The Porsche 911 Carrera RS is considered by many in the motoring fraternity to be the pinnacle of the 911. Porsche have built many extraordinary cars since 1973 of course, but so far as the 911 goes, the Carrera RS set the bar in both looks and performance.
500 cars were required for Porsche to homologate the 911 Carrera RS for touring car racing in Europe, and it wasn’t known at the time if the company would be able to sell them – they had a price tag well in excess of $10,000 USD and the executives at Porsche weren’t sure the demand for the car existed. They needn’t have worried. The model sold out in less than a week after first being displayed at the Paris Motor Show, and Porsche would go on to build 1590 examples over the course of the production run.
Porsche offered the Carrera RS in two trim packages – Touring and Sport Lightweight. The Touring package included things like carpeting, a radio and other modern amenities whereas the Sport Lightweight variant was a stripped out racing car designed to be just barely road legal.
The list of celebrity owners of the Porsche 911 Carrera RS is too long to list here, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Jamiroquai’s Jay Kay, and Jenson Button are all either owners or former owners – and the list goes on a long way from there.
The performance of the RS (an abbreviation of Rennsport, German for race sport) is impressive, especially when you consider that this is an air-cooled car build in the early years of the ’70s. The 2687cc flat-6 was capable of 210 bhp and 182 ft lbs of torque, giving it a 219 bhp per tonne, a top speed of 150 mph and a 0-60 mph time of just 5.6 seconds.
Prices have, perhaps not surprisingly, seen an even more precipitous rise than the air-cooled 911 base model – and the car you see here is expected to fetch between $900,000 to $1,100,000 USD when it rolls across the auction block with RM Sotheby’s on the 10th of December in New York City. If you’d like to read more about the car or register to bid you can click here.
Photo Credits: Patrick Ernzen ©2015 Courtesy of RM Sotheby’s
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
