From modern ECUs to dual-clutch transmissions, this race car proved it all
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
In some ways like the 917 before it, the 956 took advantage of rules in a way the creators of Group C didn't anticipate.
Upvote
15
(15
/
0)
I don’t know how I missed it in my earlier years, but I just became aware of the 1988 Shell/Dunlop 962c livery a few months ago. Quite handsome in a “clean” and “classic” sense if you ask me. Check it out if you haven’t ever come across it yourself. It’s easily found now days with a Google image search.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
The car that Porsche claimed had so much down force that it may have been possible to drive it upside down. Go to the Porsche museum in Stuttgart and you can see one hanging from the ceiling. Very cool car.
Upvote
9
(9
/
0)
Photon_plumber
Ars Tribunus Militum
The Peterson? Sure, twist my arm. I'll go if necessary*
*I could be on my deathbed and would never refuse a trip there. Their static collection is amazing, as is the rotating collection.
*I could be on my deathbed and would never refuse a trip there. Their static collection is amazing, as is the rotating collection.
Upvote
7
(8
/
-1)
What's the distinction between cylinders and barrels, or should that be cylinder heads?
Upvote
17
(17
/
0)
Upvote
5
(6
/
-1)
When I begin my career as an obscenely wealthy rich person a 962C would be on my list to go historic racing in. I love the short tail cars, they just look so brutal. A massive turbo, manual shifter, and gobs of mechanical grip is just a recipe for fun.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
Mulsannes Corner has a pretty great breakdown on them.
http://www.mulsannescorner.com/Porsche962.html
http://www.mulsannescorner.com/Porsche962.html
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
Upvote
13
(13
/
0)
Upvote
17
(18
/
-1)
In '85 three of us took off for Sanoma from the Presidio of Monterey just to get out of the barracks for a weekend. We got to the track after dark on Friday night and kind of blindly set up our borrowed GP Small Army tent next to some fence up on the hill above the track.
We enjoyed the races on Saturday, but on Sunday morning woke up to one VERY angry man stomping around outside our tent. I'm not sure we really understood what he was going on about except he wasn't at all happy about where this dilapidated Army tent was sitting (we found out after we got there that it was kind of missing a pole so we used the fence.)
He was replaced a few minutes later by a much more reasonable individual who explained (to three groggy, somewhat hungover soldiers) that the fenced in area was a Hospitality area and would we please move our tent?
Well, of course, we're leaving right after the race anyway and so we took it down. The man returned and gave us three VIP passes to the fenced in area that was being run by Lowenbrau.
We were given all the free food and beer we could consume and were introduced to and took pictures with Al Holbert (already a legend at the time) next to the replica Lowenbrau Porsche 956 they had there.
I've been to a few races over the years, but that certainly was the best one.
We enjoyed the races on Saturday, but on Sunday morning woke up to one VERY angry man stomping around outside our tent. I'm not sure we really understood what he was going on about except he wasn't at all happy about where this dilapidated Army tent was sitting (we found out after we got there that it was kind of missing a pole so we used the fence.)
He was replaced a few minutes later by a much more reasonable individual who explained (to three groggy, somewhat hungover soldiers) that the fenced in area was a Hospitality area and would we please move our tent?
Well, of course, we're leaving right after the race anyway and so we took it down. The man returned and gave us three VIP passes to the fenced in area that was being run by Lowenbrau.
We were given all the free food and beer we could consume and were introduced to and took pictures with Al Holbert (already a legend at the time) next to the replica Lowenbrau Porsche 956 they had there.
I've been to a few races over the years, but that certainly was the best one.
Upvote
35
(35
/
0)
As a Copenhagen'er I am interested in the history behind "1 Copenhagen". Never heard about it before, tried to google with few hits, so can anybody point to information about it?
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
From Wikipedia
This was the key. Anyone could go to Porsche, hand over some cash (a few hundred grand) and have a car that was capable of winning at the very highest level, including winning Le Mans.
What other **major** manufacturer in Sportscars/WEC would do that? Jaguar? Mercedes? Peugeot? Toyota? Audi? Nope.
An incredible move by Porsche for which they don't get enough credit.
* Joest won Le Mans in 1984 and 1985 with a privateer 956
Joest would later go onto help run Audi's hugely successful Le Mans programme with the R8/R15/R18
This was the key. Anyone could go to Porsche, hand over some cash (a few hundred grand) and have a car that was capable of winning at the very highest level, including winning Le Mans.
