Road runner: flat out in the road legal Porsche 963 RSP one-off hypercar

A man wipes the soles of my shoes with a cloth. This isn’t the sort of service you usually get when climbing into a car. But then the Porsche 963 RSP isn’t your usual sort of car. It’s the sort of car where having clean, dry soles matters. You don’t want to be slipping on the brake pedal when you’re howling along at well over three miles a minute and the end of the Mulsanne Straight is fast-forwarding towards you. Nor if an ageing Renault Scenic happened to stumble out of a side turn into your path.

Well that could never happen you’d think, how on Earth would it get past the marshals and the barriers? But in this instance it really could happen, because this is the Porsche 963 RSP. And it’s road legal. This morning it drove around a modest town in northern France – an experience its driver described as “very challenging”. Seeing as this was Timo Bernhard, the man who drove the 919 Hybrid Evo to the fastest ever lap of the Nürburgring, we could chalk this morning’s drive up as “not something a mere mortal should ever attempt”.

I learn why after I post myself in. The thickly padded, softly upholstered seat is a delightful surprise, so too the fragrant whiff of leather. It’s lighter and brighter in here than I expected and I can even see out reasonably well. There’s a cupholder. Aircon. What I can’t see is a button labelled ‘start’.

I’m handed a set of headphones. A voice says, “OK, we are now going to start the car”, and roughly an hour later, having toggled, flicked, clicked, pushed, pulled, pressed and checked, there’s an electric whine and some ‘green for go’ lights have illuminated. People with laptops have been involved. The car had been prewarmed before I got anywhere near it. Now I’ve got to get it rolling, and that means I have to use the hand clutches...

The 963 RSP is a tribute, a second act in one of the great moments from Porsche history: 28 April 1975. Because it was on that day, 50 years ago, that Count Teofilo Guiscardo Rossi di Montelera hopped in his newly street legal 917 at the Porsche race team’s Weissach HQ and drove it the 400 miles back home to Paris. Yes, Count Rossi had decided it would be fun to have a road going 917 – the world needs more people like this – and Porsche, to its massive credit, got on board with this plan.

Rossi’s car was chassis 30, a car that had barely been raced, and was then used as the ABS development mule. Porsche fitted it with mirrors, indicators, exhaust mufflers and a horn, then painted it silver and shipped it out the door. This was, let’s not forget, still an utterly ferocious 600bhp flat 12 Le Mans racer with a 230+mph top speed and a vengeful reputation.

The authorities knew this, so it was denied road registration in Germany, while the French would only consider it if they could crash test it first... This failed to dissuade Count Rossi, although how many dead ends must he have gone down before he wound up getting it registered in Alabama? The US state’s only proviso – a weird one this – was that the car wasn’t allowed to be driven within the state itself.

But it’s a legend, still owned by his family, has never been fully restored, and is apparently still driven from time to time. The Rossi 917 created history. This 963 is merely trading on it. But Porsche hasn’t just gone through the motions here. The temptation must have been there to take a raw racer, paint it silver, stick a tan interior inside and shove it on a show stand. But no, it’s gone through the same process as the 917. And is painted the exact same shade of Martini silver. Actually let’s start with the paint, because this is the first 963 ever to have been painted, all others just wear decals and livery on top of the naked composite bodywork.

It looks utterly alien without logos interrupting the lines. The shape is insectoid, no concession to beauty has been made. A few of the riskier aero flicks have been removed to lessen slicing injuries to pedestrians and the open tops of the wheelarches have been covered with vents. Indicators were already mandated by race regulations, while the headlights have been reprogrammed. A horn was added. Like people won’t have heard you coming.

The finger operated clutches are a pair of paddles below the regular gearchange levers. It’s like playing the accordion behind the steering wheel, as fingers flit up and down the various paddles. The clutch governs the V8, not the e-motor – this is a hybrid remember – so you get rolling on the electric, and once you hit 88... sorry, 25mph, drop the clutch, the engine clatters into life like someone’s detonated a grenade in a nut and bolt factory and you’re off.

The moment you bury the throttle the deafening, gnashing, tuneless metallic rattle hardens and focuses in and the 963 explodes forward. Lights flicker on the race wheel, you pull paddles, vibrations buzz through the chassis, the steering twitches and caught in the midst of all this, your adrenaline spikes as you realise the maximal attention the 963 requires. That’s a twin turbo V8 back there – an engine with real Porsche pedigree. It started life as a 3.4-litre in the super successful RS Spyder LMP car, and after a bit of work (including being enlarged to 4.6-litres) found its way into another hybrid, the 918 Spyder. Around 80 per cent of the components from the road car incarnation are carried directly over to the 963.

Restricted by race regulations power is capped at 680bhp, which doesn’t sound a lot when every other supercar seems to have 1,000bhp. But racing now seems to be the only section of the car industry that realises the benefits of saving weight. Assuming the RSP hasn’t ballooned too far from the 1,030kg race version, we’re looking at about 650bhp/tonne. Which is a better power to weight ratio than a Ferrari SF90, level pegging around the Pagani Utopia and GMA T.50 mark. Plenty, in other words.

But I barely feel the acceleration. Far too occupied by everything else – there’s a level of intensity to this car, and a level of concentration from the driver that puts this in a realm far beyond the most extreme road going hypercars, a sense that the car exists to do one thing extremely well, and that thing is not ‘be entertaining’, ‘create a spectacle’ or ‘drive on a public road’.

Porsche may have tried its best, raising the ride height as far as possible, softening off the DSSV spool dampers, making the hybrid less aggressive, governing the engine to run on pump fuel, but just because it’s not wearing numbers doesn’t mean this leopard has changed its spots. My first two runs up and down at Le Mans airport are a flurry of clutch grabs, noise, flashing dash lights, unnervingly direct steering, brakes that don’t and a locomotive-like turning circle. But then I start to catch up with the car and realise the rest of it is trying to look after me.

The stability is amazing, the precision of the steering and throttle and chassis is like nothing else I’ve experienced

The stability is amazing, the precision of the steering and throttle and chassis is like nothing else I’ve experienced. And the brakes... initially they were so unresponsive I thought there must be yet another clutch in the footwell, but once they had heat in them the power was so immense I was glad to be held in by a harness rather than a three-point seatbelt. Trust and confidence quickly penetrate the initial chaos and frenzy. And not once do my feet slip on the pedals.

I get out thinking it’s only a shame it hasn’t got two seats. Missed opportunity there. But it works, it operates, and circumstances permitting the 963 RSP’s new owner really could take it out and drive it. But so much donkey work is involved in those two italicised words. The need to harness a race team to start and run the car. The need to get the authorities on side. It was tricky enough for Count Rossi in the 1970s, what will it be like for Roger Penske in the 2020s?

The American racing legend is the car’s new owner, his initials form its name. It’s a suitable connection given he has a relationship with Porsche motorsport dating back to 1972 that includes running Mark Donohue in a 917/10 in the awesome Can-Am championship. But the idea this time round came from Porsche, not a wealthy playboy with mischief on his mind. Instead of authenticity, it’s a good bit of PR.

This isn’t a homologation special like the GT1 Straßenversion, it’s a gimmick, a bit of fun, doesn’t really do more than remind people of a very cool chapter in Porsche history. But ask nicely and Porsche might build you one too. Expect to pay maybe £3m. Plus a good tip for the man who dries the soles of your shoes.