MOTORSPORT - Device & Conquer

Rom conception its road-car roots were obvious, a familiar sculpture cloaked with bolt-on extras typical of many 1970s racing cars. But it didn't remain that way for long. Notionally derived from the standard 911, Porsche's 935 soon became a sleeker, more dramatic alternative - linchpin of the company's World Championship for Makes challenge. It was a winner in its first season, 1976, and scored its final major victory in 1984, at Sebring. Between times it notched up countless outright and class wins, a couple of world titles, a raft of IMSA honours and one outright Le Mans success. We spoke to a number of prominent drivers about 935 memories and their thoughts are gathered on the following pages. First, though, we approached the car's architect Norbert Singer. "The 935 is perhaps a little bit forgotten in Porsche's sports car racing history," Singer says. "It was important for us because it was competing in the World Championship of Makes, so it was really representing the name of Porsche. "The Group 5 regulations of the time created a nice playground for an engineer because of the freedom allowed. If you looked at the rules, they suggested you had to have a car that looked like the road version with wider fenders and tyres. We started very conservatively for 1976. But if you really read the regulations closely, you could do a lot more. That's what we did step by step and is how we ended up with the 'Moby Dick' car in 1978. "We knew these 'special production' rules were coming, which is why we developed the 911 Carrera RS Turbo in 1974 and ran it in the prototype class that season. The new class was delayed until 1976, so we stopped racing at the end of the year and concentrated on development of the first 935. "We won the championship in the first season, but it was a big battle with BMW. There was a clarification in the rules and we were told that the spoiler from the road car had to be fitted to the racer. Our intercooler was mounted on top of the engine and we had to go from an air-air to an air-water intercooler, and develop it in just a few weeks. That gave us some problems in the middle of the season, which meant we had to win at Watkins Glen to have a chance of the championship in the last race at Dijon. "Perhaps my favourite memory was the development of the small-capacity 'baby' 935 for the German DRM championship. We were competing in the over 2-litre capacity class and, more often than not in 1977, we were racing alone. Ford and BMW were racing in the under 2-litrc class and they started saying in the German newspapers that Porsche should come and join them, because that was where the real racing was going on. "Dr Ernst Fuhrmann, our boss at Porsche, made the decision that we should do a small 1.4-litre turbo that would put us in the 2-litrc class and the press department suggested that we should do the Norisring event. The engine didn't rev very well because we didn't have time to do the mapping properly, but the car was light. The limit was 735kg and we were down at 715, but because we didn't want our competitors to know that we ballasted it by pouring molten lead into the longitudinal support frames. It's still like that in the museum today. "Norisring was a disaster, but a few weeks later at Hoclcenheim Jacky Ickx dominated the class and finished second overall. It was a race of nearly 45 minutes and we were nearly 60sec ahead of the second-placed BMW. So Dr Fuhrmann came up and said, 'Now we have shown them, we stop'." That was a domestic success, but the bottom line is that Singer had taken what was essentially a 12-year-old road car and overseen its conversion into a world-beater.