What other **major** manufacturer in Sportscars/WEC would do that? Jaguar? Mercedes? Peugeot? Toyota? Audi? Nope.
An incredible move by Porsche for which they don't get enough credit.
* Joest won Le Mans in 1984 and 1985 with a privateer 956
Joest would later go onto help run Audi's hugely successful Le Mans programme with the R8/R15/R18
Upvote
15
(15
/
0)
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
Joest has more Le Mans wins than any other team, including the Porsche factory!
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
Could you elaborate, for a non race enthusiast (but curious) audience?
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
Cadillac and Acura DPi cars in IMSA are the only ones that come to mind. But those are essentially modified and branded LMP2s and not bespoke customer cars from an OEM.
The LMP1 hybrids were too expensive and complex for a private team to campaign, which makes me wonder if/how they would be run in a vintage race.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
For one thing, the driver's feet were forward of the front axle to optimize weight distribution.
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
Missed slogan opportunity. "Coke: it gives you that racing sensation!"
On a related not, the “Coke is it” has never made much sense to me. I’m not a native English speaker but the phrasing just seems off to me. I’m guessing it’s supposed to be equivalent to the (reasonably) modern day colloquial “x is the shit” but the Coke slogan still seems weird.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
Missed slogan opportunity. "Coke: it gives you that racing sensation!"
On a related not, the “Coke is it” has never made much sense to me. I’m not a native English speaker but the phrasing just seems off to me. I’m guessing it’s supposed to be equivalent to the (reasonably) modern day colloquial “x is the shit” but the Coke slogan still seems weird.
I think that's mostly right. Keep in mind in American English, there's the expression "It Girl" which generally refers to a young, attractive female actor who is highly sought after. Sometimes the person is a model or other celebrity, but the grammatical/semantic formulation is similar to "Coke is it" -- which translates in modern verbiage to "Coke is the shit" except of course, Coke will never embrace that marketing campaign slogan, however much fun it would be to see them try!
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
well, i'm not the original responder, but when it comes to racing history pedantry, i'm always game!
first, lets start with the 917. now, if you've seen 'ford vs. ferrari' you kinda have seen the first half of the story. the other half was that the FIA (racing sporting federation) tweaked the regs a bit to curb ford's dominance. they reverted to the GT40 Mk. I and still won two more times ('68-'69). the '69 race at lemans featured a literal duel to the finish between a GT40 and porsche 908 (nominal predecessor of the 917) that featured three lead changes on the very last lap.
by that time, porsche had decided to move up from the smaller classes that it was dominating to take on the big boys in the prototype category. now, remember that rule tweak i mentioned? the rule specified that to homologate a car for the 'group 6' specification, it would need 25 examples built. the underlying idea here was that it would return the class to the type of semi-road legal cars that had dominated endurance racing in the early '60 (think of cars like the ferrari 250 GTO) rather than the very-low number prototypes like the ford GT40 Mk. IV. porsche pretty much just turned that whole concept right on it's ear by building 25 917s before it even raced (and were completely proud of showing them all off - google something like 'porsche 917 homologation' and you'll likely find the photo of them all lined up. ferarri, by contrast was prone to use shenanigans to convince the commissioners that they had created X number of examples of a certain model.)
long story short, 917 dominates european endurance racing utterly in 1970-71, ferrari pretty much gets crushed and leave endurance racing altogether (they had utterly dominated lemans from the late 50's to mid 60s) and haven't really been back since (just because there was a dallara with a ferrari engine that raced a few times in '90s doesn't make it a factory effort.) the FIA does what the FIA usually does in the face of porsche screwing with them and alter the regs to pretty much outlaw the 917. porsche hangs a pair of turbos on an open-cockpit 917, eventually resulting in the 917/30 that raced with something like 1300hp in the CanAm series here in the US - until that, too, got outlawed. exit the 917.
