure racing prototypes.
The engine was expanded from 2.8 to 3.0 liters partway through 1973, and for the 1974 model year, a revised RSR appeared to coincide with 1974 model year bodyshell updates for the standard 911 production. The 1974 car was produced as an “evolution” version of the 1973, requiring a much lower production volume for the car to be homologated.
In October of 1973, Roger Penske took delivery 15 of special 1974 cars in Riverside California, which had been built to his order. He acquired the cars to participate in the first ever International Race of Champions (IROC), which was actually a series of four races, three at Riverside in late October and the final race at Daytona in February of 1974. The cars would be driven by a dozen of the best racing drivers in the world, hailing from different racing disciplines including Indy, Can-Am, NASCAR, and Formula 1. The Riverside races each consisted of a dozen cars while three cars would sit out as practice cars.
The mechanical specification of the IROC cars was a hybrid of the 1974 Carrera RS 3.0 road car and that car’s racing variant, the RSR. The cars used bolt-on Fuchs alloy wheels, 9” in the front and 11” in the rear, like the 1973 RSR, rather than the even wider center-lock wheels used on the 1974 RSR. The remainder of the chassis, in addition to the engine, was consistent with the 1974 RSR specification.
All 15 cars were mechanically identical but were finished in different colors so that they could be easily distinguished on TV because the final race, at Daytona in February of 1974, would be telecasted by ABC, in color of course. Rather than the familiar Carrera script on the sides of the cars, bold Porsche lettering was applied, which was also placed on the front and rear of the car for the benefit of American television viewers. Porsche’s engineers carefully tuned each car’s engine and chassis to deliver similar power outputs, handling characteristics, and grip levels in order to make the playing field as level as possible. In this, the first ever IROC, the drivers raced Porsches because they were the best off the shelf race cars then available, although in every subsequent year, IROC always used American cars. The final IROC race occurred in 2006.
This particular car bears serial number 0124 and raced in two of the four 1974 IROC races, both of which it won. Its first victory was in the hands of George Follmer at Riverside, and its second win was with Mark Donohue the following day, also at Riverside. Seven of the 15 cars were put up for sale, while the other eight returned to Germany for additional fettling and adjustments in anticipation of the final race at Daytona on Valentine’s Day of 1974. When the cars arrived in Florida, Al Holbert and Peter Gregg spent about a week shaking the cars down before the race.
At Daytona, this car did not compete; it was initially built as a spare but raced twice at Riverside when other cars dropped out for various reasons. Upon the conclusion of the final IROC race at Daytona in February of 1974, this car was sold to Al Holbert and repainted blue. This was an especially important car for Holbert because it represented one of his earliest turns at professional racing, having started as a mechanic working for Roger Penske, including on George Follmer’s Lola T70. Although Holbert would go on to win the IMSA Camel GT championship five times and also won the “triple crown of endurance racing” (Sebring, Daytona, and Le Mans) twice, none of that had happened yet when he acquired this car.
He raced it for the remainder of 1974, winning at Road Atlanta in April, Lime Rock in May, and Mid-Ohio in June. At the Daytona finale in December, he got second overall in the car. In total, he raced the car nine times in the 1974 season. While testing in Michigan in December of 1974, it was substantially damaged when he rolled the car. The mechanical parts that could be used were removed and installed in a new body shell ordered from Porsche (together with the components from a 1973 RSR Holbert’s co-driver Milt Mintner had crashed the previous year) and this became the car that Holbert campaigned in the 1975 season.
The remains of this car, 0124, were set aside at Forest Grove Autobody in Warrington, Pennsylvania for decades until they were purchased, together with the documentation and rights for the serial number, in 2008 by a German collector who used it as the basis to restore the car. This colorful history is typical of vintage race cars and critically, this car has clear and unambiguous history and there are no alternate claims to this serial number.
The car has been extremely correctly restored and is in beautiful condition. It runs and drives extremely well, having been recently serviced by Retro Sport in Richmond, California. A new set of Michelin TB15 tires was fitted at this time. The car is very exciting but fully streetable. The engine is in a sensible state of tune suited to road use, but absolutely rips when summoned. The clutch is sporty but manageable and the entire experience is thrilling. An on board fire system is installed and car could be prepared to race relatively easily (a list of required work is available).
This is an exceptional opportunity to acquire one of the most exciting Porsches ever made. Perfectly streetable but also quite significant from a motorsports perspective, this exceptional 911 is a thrilling but usable artifact from one of the marque’s most exciting periods.
