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Fast Porsche Speedster

“The engine was the spare, well, it was what became the spare engine; it had been the primary engine in HR2, the 962 which I raced. It was the Daytona engine,” says Bruce Canepa.

It isn’t every shop that has such an engine going spare, and when Las Vegas casino owner Gary Primm contacted Canepa about the disappointing 1989 911 Speedster he’d just had delivered, the stars aligned.

Primm had driven his Speedster about 100 miles and found it lacking, calling Canepa to ask: “What can we do with this thing? It’s boring, and slow,” Primm and Canepa having collaborated previously on an AMG build.

It didn’t take Canepa long to figure out what to do with the Speedster. He admits: “They were pretty underwhelming. They had no power, they had a Turbo chassis, which was almost too much car for the motor, and they were flexy.”

He thought for a while before fixing on the idea of a 934 for the road. “Really, the nicest thing about Primm and a lot of my customers is he just let me build what I want,” says Canepa. “He didn’t really know what a 934 was. I said ‘we’re going to put on 934 flares; they look cool. We’re going to make it look like a Porsche race car, but with no roof on it.’”

The result is sitting in Canepa’s showroom in Scotts Valley, California. I’ve been poring over it for over an hour. Even here among Porsche rarities of
the like you’ll seldom see outside Porsche’s own Stuttgart Museum, the Speedster is a knockout.

G1 Guards red, because that’s how it was delivered to Canepa (all of Primm’s cars are red), the build is so beautifully executed it could easily be a factory car, albeit a very special one.

The deep front splitter has its outer cutouts filled by running lights behind Perspex, and the remaining three large intakes are pure 934 race car. In the unlikely event that the front bumper left you guessing, this is a Speedster unlike any other. Those 934-proportioned flared arches front and rear, covering 17-inch, three-piece BBS alloy racing wheels, leave little doubt.

Those punctured rear wings feed intake air into the engine, this Speedster taking the idea of a Turbo-bodied Speedster to its ultimate incarnation. Only unlike the standard cars, the visuals are more than matched by the mill.

For the full feature on the world’s craziest Porsche Speedster build, pick up your copy of Total 911 issue 181 in shops now or get it delivered to your door via here. You can also download a digital copy with high definition bonus galleries to any Apple or Android device.

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