interlude: the forgotten hero in all this is the porsche racers from the mid-70s. it all started with the 934, which was basically turbo charged 911 made for racing in the group 4 category. porsche engineers figured that bigger tires would help them significantly and so the 934 got the most massive fender flares perhaps ever seen. but hey, if we can do that with a quasi-production model, why not try it with a semi-prototype? and thus the 935 was created for group 5. the 935 may well be the most numerically abundant prototype ever created and most likely has won the most races world wide of any car in the post-war era. people were still racing them competitively in hillclimbs and whatnot well into the '90s, so lets not dwell too much on that - except for one thing: the original 935 had the headlights mounted int he fenders same as any other 911, really. until some enterprising porsche engineers realized that they didn't have to have them configured like that. so the headlights went in the front valance and the 'flachbau' porsche was with it's sloped nose was born. if you see a picture of a 935, that's usually what it looks like. so, with group 4 and 5 more or less cornered (porsche was in the business of selling racecars - and boy, business was good back then.) a few enterprising minds turned their eyes to group 6 once more. using a leftover tubeframe from the 917, the (ridiculously powerful for it's era) braking system from the 917/30 and the engine from the 934/935, the 936 was born and yeah, lets just say wins at lemans an elsewhere soon followed.
the common thread here is the 911-derived turbo engine that porsche used in all three models and subsequently developed further for their initial foray into indy (which was aborted because USAC - perhaps rightfully - feared the specter of porsche dominance so much, they basically tweaked the regs to ban the porsche engine before it ever raced) and ultimately was developed even further for use in the 956 and then the 962.
now, to wrap things up - what made the 956/962 another one of those cars that kinda broke all the rules? well, group C, which finally replaced group 6 in the early '80s was essentially a fuel consumption formula. cars under it's aegis were supposed to be limited to no more 100l fuel tanks and no more than 5 fuel stops per 1000km raced. the idea was to curb the explosion of power that the sport had seen in the waning days of group 5/6 (where some 935s were racing with north of 700-800hp.) and in theory, this was a good idea, really. i mean, ford built a group C challenger (the C100) at this same time using the venerable Ford Cosworth DFV formula 1 engine as it's base and it (imo) kinda-sorta was the type of car the FIA had in mind. lancia f.e. exploited a small loophole in the 1982 regs that let non-group C cars race alongside the group C cars and thus had pretty decent success versus the frugal 956 because they were racing with just as much horsepower that they could squeeze out of their engines, not having to worry about the fuel consumption rules. when they switched to their proper group C challenger (the LC2), their successes greatly diminished. so what made the 956 work the regs in such a way as to trounce all comers? well, the article points it out - the engine management system gave them completely unparalleled fuel efficiency while at the same time allowing them to have more horsepower than their direct competitors. on top of that, the engine was a very mature design and pretty reliable (something that couldn't be said for the ferrari-sourced engine in the LC2, though it would later be used to great effect in both the 288 GTO and F40.) the real hammer blow, though, was that they sold it pretty much anyone who was willing to pony up 230,000 deutschmarks (they did not do this with the 936 - only four were ever made.) this pretty much insulated them from FIA tomfoolery because if they did, they would overnight lose pretty much 90% of the field in any given race.
the 956/62 was really the last of it's kind in that regard. sura, companies like dallara supply cars to the entire field in a great number of series, but that's due to the series effective adopting a spec-chassis/one-make only rule. the 956/962 was simply an effective option for thise who wanted it and porsche was more than happy to sell them in great numbers (which, it has to be said, they did not do for either the GT-1 or the 919 in subsequent decades.) eventually, some people did rise to the challenge of taking on the porsche racing hegemony (first jaguar and then mercedes-benz after it more or less was shamed back into racing by peter sauber building a significant challenger using an off-the-shelf MB engine) the 956/962 thus passed into history.
btw, there are literally dozens of really nice liveries for the 956/962 well worth the google.
Upvote
19
(19
/
0)
The only unbreakable racing records are the ones where they change/destroy the track/law/rulebook afterwards.
Lasting 35 years was an amazing achievement. Unbreakable ? You keep using that word ...
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
Missed slogan opportunity. "Coke: it gives you that racing sensation!"
On a related not, the “Coke is it” has never made much sense to me. I’m not a native English speaker but the phrasing just seems off to me. I’m guessing it’s supposed to be equivalent to the (reasonably) modern day colloquial “x is the shit” but the Coke slogan still seems weird.
I think that's mostly right. Keep in mind in American English, there's the expression "It Girl" which generally refers to a young, attractive female actor who is highly sought after. Sometimes the person is a model or other celebrity, but the grammatical/semantic formulation is similar to "Coke is it" -- which translates in modern verbiage to "Coke is the shit" except of course, Coke will never embrace that marketing campaign slogan, however much fun it would be to see them try!
