Porsche 911 - page 156

People just love doing stuff on the Porsche 911 platform. It seems every day, a new, reimagined version of the rear-engine sports car pops up, and nine times out of 10, they’re mostly good. The 911 lineup is the most versatile of any sports car ever produced, and there is a variant for every need. With the platform being as versatile as it is, you would think Porsche themselves would be giving you the craziest iterations of the 911, but no. Another neat example of a heavily modified 911 comes from a California-based Russel Built Fabrication. The company started out in the 2000s, by maintaining movie prop cars, but eventually evolved into a fully-fledged custom shop. Russel Built Fab’s latest and most ambitious project is the Porsche 911 Baja, which takes an already-capable platform and gives it the ability to jump over sand dunes at seriously impressive speeds. While this is not the company’s first off-road 911 build, it is, by far, the most extreme that I have ever seen. Here’s what makes it tick.

The 2025 Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet marks the beginning of the 992.2 generation and issues subtle yet meaningful updates to the iconic sports car. While this rear-wheel drive convertible is powered by the same 3.0-liter twin-turbo boxer-six mill, Porsche enhanced it with an intercooler from the Turbo model and upgraded turbochargers from the outgoing GTS model. The result is 388 horsepower, nine horsepower more than the outgoing model.

TECHART is one of those tuning houses that have cemented a reputation for high-quality performance parts. Since 1987, the company has done wonders for mostly (but not only) Porsche sports cars. Eventually, TECHART expanded its work to models like the Cayenne and Panamera, but what the outfit does with the 911 is something else. Back in 2021, the German tuner introduced the GT Street R - a 992 Turbo S with more power and crazy aero. At the same time, TECHART introduced Flyweight - its new performance brand for personalization. Think Porshe’s Sonderwunsch, but from TECHART.

Porsche’s 911 GT3 has long been the choice for driving purists seeking the ultimate road-legal track car. After being absent for the 2017 model year, it reappeared for 2018 with some crucial upgrades to improve its already-compelling racing pedigree. Gone was the 3.8-liter engine! A 4.0-liter naturally aspirated derived from the GT3 Cup racer motivated it with 500 ponies of might, capable of revving up to 9,000 rpm. A seven-speed PDK was standard, but a six-speed manual made a comeback for purists.

Bonhams is set to auction a very special 993-generation 911 Turbo at Goodwood Revival Collectors’ Motor Cars And Automobilia. Officially named ’The Last Waltz’, it is the last air-cooled Porsche to be built and released from Zuffenhausen. An important milestone in the brand’s history, the Last Waltz was built at the factory on March 27, 1998. It’s too bad that I was only eight years old and completely oblivious to history unfolding. It was commissioned via the Sonderwunsh program for German Author Clauss Vanderborg. Jerry Seinfeld’s famed 993 Carrera 4S Cabriolet was finished and delivered on 31st March, shortly after the Last Waltz came off the line. However, the latter spent six months with the special wish wing of the brand getting specially kitted out with a bunch of aesthetic and mechanical modifications.

Unfortunate circumstances are just as likely to hit cars as they are people and I recently stumbled upon one such build on the web and this one is bound to raise a few eyebrows, among the classic Porsche 911 community. Air-cooled Porsches are one of those things that are considered art. Altering any aspect of them is the automotive equivalent of blasphemy. Unless, of course, you are Singer, Tuthill, or one of the other names, dealing in reimagined 911s. Essentially, what you are looking at is a Frankenstein of a car. It started as a 1976 model that was turned into a race car, and eventually, thanks to a landslide, it required a powertrain transplant. Chris Ashton from Ruffian Cars is the man behind the crazy Porsche 911 race car, and what he had to say about this build and how it um... evolved, was quite the story. More importantly, the Tesla powertrain is not where the madness of this classic 911 build ends. This also raises the question - is it better to let something die or save it through unconventional methods?

