Rare Porsche 911 GT1 Straßenversion set to smash historical price record

This Porsche 911 GT1 Straßenversion (German for “street version”) came out 23 years ago as a homologation special and is now available for sale for €10,550,000. Should it find a buyer willing to pay as much as that, it will set a new price record for that model.

With 787 kilometers (489 miles) on the odometer, the car is all but pristine. Porsche created the original GT1 racer to participate in the GT championship in the mid-1990s. Most of its competitors routinely modified road-legal cars for racing back at the time, while Porsche insisted on building a pure racecar from scratch and then making it road-legal for homologation purposes only.

Around 20 such vehicles was produced in total (watch the video for an overview), and they were nearly identical to the original racer in terms of equipment and tech. The most important difference was in the engine, a 3.2-liter twin-turbo flat-six rated at 600 PS (592 hp / 441 kW) in its racing implementation, but dialed down to 544 PS (536 hp / 400 kW) in the road-worthy version. This particular example, which resides in Japan right now, was retrofitted with upgrades to produce 700 PS (690 hp / 515 kW) and go 0-100 km/h (0-62 mph) in under four seconds.

The most expensive a Porsche 911 GT1 Straßenversion ever fetched at an auction was $5,665,000 USD. A racecar with 7,900 km (4,909 miles) on the odo brought its seller that much four years ago.