The phrasing makes sense from a colloquial perspective. "It" is generally used as a pronoun in place of a known quantity - "The bookcase fell over and now it is broken" - or as an abstract subject - "it is raining outside".
In this instance, Coke is using "it" as a pronoun for a known quantity, except that they haven't specified that known quantity. It (the unknown known quantity) could be "There is only one "best" beverage in the world, and Coke is it". Or "You know that thing you've been searching for all of your life that provides you with a sense of fulfillment? Coke is it". Leaving it open-ended is a pretty good marketing tool, it allows the consumer to fill in the blanks about whatever "it" is.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
The cylinder consists of a head and a barrel, so yes, as you say, cylinder heads are liquid cooled while cylinder barrels are air cooled in this design.
Side note: the first Porsche race car to have this setup is the 1978 "Moby Dick" 935 variant, which pushed interpretation of Group 5 rules to truly extreme limits.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
It became very reliable, but the very first system wasn’t reliable straight away.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
One of the promising parts of the '23 LMDh class is that customer cars (or at least non-full-works efforts) will be a part of the mix, and eligible for overall wins (as long as the BoP isn't screwed up).
Customer programs require commitment from the OEM to do right, and some of them (cough, GM) just don't embrace them as much as others.
Most typical water-cooled engines have two major components -- a monolithic block casting which forms the crankcase, and incorporates the cylinder bores and the coolant passages. Bolted to it are the cylinder head(s), containing the valvetrain. In overhead cam engines, the camshafts that operate that valves are in the heads, not the block.
The old air-cooled VW and Porsche engines are a bit different, in that the crankcase, cylinders, and cylinder heads are all separate components, and bolted together.
Instead of operating within bores in large hunk of metal, they are contained within individual cylinder barrels, finned for air-cooling. That's where the distinction comes from.
As an aside, there is a converse to this, monobloc engines, where they're all part of a integral unit.
I remember the Camel GT days fondly, as a fan of the Holbert/Bell #14 Lowenbrau Special, with engines built in Southern California by Andial.
Sadly, Holbert was killed in a plane crash, but before that, he served as director of PMNA, and Holbert Racing produced an American-built 962, chassis HR1.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
The Audi factory had a lot to do with that. No discredit to Joest, they run a tight ship.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
Absolute legends, the customer 962 was to 80s GT racing what the Cosworth DFV powered March or Lola was to early 70s F1, the basis for any private team with reasonable money to field a competitive car.
From almost 40 years later it's surprising how analog these cars are , having far more in common with a 917 than a 919. These are also beautiful cars with far more balanced proportions than modern LMP cars with their tall cockpits and flattened bodies.
I wish Gulf had sponsored at least one 962 team because they would have looked great in blue and orange.
From almost 40 years later it's surprising how analog these cars are , having far more in common with a 917 than a 919. These are also beautiful cars with far more balanced proportions than modern LMP cars with their tall cockpits and flattened bodies.
I wish Gulf had sponsored at least one 962 team because they would have looked great in blue and orange.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
Thank you for this. Rather substantial first post ;-)
Long time 962 fan here. Had the privilege to see it and the 919 at Laguna seca at Rennsport reunion a few years ago. The 962 is by far the best looking race car of all time imho.
Thanks for the article Jonathan!
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Beautiful cars. The 962 was my favorite back in the late 1980s when I discovered the IMSA Series on TV. I often wondered how the Nissan ZXT was so dominant and powerful compared to the Porsche 962 and Jaguars. I guess it all came down to better aerodynamics and technology.
Didn’t the IMSA series try to even the field by restricting total weight of the cars and using restrictor plates on turbos? The Group C cars in Europe were limited by amount of fuel they could use per race (I think?). Why doesn’t modern day NASCAR or even formula 1 go back to something like this? Allowing teams to use whatever hell kind of engine they want to use as long as the car meets a certain standard, spec, or whatever. It would certainly make NASCAR much more interesting.
Didn’t the IMSA series try to even the field by restricting total weight of the cars and using restrictor plates on turbos? The Group C cars in Europe were limited by amount of fuel they could use per race (I think?). Why doesn’t modern day NASCAR or even formula 1 go back to something like this? Allowing teams to use whatever hell kind of engine they want to use as long as the car meets a certain standard, spec, or whatever. It would certainly make NASCAR much more interesting.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)