908 RACER REBORN
Team of upstart young designers reboots classic racer in digital form
Two years and 5000 man hours in the making, behold a modern reinterpretation of the iconic 1969 Porsche 908 racer. We give you the 908-04. It's the work of five young designers, all of whom work for an unnamed Chinese car company in Shanghai.
The driving force behind the project is Alan Derosier. “Since I was nine years old,” Derosier says, “I've been dreaming of Porsche, it's the reason I became a car designer.” Apparently, Derosier's line manager was accommodating enough to allow him and others to work on the project in the office during spare time in the evenings.
Derosier had fallen in love with the 908's shape and wanted to create a modern take on the car he adored. “As designer, I made the choice to have the longtail because Porsches with this feature have something genuinely unique. And until now nobody, as far as I know, has tried to create a modern version of it. In my opinion, it is a bit of a forgotten idea, so I thought it would be a “rebirth of an icon” that would generate nostalgia in car and Porsche enthusiasts alike,” he says.
Part of the inspiration for modernising the design involved trips to a local high-end car specialist and soaking up details from the latest Porsche road racers including the 991 GT3 RS and 918 Spyder. The team soaked up the modern design DNA, including the way Porsche now creates car surfaces, and applied that to the reborn 908 design. Influences from the Mission E pureelectric concept car are clear in the design, too.
One major challenge was to work with real-world proportions. The team aimed to create a concept that was physically feasible. “We worked with coherent dimensions and constraints such as seating position, visibility, headroom, door openings, ingress/egress, width, length, height and so on”, Derosier explains. The result, we think you'll agree, is stunning. It certainly has an elegance and flow that's lacking from the technically fascinating but rather brutal and functionally uncompromising Porsche 919 Hyrbid racer. The 908-04 isn't a fullydeveloped aero or technical package so its performance characteristics are essentially non existent. But who cares when it looks this good?