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For Dakar, rules have changed fundamentally since the 959 dominated. A car-class Dakar competitor these days is a 100% purpose built, tube chassis race machine with a body shell that looks a bit like the car it represents... Probably less than a dozen parts (mostly cosmetic) that came from the actual production car. As you can see in the photo above, the 959's while I'm sure heavily tweaked by a race department, are pretty much the actual vehicle.
For Baja, I'm sure if SCORE had a class for stock 911s like they do for VWs, they would be pretty competitive. But as you say, values are too high, owners often think driving them in the rain is a sin let alone beating the crap out of them off road racing...
You can turn a fiesta/focus/mazda23456/vw into a rally car for the price of a 996tt and likely will make it run just as good. Hell we once tried turning a cayenne into a mud/dune crawler, turns out i could buy 2 decked out tjs for the money we would have put in.
The point isn't that you can build any car into an off-road rally racer and make it a winner. Clearly that can, and is, done all the time.
The point is that 911s have been use in off-road rallying, and winning them, almost from day one. And that ethos continues to this very day all over the world.
This article states Porsche started selling their first factory built rally kit for the 911 in 1966, 1966.
"Some history: The Porsche 911's first-ever race was the 1965 Monte Carlo rally, entered because Porsche's PR man at the time wanted to show how much the future icon could do. A year later, Porsche began selling an optional rally kit for the 911 that included Recaro seats, a roll bar, and adjustable Koni dampers. Porsche produced factory rally racers until the early 1970s, winning Monte Carlo three times in a row before letting privateers carry the torch so the factory could focus on campaigning in the East Africa Safari. After years of painful lessons, when Porsche took its brand-new 1978 911 SC to the safari, the 3.0-liter flat-six coupe was hours away from winning the race before damaging the suspension, demoting the car to second place. Porsche fans wanted their own replicas, and finding the new 911 to be an affordable option, the SC — built from 1978 to 1983 — went from denoting "Super Carrera" to "Safari Car." "
Last edited by Carlo_Carrera; 11-19-2020 at 02:02 PM.
Rally's are mostly run on fire roads. The Monte Carlo rally was mostly paved roads. That's not off road driving in my book. Off road driving is a trail, not a fire road.
Rally's are mostly run on fire roads. The Monte Carlo rally was mostly paved roads. That's not off road driving in my book. Off road driving is a trail, not a fire road.
Did you even watch the videos? The Mexico 1000 does not run on fire roads, nor does the the East African Safari Rally nor Paris-Dakar. All of the 911 Safari rally videos above take place on off-road trails, not fire roads.
As for your definition of what off-road is the FIA, FIM, WRC, ASO and every other racing organization world wide and the folks involved in it disagree with you.
Last edited by Carlo_Carrera; 11-20-2020 at 10:24 AM.
I really like this 911, but its socially responsible mud flaps are a top shelf addition.
Without question, trucks/Jeeps (especially jacked up) with wide tires and no mud flaps can be hazardous to nice vehicles. My windshield was cracked by a rock thrown by one of these wide-tire vehicles and they were probably 100 yards in front of me (no other vehicles between us.)
11-19-2020, 12:29 PM
