MR GT3

He's the man behind one of the world's greatest performance car dynasties. Andreas Preuninger, boss of Porsche's GT department, opens up about the past, present and future of the 911 GT3 line

- by JAMES TAYLOR

HAT FIRST 996 GT3 BECAME THE NUCLEUS OF A new GT department within Porsche, a kind of special ops division that has created each subsequent generation of the 911 GT3 and GT2 families, along with the Cayman GT4 and Boxster Spyder series and much more besides.

From the department's inception, it’s been run by Andreas Preuninger, Director GT Model Line, aka ‘Mr GT3’.

‘I'm not the inventor of the GT3,’ he says, matter-of-factly, ‘it was there before me. I was working as a sales engineer for an external engineering service here in Weissach and worked my way into Porsche’s Sport Driving School. I joined the team of instructors, and among the cars we were using were two pre-series development cars of the first-gen GT3: a yellow one and a metallic orange one. We called it “Sausage Metallic” because it resembled the colour of a kind of sausage that is famous in Germany. And I loved that car. The idea in me grew: I wanted to do something with it, to develop that product.

‘Back then I was an enthusiast of the 964 RS — that car was my role model, absolutely. I wasn’t so much a fan of the first 996 Carreras, because I thought they lost a little bit of character, but it was all there in the GT3: it reminded me so much of the virtues the 964 RS had. And that made me apply to the former boss of Porsche Motorsport [Herbert Ampferer] — because the car was a Motorsport product — to be the next project manager for the second-gen GT3. And the rest is history...

Nearly a quarter-century of history, in fact. From the 996.2 GT3 onwards, Preuninger has been responsible for each GT3 model, and also for specials such as the 911 R and S/T. ‘I counted them, I’ve done 25 so far,’ he smiles. He took over the second-gen 996 project in 2001.