924 CARRERA GT
“I was never into the way 911s drove. I tried my dad’s 911E in the ’70s, spun it and nearly put it into the River Yarra”
RUSSELL STURZAKER, CROYDON, VIC
Of the 15 officially imported 924 Carrera GTs in Australia, Russell’s concourswinning car is the only black one. “I had it for eight years, and tracked it all the time. I then sold it, but bought it back 15 years ago,” says Russell. “What I love about it is that Porsche wanted to show that a front-engined, water-cooled car could be competitive. They walked around the spare parts bins and got all the bits they needed in order to compete at Le Mans.”
But weight distribution only gets you so far. Racer Tony Dron found the handling required finessing. “With weight at each end and little in the middle, it handled like a dumb-bell,” he said. “A couple of heavy bags of cement, placed in the middle of the car, widened the neutral band of handling hugely; it was much nicer to drive like that, and the lap times at Donington were unchanged because of the inertia of the added weight.”
Competition was key to the credibility of the four-cylinder transaxle cars. The Carrera GT was built with the aim of producing the 400 units required to homologate it for Group 4 racing. Arriving between the 936 and 956 factory racing cars, here was a chance for Porsche to forge a different chapter and legitimise the forthcoming 944 model. A 924 Carrera GTR finished sixth at Le Mans in 1980 which, given it qualified 46th on a grid of 50 cars, was one heck of an achievement. Another Carrera GTR at La Sarthe that year was piloted by Peter Brock, Jim Richards and Colin Bond.
The famously prickly Fuhrmann, vindicated by the direction of the 924/944 development schedule, was elbowed into early retirement at the end of the year, Dr Ferry Porsche being the quiet authority keen to refocus development on the 911. He parachuted in the equally confrontational Peter Schutz in a bid to modernise the flagship. While the Carrera GT’s production run of 406 cars was rapidly over, its position at the head of the 924 hierarchy was replaced by the even rarer GTS, of which 59 were built, and the almost unicorn-like GTR, another homologation special which saw just 17 units leave the Zuffenhausen plant.
Identifying a genuine 924 Carrera GT is relatively easy if you know how to decipher the VIN plate, which should have the letters 93ZBN7 in it. Those numbers are key. Remember that 937 is the Porsche designation for the 924 Carrera GT. By contrast, a 924 Turbo (931) wearing a bodykit will have a ‘1’ after the ‘N’. After that designation, the GT chassis numbers run from 051 to 450. All 924 Carrera GTs will be either black, red or silver.
Other identifiers include thinner rear hatch glass, an 84-litre fuel tank, the intercooler on top of the engine, and those polyurethane wheelarch extensions. Replica panels are made from fibreglass and, unlike the originals, are rigid and won’t deform and rebound when pressed. If these have been replaced, or if other hard-to-source items such as the brake ducts, decals or the original hatch glass are missing, it’s probably a good idea to inspect the vehicle more thoroughly for accident damage.
It’s hard to find a car launched in the 1980s that didn’t end up in the clutches of the Wheels road-test team, but the 924 Carrera GT is one of the few. Only 75 were built in right-hand drive (of which 42 survive today) and of these, 15 were Australian complianced. As values and interest in the Carrera GT grew, many of those slipped back overseas. Today there are but a handful on these shores.
Aussie journalist Steve Cropley did test one for sister title Car magazine, back in 1981. “No more is the Porsche turbo a kind of Rhodes Scholar’s car, needing all the power of an awesome brain to ensure that it is kept always in the right gear and is taken to precisely the right engine speed to ensure a smooth flow of turbo power. The chassis is brilliantly developed and balanced,” he wrote. “The Carrera’s grip on the road, even at semi-suicidal speeds, is akin to that of a barnacle on the bottom of a trawler.”
What the Carrera GT demonstrated was that Porsche’s sporting lineage needn’t be exclusively air-cooled and rear-engined. Today the 911 accounts for around 10 percent of Porsche’s global vehicle sales and the company is working on a more affordable entry-level sports car. It could hardly have a better template for cost-effective success than the achingly desirable 924 Carrera GT.