Wing Man

Meet Andreas Preuninger, Mr RS, the man behind Porsche’s most hardcore road cars... and the new GT3 RS

- Ollie Marriage

Andreas Preuninger first came to the Isle of Man several years ago, “and ever since I’ve been wanting to come back, to do some real driving here.” This is the place for it. And, God knows, we have the cars for it. I keep having to pinch myself as I look across the car park of the famous Creg-Ny-Baa pub. It’s a litter of Porsche’s most hardcore driving weapons. And Preuninger is the man responsible for each and every one of them.

OK, not quite. The 1973 Carrera RS was a tad before his time, but earns its position here as the granddaddy of the car we are celebrating: the GT3 RS. Preuninger is the head of Porsche’s GT cars division. This has to rank as one of the juiciest jobs in the whole car industry. Porsche makes great sports cars. His job is to make them greater.

The lengths he and his team go to to achieve this are second to none. Across the car park sits the car that’s just been superseded, the first-generation 991 GT3 RS. At this point, I’d like to point out that there will probably be a lot of unavoidable model designation geekery in this piece. It comes with the territory, unfortunately. Preuninger’s job is to work the details, to hone each car until it’s as sharp as his own cheekbones. Necessarily, that means the words have to follow suit. Anyway, back to the 991.1 (as opposed to 991.2, which is the new car, or 997.1 and 997.2, which came before the 991.1; and the 996.2, which was the first GT3 RS, but I digress). It had a magnesium roof. Not carbon, because that would have weighed more. Yet to save less than a solitary kilo, Porsche went to extraordinary lengths: the magnesium was sourced in Malaysia and shaped in Canada before being shipped to Germany for fitting to the car.