Since its introduction with the lovely, Pininfarina-styled 308 of 1976, the two-place, mid-engined, eight-pot Ferrari has been a constant that’s seen challengers come and go. Sure, Porsche’s turbocharged 911s have offered performance parity or superiority, but they’re a juiced version of a car affordable by mere dentists. Lamborghini’s Jalpa and Silhouette never posed a serious threat to Maranello’s segment dominance; it wasn’t until the arrival of Lambo’s serious-business Gallardo that the prancing horses had any real, direct competition.
With the arrival of Audi’s R8, followed by the McLaren 12C and its evolution, the 650S, not to mention Sant’Agata’s handsome new Huracan, the 458 is beset on all sides. While Porsche’s moving plenty of Neunelfers, they want a piece of that rarefied pizza pie. And after all, Porsche’s very first 356 was mid-engined. Production demands led the cash-strapped startup to utilize the rear-engined configuration common to the Volkswagen from which it was derived. Sometime after the 911 was saved from being replaced by the departed 928, Porsche engineers decided to work the devilish kinks out of the badonkadonk-backed sports car and have proclaimed the rear-engined configuration superior ever since.
Except, of course, when it suits them. The 918 carries its V-8 in the same place the Carrera GT cradled its V-10—the middle of the car. And although Porsche is using four-cylinder hybrid propulsion in its 919 Le Mans racer and is working toward turbocharged fours for its lower-end machines, the class demands at least eight pots at this point. Although the last-generation 911 GT2 RS and current Turbo S certainly post class-competitive power numbers, the scuttlebutt is that Porsche’s leaning toward a flat-eight for the new car. The UK’s Autocar reports that it may feature a turbocharger for every two cylinders, in the interest of minimal lag and maximum complexity.
The company’s built horizontally opposed eights before. The 907, 908, 909, and 910 racers of the 1960s all featured the configuration, as did as a few 904s and 906s. The latter two could be fettled to be road legal, but only in a rather tenuous sense. A mere two flat-eight Porsches were constructed as genuine roadgoing cars—a pair of 914s, one built for Ferdinand Piech (who was in charge of the Volkswagen-Porsche program during his tenure at the family firm) and one for Ferry Porsche himself. Neither featured four turbochargers.
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The new car’s chassis should be considerably less archaic than the old 914’s. It’s to be built on the VW Group’s new modular sports-car architecture, a platform that will underpin everything from Lamborghinis and 911s to Boxsters. We reported last year that the new car would be called the 960, which still may be true, although Autocar refers to it as the 988. Porsche’s model-naming conventions often present a disconnect between numeric designations and chassis codes. The 911 has variously been a 901, a 964, a 993, a 996, a 997 and a 991, after all. They could call it “Maurice” and we’d still want to drive it, although if we could choose, we’d cast our vote for “Bruce.”
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