Porsche has unveiled one of the most extreme modern interpretations of the 911 at The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering during Monterey Car Week: a one-off 911 GT2 RS transformed through the brand’s Sonderwunsch program into the Flachbau RS.
Created at the request of a Porsche collector, the project took nearly three years and brought together specialists from Porsche’s Sonderwunsch department, Style Porsche, Weissach development, Porsche Motorsport and Manthey. The result is a road-legal reinterpretation of the legendary Porsche 935/78 “Moby Dick,” one of the most recognizable racing cars in Porsche history.
The starting point was a virtually new 2018 Type 991.2 911 GT2 RS with the Weissach Package. Rather than simply recreating the 935’s silhouette, Porsche’s designers developed a contemporary Flachbau, or “slant nose,” body that brings the distinctive low front fenders and dramatic proportions of the racing car into a modern road-going package.
The car is finished in Grand Prix White, a Porsche colour dating back to 1974, with matte black and exposed carbon-fibre detailing including a U-shaped graphic across the front that references the livery of the 935/78, and staggered LED headlights and reshaped front fenders.
At the rear, an enormous wing inspired by the 911 GT3 R Rennsport is mounted on S-shaped supports and can be manually adjusted between three positions. Porsche says the aerodynamic package, developed with Manthey, can generate approximately 1,221 pounds of rear-axle downforce at around 211 mph in its High Downforce setting.
Despite the visual transformation, Porsche left the GT2 RS powertrain unchanged at the customer’s request as project focused heavily on weight and aerodynamics. Extensive lightweight measures shaved almost 70 pounds from an already Weissach-optimized GT2 RS, while the interior was stripped of the PCM infotainment system, audio components, much of the sound insulation and other comfort-focused elements.
The result is particularly significant within Porsche’s history of bespoke cars. The Flachbau name has been associated with the Sonderwunsch program since the 1980s, when Porsche offered a dramatically reworked 911 Turbo based on the 935 with redesigned front fenders and pop-up headlights. Between 1982 and 1989, just 948 examples of that factory special version were produced.
This latest interpretation pushes that idea considerably further. It is simultaneously a tribute to Moby Dick, a modern expression of Porsche’s Flachbau heritage and an example of just how far the Sonderwunsch program can go when the brief is essentially without limits.
And while the car may look like something built purely for the racetrack, Porsche went to extraordinary lengths to make sure this particular Flachbau could remain road legal in Europe, subjecting the new components to digital validation, structural testing, wind-tunnel analysis and real-world testing. Three test vehicles were built, with the development program including 50 laps of the Nürburgring Nordschleife and endurance testing designed to simulate approximately 150,000 kilometres of customer use.
