The Porsche 956/962 was quite possibly the greatest sports racing car ever built, absolutely dominating Group C competition in the 1980s. So why is someone debuting a 962 in 1993?
Well, this isn’t a Porsche 962, it’s a Dauer 962, done up by a privateer named John Dauer as a homologation special for GT1 racing, the top class at Le Mans after Group C blew itself up for a variety of reasons.
You see, Porsche built so many 962s for privateers to run at Le Mans that it was basically a GT1 car already, kind of like the GT40 in the late ‘60s.
Again, this was just a Porsche 962 with whatever it needed to be road legal. As such it has the same twin-turbo flat six as the 962 race car, only unrestricted up to 730 horsepower as Dauer claims. Top speed was 251 mph, or 404 km/h, per Dauer.
This was the Dauer’s debut at the 1993 Frankfurt International Motor Show, a video I bumped into while looking up info on something else entirely. Everyone seems to be in a quite cheery mood, with some wonderfully huge bottles of champagne at hand.
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They had every right to be happy. Dauer would run the 1994 24 Hours Of Le Mans and won it outright, making the car a solid contender at the greatest race in the world for a solid decade. Worthy of champagne, I’d say.