This 911 SC RS Is an Ultra-Rare World Rally Weapon
There are many flavors of Porsche 911, but few are rarer than the 911 SC RS, aka the 911 Evolutionsserie, aka the 954. Lightened, strengthened, and aimed straight at international rally competition in 1984, this more athletic 911 had a short-lived but exciting motorsports career, and Porsche Motorsport built just 21 examples in order to homologate it for the FIA’s infamous Group B category. One of those 21 911 SC RSs (the last one, in fact) is up for auction this month.
By 1984, the loosely regulated (and very fast) Group B category was in its third season as the top class of the World Rally Championship (WRC). The sport was popular, drawing big crowds and big budgets from factory teams. Porsche took a stab at the category not with a dedicated Group B car designed from the ground up, but with a modified version of its bread-and-butter sports car, the 1978–83 911 SC 3.0.
This made sense from a rules standpoint. Group B required the manufacturers to build 200 road-going examples of a car in a 12-month period to homologate the rally version for competition. With fresh designs like the Peugeot 205 T16 or Lancia 037, that meant an added burden of having to screw together 200 expensive, uncomfortable, impractical, scary, and hard-to-sell cars for the public. There was a stipulation in the rules, though, for “evolution” models, where manufacturers could add modifications to an existing car. The required production for evolutions was just 20 units, and since Porsche was already selling 911 SCs by the thousands in the 1980s, the carmaker could just get to work modifying that existing platform.
And modify it they did. Starting with a reinforced, seam-welded, widened body of a 911 Turbo, Porsche Motorsport added aluminum doors, hood, and front fenders. Thinner glass, unique fiberglass front bumpers, and a stripped interior further brought weight down to 2160 pounds—about 600 pounds lighter than a standard 911 SC coupe. Porsche also fitted wider Fuchs wheels, 917-derived brakes, and aluminum roll cage, and an underbody skid plate. The 911 SC’s flat-six retained its 3.0-liter displacement, but lightweight internals and race exhaust allowed it to rev to an 8000-rpm redline, putting power to the rear wheels via a five-speed gearbox and 40 percent locking differential.
Despite all those changes, the 911 SC RS made no waves whatsoever in the WRC. Four-wheel drive was the future, and this was a rear-drive car. What’s more, the more exotic designs from Audi, Lancia, and Peugeot, with their forced induction engines, were just plain faster. Porsche nevertheless found success outside of the WRC, in the notorious multi-week rally raid known as the Paris-Dakar Rally. Porsche won the event in 1984 with a manually controlled four-wheel-drive version of the 911 called the 953, and again in 1986 with the fully developed all-wheel-drive 959.
According to Broad Arrow, five of the original 911 SC RSs were earmarked for the Rothmans Porsche Rally Team and Dave Richards Engineering, while this last one sold to Tycho Christian van Dijk, owner of the Van Dijk Racing Team. While van Dijk had plans to enter a slew of rallies in the 1984 season, he wound up only contesting one event with the car. At the 1984 Tour de Corse (Corsica), they finished in 14th place, nearly two hours behind Markku Alén in the winning Lancia 037. It was, at least, the highest-placed Porsche.
Corsica was both the start and finish of the car’s competition career. That means it never achieved rally glory, but also that it was spared the bumps, bruises, and crash damage that inevitably happen to rally cars. Van Dijk also kept and maintained the car until 2004, so it’s still largely original, and today it is represented with all sorts of inspection reports and documentation, including original route maps from the Tour de Corse.
The 911 SC RS is a somewhat obscure car and merely a brief chapter in Porsche’s long history of racing. But it’s also an exceedingly rare piece of that history. The last time one of these 911s sold at auction was 20 years ago, when a car with some period Belgian regional rally history sold for €156,750 ($199,872 at the time). A lot has happened in the market for old cars, old 911s, and old rally cars since then, however, and today’s collectors go gaga for any air-cooled 911 race car ‘roided up by the factory. That’s why, when this one crosses the block at Broad Arrow’s Chattanooga auction on October 12, it carries an estimate of $2,600,000–$3,500,000.
