“Porsche is displaying its racing cars at the MAK,” they said.
Once again, the engineers had calculated everything perfectly.
Many.
Several.
Two.
Fortunately, neither of them is ordinary. They are two of the greatest fraudsters in human history since Charles Ponzi.
Exhibit 01
36Joest Porsche 962CLook at the flattened white pancake wearing number 36. That is the Joest Porsche 962C, and it exists because somebody tried to ban something.
In 1994, the organisers of Le Mans decided that racing needed to become more relatable. Cars competing in the GT1 class would now have to be based on road-going supercars.
The German engineers studied the new regulations, narrowed their eyes, and reached for the most savage, pure-blooded Group C prototype they had — a machine that had spent years systematically erasing its rivals from racetracks.
They fitted a cheap number plate, threw a carpet onto the floor and explained to the regulators:
horsepower
horsepower
horsepower
The most beautiful part of this bureaucratic insanity is that, because of the FIA’s restrictions, the racing version had to be strangled with air restrictors until it produced only around 600 horsepower.
The road version, meanwhile, had no such limitations. The one sold to eccentric millionaires produced the full 730.
Imagine buying a hypercar for relaxed Sunday drives and discovering that your machine for collecting bread is 130 horsepower more powerful than the one that has just won the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
993 in front.
962 behind.
Angle grinder between.
Beside it stands the number 30 Porsche 911 GT1 Kremer, an example of an even more sophisticated deception.
This time, the fraud was architectural.
To satisfy the same homologation rules, Porsche’s engineers committed what can only be described as a surgical offence.
They took the front section of an ordinary 993-generation Porsche 911, complete with its road-car chassis rails and steel bulkhead.
Then they reached for an angle grinder.
They cut the car in half directly behind the driver and replaced the entire rear section with an architecture descended from the 962 prototype: a mid-engined layout, a bespoke rear subframe and the famous turbocharged flat-six whose bloodline ran all the way back to Group C.
This was not evolution.
It was Frankenstein with the face of a university professor stitched onto the body of a professional assassin, all so that a racing prototype could pretend to be a family coupé.
The fact that this particular car caught fire during a race in 1997 feels less like an accident and more like the inevitable conclusion of the experiment.
There will be no tedious nostalgia here about grass being greener, metal being thicker and men being permitted to smoke beside open fuel tanks.
That is not the point.
These two cars demonstrate a much deeper truth: rules and prohibitions do not suppress human ingenuity. They accelerate it.
The tighter the restrictions and the more despotic the governing body, the more extreme, sinister and brilliant the solutions produced by the people trying to escape them.
Bureaucracy cannot stop progress.
It merely forces engineers to become highly qualified international criminals.
And it is enormously satisfying to watch.
Rules create criminals.
FE/WD