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If you want proof that imagination is a muscle, just look at Porsche’s Sonderwunsch program that relaunched in 2021 to build factory one-off cars for absurdly rich people. It started small with a custom liveried Porsche 911 GT3 for the 1985 24 Hours of Le Mans winner Paolo Barilla. Then it moved on to more complex projects like the 993 Speedster and the 997 Classic Club Coupe. And now, those magic elves are revealing their most ambitious work yet: the Flachbau RS, a modern 911 slantnose built on the bones of a 2018 911 GT2 RS.
Commissioned by a mystery customer in Europe at a cost of several million dollars, the Flachbau RS is far more than a restomod. I’m not sure what you’d call it, exactly; it’s an eight-year-old car meticulously torn apart, re-engineered, and reassembled with contemporary aerodynamics, a low-tech caged interior, and that iconic front end calling back to the original 911 Flachbau from the 1980s.
Porsche
Over the last three years, a strike team comprised of designers, engineers, and other fun nerds from Porsche, Manthey, and Weissach worked to realize the lucky customer’s vision for a street-legal homage to the 935/78 race car known as Moby Dick, which itself was the inspiration for the original Flachbau that was sold in extremely limited numbers between 1982 and 1989.
The customer requested that they leave the powertrain alone—smart move when we’re talking about a 3.8 liter twin-turbo flat-six making 700 horsepower and 553 lb-ft of torque—but everything else was up for reimagining. Fortunately for him, Porsche was able to tap longtime designer Grant Larson, who also penned the modern 935 concept the company showed off at Rennsport Reunion in 2018, to finalize the vision for the Flachbau RS just before his retirement last year.
Porsche
Starting at the front, the sloping, louvered fenders necessitated a new bumper and splitter, new super-slim headlights, and even redesigning the fuel filler mechanism to fit. Manthey also pitched in on the front-end aero with additional canards and underbody elements.
Porsche
Inside, the cabin retains some of the donor car’s original red and black colorway and carbon fiber trim, but much of it has been stripped out. That includes the entire infotainment and sound system—where there was once a screen in the dash, there’s now a leather-lined storage cubby. Nice. Sound deadening and insulation were thrown out wherever possible, leaving gleaming painted metal all over the place. Even the wiring harness was left exposed. All that lightened the car by 70 pounds compared to a stock GT2 RS, which was already a bantamweight fighter.
Porsche
At the back, the giant wing with its S-shaped mounts has three different configurations to step up downforce all the way to 1,221 pounds over the rear axle at the car’s top speed of 211 mph. It’s patented too, so don’t go try and copy it. Because the customer wanted it to be street legal, and it’s technically a factory product, Porsche had to go through the usual validation and homologation steps it would for any model, including building multiple test cars, virtual crash testing, wind tunnel sessions, endurance tests, extensive vibration tests for the rear wing, and 50 laps on the Nurburgring—where our spy photographer captured one of the test cars last August.
And yes, that road legal requirement is also why Porsche couldn’t go full 1980s and give it pop-up headlights. Alas.
While it’s unfortunate that those spy photos or the preceding Flachbau trademark Porsche filed earlier last year didn’t herald the return of a production 911 slantnose, it’s still a sight to see how the company is dialing up the crazy in the Sonderwunsch division. I know they’ll be one of my first calls if when I hit the Powerball jackpot.
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As Editor-in-Chief, Kyle draws on 15 years of newsroom experience and a lifelong passion for cars to shape The Drive’s singular approach to automotive news.
