Some Porsches weren’t Porsches
Formula One drivers liked the speedy 500E car
Like Ferrari, Porsche’s ionic badge features a prancing horse: a rampant stallion both paying homage to the medieval horsebreeding history of home-city Stuttgart, and proudly boasting of thoroughbred clippity-clop under the hood.
With a half-century of 911 heritage now being loudly trumpeted, Porsche is all about bloodlines, breeding, and the purity of the pedigree. While the Panamera, Cayenne, and now the Macan are born cash-cows, Porsche’s sports car line has a carefully pruned family tree stretching all the way back to the original 356 sire.
But enough of this hoity-toity horseplay — let’s talk about a trio of mules. Two of the best cars Porsche ever built were mixed breeds that didn’t even wear a Porsche badge, and one that did was just about the wonkiest vehicle ever conceived in Zuffenhausen.
The first of these Bruders-from-another-Mutter came about through simple pragmatism. With production of the 959 supercar winding down, Porsche found itself with an idle assembly line in tight financial times.
The devil finds work for idle hands, as the saying goes, and the result was the ballistic MercedesBenz 500E. Mercedes had deep pockets as a result of the success of its model lineup, but also had an R&D department working flat out on new projects. They wanted a super-sedan version of their solid W124-chassis executive cruiser, but didn’t want to divert resources to develop it.
Porsche not only engineered a way to cram a 5.0L V8 taken from the SL500 coupe under the hood, but also hand-built each one of these rarities deep in their Rössle Bau factory. Mercedes provided the initial chassis and specifications, and then shipped the cars to Stuttgart.
Once in Porsche’s hands, a 322h.p. all-aluminum V8 would be installed, and the car’s fenders widened to fit the massively-wide alloy wheels.
A specially beefed-up rear suspension was fitted to reduce squat on acceleration, and then the unpainted car was shipped back to Mercedes.
Even after painting was completed at Mercedes, Porsche wasn’t finished. The cross-bred super-sedan would return again to Porsche for final assembly; the last pair of hands touching the completed car would belong to a Porsche worker, not one wearing Mercedes overalls.
Officially called the 500E (and later the E500), this boulevard-blitzer soon developed a reputation as one of the fastest four-doored machines on the planet. Two decades on, 320-odd horsepower doesn’t sound like much, but in 1991, it was enough to jet the four-seater, granite-solid Merc’ to an unlimited top speed of 275 km/h.
Most of the Formula One drivers of the time owned and loved these cars for their high-speed capabilities, huge brakes and excellent stability. Built between 1990 and 1995, and exported to the U.S. as well, they’re highly collectible and can easily be differentiated from contemporary Benzes by their flared front wheel arches.
Built right alongside the last batch of 500Es in Stuttgart was another half-Porsche that would become a forbidden-fruit icon that is only just now importable under Canadian grey-market rules. The four-ringed badge on the grille says “Audi.” The script on the intake manifold (and the performance) screams “Porsche.”
The Audi RS2 was the first machine to wear Audi’s now-iconic RS badging. These days, the RS designation instantly communicates road-crushing power levels and condition-conquering grip. This bright-blue pioneer married turbocharged thrust and fourwheeled traction for some seriously world-beating performance — and it was a wagon.
The basis for the mighty RS2 was the humdrum Audi 80; the kindest thing that can be said here is that of all the cars for sale in the early 1990s, the Audi 80 was certainly one of them. Porsche took this humble hatchback and starting huffing and puffing.
The result featured a grumbling, rumbling, 2.2-L five-cylinder engine with bored-out air passages and a specially ground camshaft. It had a large, heavyduty intercooler, a turbocharger the size of a Labradoodle, and a new Bosch engine-control module to handle 20 psi of forcedinduction boost.
From the outside, the RS2 has enough Porsche styling cues to thoroughly bewilder the unknowing bystander. The wheels, for instance, are the “Cup” style of a 911, and both the turn signals and side mirrors are also lifted right off a 1990s Porsche. The hatch has a single-colour reflector element intended to look like the back of an air-cooled 964-model 911, and the rear badge incorporates both Porsche and Audi branding.
Interesting, surely, but all the really good stuff is behind the scenes with this fairly innocuouslooking station wagon. With Quattro all-wheel drive, a sixspeed manual transmission, and 315 h.p.-worth of turbo-charged five-cylinder, the RS2 leaps off the line as if rammed by a Freightliner.
Zero-to-100km/h comes in under five seconds. Zero-to50km/h is staggeringly quick at 1.5 seconds, better even than the contemporary McLaren F1 or an actual Formula One race car of the time. All this in a car with a rather terrified golden retriever in the back.
Built for only two years, from 1994 to 1995, the RS2 is extremely rare, and was never officially offered in Canada.
Happily, its uniqueness and appeal have resulted in many examples being carefully preserved, and as it’s now past the 15-year Canadian grey-market importa- tion laws, a European version can be imported by a private individual. In fact, there are something like a half-dozen of these special cars running around the country — keep your eyes peeled.
But perhaps even a five-seat station wagon with room for a dog named Enzo isn’t quite enough space. If that is the case, our next misfit should suffice: the B32 has seating for six. This machine might just be the weirdest thing ever to wear the prancing stallion of Stuttgart on its grille.
Unlike the well documented RS2 and 500E, so few of these machines were built that its origins remain shrouded in mystery. One story claims they were built as support vehicles for Porsche’s Paris-Dakar rally attempt, where they chased jacked-up versions of the 959 supercar across the desert, trailing plumes of dust. Another story postulates that the B32s were made to run with the big rigs carrying high-speed prototypes to and from the Bonneville Salt Flats.
There is also some evidence that Porsche simply built these things because they could. What is it? It’s a Volkswagen Vanagon with an air-cooled 911 engine stuffed in the back.
If you’ve never had the opportunity to drive a VW Type-3, those blocky 1980s campsite stalwarts, the experience can best be recreated by disconnecting at least two of your car’s sparkplugs and loading your trunk with sacks of cement. Possessed of meagre horsepower and weighing well over two tonnes, they’re versatile, and roomy, and about as speedy as continental drift.
Porsche’s version swapped in a 230-h.p. 3.2-L flat six from a 1980s Carrera and a five-speed manual gearbox.
Wheels and brakes came from a 944 and the top speed was just over 200km/h.
Seeing as the top-heavy Vanagon’s crumple-zone stretches from the metatarsals of your big toe all the way back to your pelvis, the idea of a high-speed version is utterly terrifying. It’s also completely hilarious. The (completely unsubstantiated) rumour is that there was a weekly raffle among the Porsche racing and development team to see who would get to take the B32s home on the weekends and drive up and down the autobahn, blowing the doors off BMWs.
As only 15 or fewer were ever built and sold to the public, it’s almost impossible to find one today. The recipe, however, is fairly straightforward, and given enough mechanical know-how and a laissez-faire attitude toward personal safety, it’s perfectly possible to park a replica in your driveway.