Porsche Races Down The Memory Lane With Its 935 Race Car
Porsche used one of its most recent videos to share the glorious history of the brand’s 935/78 racer.
Porsche has kicked off the New Year on a high note. The German company recently managed to dominate JD Power’s Vehicle Dependability Study. The Porsche 911 was honored with the title of ‘The Most Dependable Car’, and the company managed to secure second position overall. It’s no secret that Porsche loves to celebrate its wins, and the Stuttgart-based sports car manufacturer recently did the same with the help of its official YouTube channel.
The company is immensely proud of its motorsport lineage and its career in the grueling 24 hours of Le Mans championship. So it wasn’t surprising that Porsche used one of its most recent videos to share the glorious history of the brand’s 935/78 racer. With 19 victories under its belt, Porsche is one of the most successful teams in the history of Le Mans.
The subject of the video is a racing icon, and its most defining characteristic is the car’s long tail design which earned it the nickname of “Moby Dick”. The moniker was bestowed upon the racing legend by its mechanics, and it was even been adopted by the car’s modern reboot, as a tribute to the Le Mans racer.
Porsche 935’s other defining attribute was its signature flat nose design. The front-end was shaped in this manner to accommodate the race car’s intercoolers and offer space for the oil. The Porsche 935 Moby Dick was supposed to be powered by a water-cooled 3.2-liter flat-six engine, but at the time, regulations mandated that the race car runs an air-cooled motor just like the production 911 of that era.
Porsche hasn’t shied away from the fact that 935 was not the most successful racers that the German sports car manufacturer ever produced, but its instantly recognizable design and quirky nickname earned it celebrity status in the racing world. The modern version of the car is powered by a 3.8-liter twin-turbocharged flat-six motor which produces 700 HP of maximum power.
The powerplant comes mated to a 7-speed PDK gearbox, and the entire ensemble only weighs 3042 lbs. Porsche will only be manufacturing 77 units of this tribute model, and each example will cost almost $814,000(€700,000).