Kremer K3 and Other Famous Le Mans-Spec Porsches for the Street

Car and Driver

12 hours ago

The 963 RSP is just the latest in a long line of Le Mans-spec Porsches taking to the public roads.
Whether it's the roar of a flat-12 or the hiss of turbocharged boost, these cars are monstrously powerful.
Here are three of the best to escape the bounds of the Circuit de la Sarthe.
Part of the great charm of the Circuit de la Sarthe, where the 24 Hours of Le Mans is held each year, is that sections of the course are actually public roads. You see the top-level endurance racing monsters roaring around, the twilight of early dawn just beginning, and you can't help but wonder what it would be like if one of these beasts should escape the circuit and be driven on the road. It's a thrilling thought, and it seems to happen pretty consistently.
The latest Le Mans race car for the road is the Porsche 963 RSP built specially as a one-off for Roger Penske. It's a wonderful machine, but it does come with an asterisk, as driving it in France is restricted to a set route. How street-legal it'll be back in the United States is up for some debate, though someone like Roger Penske has pretty effective leverage.
Porsche
And this isn't the first time a Le Mans-grade Porsche has been released onto the road. In fact, the 963 RSP is part of something of a tradition of racing-spec Stuttgart endurance racers hitting the public tarmac. Here's a look at three times it has happened before.
Count Rossi's Porsche 917K
In 1974, Count Gregorio Rossi di Montelera arrived at the factory gates of Porsche with an unusual request. One year earlier, Porsche had released the monstrously powerful 917/30 as the final iteration of the 917 available, and the automaker was moving into experimenting with a different chassis for racing. Might one of those old racing 917s be available for conversion to street specifications?
Porsche
Yes, one was: specifically, test chassis 030, as used for shaking down the then-new anti-lock braking systems. It had qualified in an Austrian endurance race but had been sitting around in storage since then. Porsche removed the fins and fitted a huge muffler to try to keep the 5.0-liter flat-12 to a bearable roar, the interior was covered in tan leather, and side mirrors were added.
Porsche
Were the European authorities ready to accept this barely modified racing machine as street-legal fare? They were not. Instead, Count Rossi somehow managed to talk officials in Alabama into sending him a registration as an antique vehicle. So-equipped, he hopped in the car and drove a 620-hp, sub-2000-pound race car from Stuttgart to Paris. What a hero.
Walter Wolf's Kremer K3 Le Mans
Speaking of heroes, the 1979 running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans was abuzz with the presence of actor and racer Paul Newman in the pits. Part of the Dick Barbour racing team campaigning a turbocharged 935, Newman very nearly won the race, but a stuck wheel nut meant a second-place finish. The winning car was a Porsche 935 prepared by the Kremer brothers of Cologne, Germany.
Kremer Racing
That same year saw Walter Wolf winding down his F1 racing efforts and looking for new adventures. If you've not come across Wolf before, he's basically the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World, but for real. He came up from post-war poverty to multimillionaire status, starting as a diver on deep-sea oil rigs. He once won a Ferrari on a handshake bet with Enzo on the outcome of the 1977 Monaco Grand Prix. He's the reason the Lamborghini Countach got its wing and huge rear tires. He even had his own cologne.
After owning a series of prototype Countach models, Wolf saw the results of the '79 Le Mans and thought one of those 935 K3s sounded like a pretty good commuter. So he commissioned one, complete with a full leather interior and air conditioning. It rode higher than the factory racers and ran on shaved wet-weather tires rather than full slicks. It ran a turbocharged flat-six that made 740 horsepower at 8000 rpm.
Kremer Racing
Eight years before the Ferrari F40 debuted, the Kremer K3 went 210 mph on the unrestricted autobahn. Wolf said that he used to have a small aircraft fly ahead with spares when he drove between Cologne and his home in the south of France, as it would burn through a set of rear tires on the trip.
Schuppan Porsche 962LM
In 1984, Australian/British racing driver Vern Schuppan won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Porsche 956. At the same time, he won the All Japan Endurance Championship in, you guessed it, Japan. Soon enough, he had set up his own racing team and was building a carbon-fiber variant of the 962, the 956's successor. One day, a Japanese racing enthusiast inquired if a road-legal version might be possible. It was, and here it is.
Boutsen Classic Cars
Built in 1991, the 962LM received a carbon-fiber chassis and used a turbocharged flat-six with quad cams and four valves per cylinder. It made around 600 horsepower, slightly detuned from the racing variant but plenty for punting its approximately 2000-pound curb weight down a billiard-table-smooth Japanese freeway.
Boutsen Classic Cars
Schuppan planned to sell multiples of the 962LM and the more GT-styled 962CR that followed, but the financial state of things in the early 1990s was more than a little wobbly. A handful were built, and this 1991 example was quite famously pictured parked up on street plates in front of one of Japan's ubiquitous Family Mart convenience stores. Pure Le Mans, totally street legal.
Brendan McAleer
Contributing Editor
Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He grew up splitting his knuckles on British automobiles, came of age in the golden era of Japanese sport-compact performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between humanity and machinery, whether it is the racing career of Walter Cronkite or Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki's half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his young daughters how to shift a manual transmission and is grateful for the excuse they provide to be perpetually buying Hot Wheels. Read full bio