Rub Some Dirt On It

Is a sports car designed for dirt roads a good idea? Or is it the answer to a question no one asked? We sent a 911 Dakar to Montana to see whether John Phillips could make sense of a 911 that's happiest playing in the mud.

- John Phillips

GREED IS GOOD, Gordon Gekko said in the 1980s. Maybe he was talking about horsepower. It was in that decade when Porsche engineers, readying a new 911 Turbo, began questioning how much power they could funnel through two wheels. Porsche president and CEO Peter Schutz responded, "Why not four?" and painstakingly created a test-bed prototype called the 959.

Schutz knew he could hasten the engineering if a competition program depended on it. Thus did Porsche venture on tippy-toes into Group B rallying the "killer Bs," a series then injuring drivers and spectators alike.

Whereupon former Formula 1 driver Jacques Bernard Edmon Martin Henri "Jacky" Ickx suggested, "Forget Group B. With the 959, we can contest the Paris-Dakar," a rally Mr. Many Names had recently won in a Mercedes 280GE. More than 959 pricey pieces of the pricey 959 were doubtless sacrificed in preparation. But it all turned to gravy in 1986, when French driver René Metge won the off-road spectacle. Nowadays, no one remembers Metge, who chain-smoked Gauloises in a Rothmans-sponsored car. Yet we all remember Ickx, who never won in a 959.

Fast-forward almost 40 years. How many sports-car buyers today venerate the Paris Dakar as Porsche’s all-wheel-drive puberty? Six or seven, easy. Porsche swears it’s more, thus the 959 doppelgänger before us. You will notice that our test car—number 329 of 2500—bears neither the optional 62-pound roof rack nor auxiliary lights. Porsche wanted clean aero for truer acceleration results.