From the July 1991 issue of Car and Driver.
If you’ve got a desperate desire to own a modern, 600-horsepower, Porsche-based street-legal race car and have $1,620,000 to back up this peculiar daydream, the line forms to the right for one of Vern Schuppan’s Porsche 962CRs.
The good news is it will be a very short line in the United States, with room for only seventeen. (If you’ve got $1,620,000, there isn’t any bad news.)
Schuppan, whose resume includes a victory at Le Mans in 1983, a bronze medal at the ’81 Indianapolis 500, and experience on the Formula 1 tour, plans to build 50 of these Team Schuppan 962s. That’s 962, as in Porsche Official Race Car, twice the winner at Le Mans and three times an IMSA season champion.
With all sorts of real and imagined race-cars-for-the-road getting serious ink these days, Schuppan has been doing instead of promising. The 47-year-old Australian has this Le Mans long-tailed 962 licensed and fully certified for the road and, as this is written, is close to completing the first of what is to be a limited series of Team Schuppan 962CRs (the nomenclature is “C” for Group C and “R” for road) on the same basis but with unique “GT” bodywork and all the comfort features one might expect for more than 1.5 million dollars.
For Sale Near You
See all results for used cars for sale near l7n 2x1
Because this project has been commissioned by a Japanese outfit—Art Sport Division, a company that specializes in exotic machinery and is headed by Toshio Terada—most of them will be measured in yen, 220 million or thereabouts. The company says it will sell the first 50 worldwide, with seventeen headed for America.
The red car shown on these pages is also destined for Japan, for the garage of Hiroyuki Miyake, a real-estate executive and Schuppan racing sponsor who wanted a Le Mans racer with the minimum of modifications needed to make it street-legal. A genuine Stuttgart-built 962 (number 962/123), it started life in IMSA with the Primus team. Schuppan rebuilt it as a Group C car with a British-made aluminum honeycomb chassis and took it to Le Mans in 1988, where it was driven by Brian Redman, Jean-Pierre Jarier, and Eje Elgh. It ran sixth for a while and finished tenth. After competing in the Fuji 1000-kilometer race that year, the car was retired. When Schuppan began pondering the notion of a roadgoing 962 some twenty months ago, it was there at the back of the shop, a suitable case for treatment.
This is a real-life racer, currently designated as a 962R, and is the prototype for Team Schuppan’s road rockets, the first of which should roll out the doors in October. The work done on this car will be applied directly to the “CR” street car, which, unlike this “R” model, will have its nose and headlight area smoothed and finished. (Miyake’s enthusiasm has generated two more orders for replicas of this Le Mans car, so Schuppan now has plans to build five of them in addition to the 50 street cars. They will sell for the same price as the more comfortably equipped GT version.)
For Sale Near You
See all results for used cars for sale near l7n 2x1
All of the “production” models will have Schuppan’s own carbon-fiber monocoque chassis, developed for his 962 race cars, and carbon-fiber and Kevlar bodywork instead of the original Porsche panels, which are mostly fiberglass.
Driving a full-spec Group C car on normal roads should not be a problem—if the pavement is smooth. But bringing one into compliance with all of the applicable regulations is something else. Rather more, in fact, than Vern Schuppan and his friend and associate Howden Ganley (another ex-racer from Down Under and the man behind the Tiga race-car company) had thought when they embarked on the venture.
The major task involves the engine. This 962 has a Porsche-built, 24-valve, twin-turbo 2.6-liter engine with water-cooled cylinder heads (later Le Mans cars have displacement of up to 3.0 liters). For the road, it needs to be cleaned, cooled, and quieted down.
A full three-way catalyst system is required in the U.S. and Japan, and if you look down the air-exit ducts on this 962’s tail, two catalytic converters are visible, one on each side. The Bosch Motronic MP 1.2 engine-management system provides the electronic controls needed. Meeting current emissions standards was achieved with relatively little difficulty, while retaining the 962R’s maximum power of 680 horsepower.
The side sponsons of the Group C chassis already have to accommodate three kinds of heat exchange—water and oil radiators as well as turbo intercoolers. And to guard against overheating in traffic, Schuppan had to find room for two big electric fans beneath them, to provide airflow at low speeds. Because of these, and also because the tight cockpit has no opening windows, air conditioning became a must. Schuppan’s team was able to tuck the works of a Sanden air conditioner into the chassis below the passenger door.
By the standards of some race cars, these turbocharged Group C machines are not unduly noisy. When it first ran on the road, this one had what looked to be an undersized single muffler across the back of the car that was fed by two tailpipes. Since these photographs were taken, two more mufflers have been added to the pipes on their way to the common silencer at the rear.
It felt almost weird when this 962 started from cold at the turn of a key and sat happily there, unattended, burbling away at around 1500 rpm. In the good old days, before electronic engine management, such a car would have needed at least five minutes of throttle blipping to keep the plugs clear and prevent stalling. The Porsche noise isn’t music either, not like a Ferrari V-12 or even a Cosworth V-8; it has a rather flat, mechanical sound. But the tone of the roadgoing 962 is authentic—it’s just muted.
