Car of the Week: This Ultra-Rare Porsche 911 Racer Could Fetch $3.5 Million at Auction
A highlight of Tennessee’s 2024 Chattanooga Motorcar Festival, now in its fifth year, will certainly be the Broad Arrow Auctions sale associated with it. On October 12, a wide array of collector cars will cross the block, the most notable of which is one of the very rarest of the Porsche 911 variants ever made. Known internally as the Type 954 SC RS, this example is the last of just 21 produced by Porsche Motorsport to homologate the model for FIA Group B rally competition.
Also called the 911 “Evolutionsserie,” the 911 SC RS was built for racing in the spirit of its predecessors, the 1964 904 GTS and 1967 911 R—all of which could be registered for highway use (unlike most competition cars), as each was required to be street legal in order to connect to off-road rally stages via public roads.
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What appears to be a plain-Jane 911 at first glance quickly reveals surprises, like Turbo bodywork that uses lighter aluminum for the doors, front fenders, and hood. Then there’s the fiberglass bumpers, thinner glass, and lack of soundproofing. An aluminum skid plate and 935-style “lollipop” seats also allude to the model variant’s race-focused intent, as do the brakes derived from Porsche’s 917 race cars.
Every effort was made to reduce weight, and this Porsche 911 SC RS tips the scales at just 2,160 pounds. Its heart is a mechanically fuel-injected 3.0-liter flat-six engine, delivering between 250 hp and 270 hp, and featuring Bosch-Kugelfischer fuel injection first used on Porsche’s Carrera 6 sports racing prototype. Almost 600 pounds lighter than a civilian-issue 911 SC, the SC RS hits 60 mph from a standstill in just 4.9 seconds.
Of the very few produced, some were allocated to the Rothmans Porsche Rally Team and Dave Richards Engineering (Prodrive), with others going to private collections. This example, the very last made, was initially allocated to South African importer Lindsay Saker, but ended up with Tycho Christian van Dijk, whose racing team prepared the car with a hood-mounted rally-light pod, radio equipment, a roof-mounted antenna, and a Jaeger rally computer.
Despite the best intentions to compete in numerous rallies for the 1984 season, the team entered only one event, the Tour de Course, finishing 14th as the highest placed Porsche out of 158 entrants. Van Dijk kept chassis No. 021 for 20 years, during which time the car remained in its original, unaltered condition. The current consignor acquired the car with just 3,094 miles on it. The vehicle’s condition and matching numbers attest to the care bestowed by both owners over the course of four decades, during which time this 911 has accrued only around 3,237 miles in total.
Jürgen Barth, the 1976 winner of Le Mans and former director of Porsche’s Customer Racing Department, was instrumental in the development of the 911 “Evolutionsserie” program in 1983. He was commissioned by the current owner to prepare a report, in which Barth noted the car’s outstanding state of preservation, including its matching-numbers engine and transmission, leaving the impression that “time has stopped because the car is in such original condition.” Destined to be the centerpiece of a serious air-cooled Porsche collection, chassis No. 021 is expected to bring an equally cool minimum of $2.6 million, but has a high-end estimate of $3.5 million.
Click below for more photos of this 1984 Porsche 911 SC RS Gruppe B “Evolutionsserie” race car.
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