WILDEST DREAMS

THESE ARE NONE OTHER THAN the first and last Porsches to win the Le Mans 24 Hours during the legendary Group C era. Not examples of those cars, but the actual cars. And this is the first time that Porsche has allowed them to be brought together and tested by a motor journalist. This, then, is quite an occasion.

But there’s more here, even than that. You might expect two such famous racing cars to be grizzled warriors, veterans of dozens of fights that took place all over the world during the superb first six years of the Group C era. But they are not. In fact their race records are staggeringly short: for Porsche 956-002 did Le Mans in 1982 and, apart from one demonstration run by Derek Bell the following year, was then frozen in aspic for the next four decades. By comparison Porsche 962-006 was only a little busier: It did the Spa 1000Kms in 1986, where Bob Wollek and Jochen Mass were delayed by a puncture. It did the Fuji 1000Kms later that year where it retired with a transmission fault, then it did Le Mans in 1987 which it won. And that was that. Two cars with a grand total of four races and zero accidents between them.

Which means that what you see now, really, is what won Le Mans then. Had they done dozens of races thereafter, they’d have been pulled apart dozens of times too, gained engines, gearboxes, bits of bodywork and who knows what else that they’d never have had at their moment of greatest glory. But both cars won Le Mans and never raced again, which means they are time capsules.

How then is it that both appear perfectly preserved, with none of the physical evidence that would inevitably accrue on their surfaces after 24 hours of battle? For the 956, because it was going to the museum, it was decreed it needed to be visually