From inside, the exhaust can’t be heard at all. Which is not to say that all is quiet; the harsh clatter of camshafts and valve gear and the whirring of belt drives from just behind your head would make earplugs desirable for a long journey. Schuppan considered fitting some sound insulation but concluded that it would not square with the customer’s desire to drive something as near as possible to a Le Mans racer.
He promises that the 962CR will be quieter. It will use a somewhat less highly
strung twelve-valve 3.4-liter IMSA motor but with twin turbochargers, developing about 600 horsepower. Entirely air-cooled, it will be less complicated than the Le Mans specification. The 962CR engines are being prepared by Alwin Springers Andial Corporation in the U.S.
The 962CR is also designed to be somewhat easier to live with. We were warned that the Le Mans car is not all that easy to drive. Actually, in terms of operating the controls, the only tricky one is the clutch—a stiff, single-plate, sudden-engaging competition piece. Race drivers know that you can’t feather the pedal: it’s in, or it’s out, and the revs had better be correct as you shift from gear to gear.
The five-speed gearbox has synchromesh—well, Porsche did more or less invent the current variety—and the shifter, at your right hand, works easy enough except when engaging first. That’s a pull down toward you and can require two hands. Second through fifth gear are in a conventional H-pattern.
No one who has driven a racing car would be surprised by the feel of the brake pedal, especially the effort required to operate the massive Alcon calipers. In truth, though, it is not unduly heavy. The steering, however, is much lighter than you might expect—at gentle cruising speed it requires little more than finger pressure. Some delicacy is needed here, as there are only one and a half turns from lock to lock, causing an unschooled driver to overcorrect. The Porsche factory used to fit a slower steering ratio to make the car less nervous on the long Mulsanne straight at Le Mans, and Schuppan thinks that his customers might prefer that.
Drive down a sinuous single-track main road in England, and you can almost imagine pushing through the esses at Le Mans. At anything like normal road speeds, talking about handling isn’t appropriate: It just steers precisely where you point it. On smooth asphalt it feels terrific, but on the ridges of a concrete motorway the suspension is so stiff that it sends shock waves through the hull.
The busy roads of southeast England are no place to set track speeds, because the 962 will send every police radar gun off the scale and a bright-red Group C racer has no place to hide. Pulled over in a Porsche 962, you can’t say, “Officer, there must be some mistake.”
Circumstances and discretion did not allow us to discover the merits of this race car’s true performance. We got up to about 120 mph, which felt hardly different than going 60 mph. A 962 only gets into its stride at 150 mph.
Much less ferocious cars have felt more eager. You know that this one can go on to great and glorious speeds, but you would have to screw yourself up to a racer’s pitch to start from rest strongly enough to beat a serious road-smoker from the traffic lights.
How fast can it go? “How fast do you want to go?” came the reply. Actually, that’s in two parts: It depends on the gearing and turbo boost. For our outing, the shorter of two axle ratios was fitted, so that the maximum speed at the redline would be about 170 mph. With a pukka Le Mans final drive, at least 215 mph
should be attainable. We were running with just 14.5-psi boost, but it can be increased to 34.8 at the twist of a knob behind the gear lever. Schuppan’s engineers predict that the fully equipped road car will accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 3.8 seconds and from 0 to 125 mph in 8.5 seconds.
Schuppan wants to give his customers the opportunity to drive their cars to the track, fit them with stiffer springs, drop the ride height, bolt on some slicks, add some numbers, and go racing. He is even considering a demonstration by entering a 962CR in the Daytona 24 Hours.
In the meantime, he has built up his operation in High Wycombe, some 30 miles west of London, to cope with the transition from racing (Team Schuppan is competing this year in selected Group C events in Europe and Japan) to roadcar manufacture, albeit at a rate of one completed car a month. Some 35 persons are employed on the project. A key appointment was Ray Borrett as vice president of Vern Schuppan Limited. A fellow Australian, Borrett had been in charge of prototypes and special projects at Holden.
If the first examples of the 962CR are produced on schedule in October, they will have arrived ahead of the Jaguar XJ220, the McLaren F1, the Bugatti T110, and all the other claimants as king of the supercars. Porsche decided some time ago not to proceed with a similar project of its own, and Mercedes now seems unlikely to go ahead with its C112 project. So, for the moment, Schuppan’s Porsches, as sold by Art Sport Division of Japan, may be the fastest truly street-legal car in the world. They are certainly the most expensive.
Nothing to See Here
Can’t see when backing up? Just switch on the camera.
Howden Ganley, a former Formula 1 driver and Schuppan’s right-hand man, and I came back from our drive in the 962R with smiles on our faces.
Hell, just being in a Le Mans Porsche on ordinary roads is a special kind of fun. Something bright red that makes a fierce, throaty noise, takes up as much room as a truck but sits no higher than a baby buggy, is guaranteed to get attention, especially in the quiet, respectable villages of Buckinghamshire.
Unwisely perhaps, we set off down a country lane like those you see in old English movies, with chipper chaps in flat hats driving MGs. But when approaching cars saw us come into view, they stopped in their tracks—not, I thought, out of admiration but in real concern that the thing thundering toward them promised to take all the available road space, theirs and ours.