We live in a world of A.I. and gone are the days where you need to be a design guru to come up with something truly unique. However, depending on the LLM (Large Language Model) and your ability to write the right prompts, you can come up with something either truly spectacular or absolutely bizarre and hilarious. I’ll admit that I haven’t been at the game long enough myself, but I’ve taken A.I. assistance to dream up everything from a compact all-electric 911 and it was just about acceptable at best. At the other end of the spectrum, you have folks who have gone about coming up with a GT3-inspired pram. More recently, I stumbled upon a Type-996 wagon that I found on Instagram, which I feel is not too bad. So let’s talk about it.

Regardless of the generation, beyond the 911 Turbo models, the GT range is the next natural step. These track-bred cars have continued to evolve since the late 90s and early 2000s with the introduction of even more hard-core models with the likes of the GT3 RS and GT2. Given how most of these track-bred cars are limited-run models, they tend to command a premium over your average run-of-the-mill Carreras. I was curious to see how the GT3 market in particular has been faring over the past few years, given the wild ride we had with regard to pricing, through the pandemic, and here’s what I found.

Sharing production costs between models is not uncommon in the modern-day automotive industry. It seems even Porsche’s iconic sports cars are no exception and the Porsche 981 and 991 models are a perfect example. The 911 doesn’t need an introduction as it has been Porsche’s flagship sports car since 1964, after succeeding the 356 - Porsche’s first sports car, since the company officially became a brand. That said, Porsche’s financial troubles from the 1990s, prompted the company to give us a budget-friendly model. In came the 986 Boxster, and it immediately became clear it was a cut-price, mid-engine 911, minus the rear seats. This was not the last time Porsche did this. Australian YouTuber and Porsche aficionado, Jeff Richardson took a deep dive into the 981 and 991 Porsche models to examine how much they have in common. He also bought a flooded 981 Boxster solely to dismantle it. One thing became clear to him – the extent of the similarities between the 911 and Boxster/Cayman is a lot more than you initially may have thought, and it doesn’t stop with these two models.

There is an obvious pattern when it comes to Porsche introducing its new 911 variants. There is a version of the rear-engine sports car for everyone, but when a new 911 comes out, we don’t get all variants at once. Things are not much different for the 992.2 update, although there is one big difference. For 2025, we got the first Porsche 911, powered by a hybrid powertrain, and this changes a few things in the Porsche 992.2 lineup. Models that are typically offered from the start will now take longer to arrive, and this includes the best-selling 911 variant – the Carrera S. This has everything to do with Porsche’s hybrid 911 variants, which sometime in the next two years, will be joined by the first hybrid Porsche 911 Turbo. Despite working on keeping the internal combustion engine alive for as long as possible, Porsche is really pushing the hybrid 911 agenda, and here’s what this means for the next-generation 992.2 Carrera S.

Sometimes I like imagining purely hypothetical competitions about some of my favorite things- Godzilla vs Kong, Edison vs Tesla, Autobots vs Decepticons, etc. I also like to imagine the odd supercar match-up from time to time, something I am sure we are all guilty of. The question of whether one car is better than another is a question that is as old as automobiles itself. And while we can only compare spec sheets or watch the drag races of some of our favorite supercars, some of us are fortunate enough to take it a step further.

If you’ve ever wondered how a classic car would fare around one of the most iconic racetracks in the world, driving instructor and local Nürburgring dweller/ YouTuber, Misha Charoudin gave us an answer, through a video he shot in what started life as a 1972 Porsche 911 T/S. There is no shortage of reimagined, restored, or resto-modded classic Porsches these days, but this one seems to be ticking all the right boxes. You wouldn’t be able to tell at first glance, but the car has been tastefully done up. I suppose that’s the proper way to know if a car has been modified properly when it looks bone stock. Under the hood lies the most pleasant of surprises, thanks to which the classic 911 now packs substantially more power. The engine is also much larger than the original 2.3-liter Carrera S mill. In a way, this is the Porsche 911 equivalent of a muscle car, and this particular example started life as a race car, according to the owner.