Porsche 959: The Car From the Future

If the Ferrari F40 was a sledgehammer, the Porsche 959 was a scalpel guided by a supercomputer. Launched in 1986, it was ostensibly a competitor to the F40, but philosophically, it was from a different planet.

While the F40 used 1960s technology (tube frame, RWD, no assists) to go fast, the 959 used technology that wouldn’t become common in road cars for another 20 years. It is arguably the most technologically advanced car ever built relative to its era—a statement that becomes more remarkable the more closely you examine the specification.

The Context: Why Was the 959 Built?

In the early 1980s, Group B rally was the most extreme form of motorsport in existence. It had essentially no power limits and minimal safety regulations, resulting in cars producing over 500 horsepower in forms that were barely modified from the street cars they were nominally based upon. Manufacturers were competing aggressively: Audi with its Quattro, Peugeot with the 205 T16, Ford with the RS200, Lancia with the Delta S4.

Porsche wanted in. Their vision was a car based on the 911 silhouette but incorporating all-wheel drive, sequential turbocharging, and advanced aerodynamics—technology that would simultaneously win rallies and demonstrate Porsche’s engineering capabilities. The development program, internally called the “Gruppe B” project, was approved in the early 1980s with a production target of 200 units (required for homologation).

The road car that resulted, renamed the 959 for production, was not merely a homologation special. Porsche’s engineers, given the mandate to build the most advanced car they could, produced something so sophisticated that many of the technologies they developed for it wouldn’t appear on mainstream production vehicles for another two decades.

Group B Origins

Like the Ferrari 288 GTO, the 959 was born to race in Group B rallying. Porsche wanted to demonstrate that their 911 rear-engine layout could dominate off-road as well as on track.

Although Group B was cancelled following a series of tragic accidents in 1986, the 959 did race. It entered the brutal Paris-Dakar Rally in 1986, finishing first, second, and sixth overall in the hands of René Metge/Dominique Lemoyne, Jacky Ickx/Claude Brasseur, and another Porsche crew respectively. The Paris-Dakar victory validated the entire engineering philosophy of the 959—a car that could manage its traction intelligently across wildly varying surface conditions, from asphalt roads to sand dunes to rocky mountain tracks.

The PSK All-Wheel Drive

The crown jewel of the 959 is the Porsche-Steuer Kupplung (PSK) system—Porsche’s dynamically variable all-wheel drive.

Most 4WD systems of the 80s locked the torque split at a fixed ratio (e.g., 50/50 or 60/40). The PSK was entirely different.

Computer Control: It used a multi-plate wet clutch to vary the torque distribution between the front and rear wheels in real-time based on wheel speed sensors, throttle position, lateral acceleration, and steering angle. The computer could direct anywhere from 0% to 40% of total torque to the front wheels within milliseconds.
The Gauge: There is a gauge on the dashboard that shows the driver exactly where the torque is going (e.g., sending 80% to the rear under hard acceleration, shifting toward the front when grip is lost). This transparency—letting the driver understand what the car was doing—was unique to the era.

This system is the direct grandfather of the Nissan GT-R’s ATTESA E-TS AWD system, the modern Porsche Turbo AWD system, and virtually every electronically controlled all-wheel drive system that followed. At the time, it was so advanced that engineering rivals spent years trying to understand how it worked.

Sequential Turbocharging

The 959 used a tiny 2.85-liter Flat-6 engine (air-cooled block, water-cooled heads in a transitional architecture that bridged Porsche’s complete move to water cooling). To get 450 hp without massive turbo lag, Porsche invented Sequential Turbocharging.

Low RPM: Only the small turbo spins, providing instant response from low speeds where a large turbo would be too slow to spool up.
High RPM: Above 4,000 rpm, a valve opens and the second, larger turbo wakes up to provide top-end power.

This resulted in a smooth, linear powerband that was completely unheard of in turbocharged performance cars of the 1980s. Contemporary turbo cars—including the earlier Porsche 930 Turbo—were notorious for their all-or-nothing power delivery, where nothing happened until the turbo spooled up and then massive power arrived suddenly. The 959’s sequential system eliminated this entirely, providing power that built progressively from just off idle all the way to the 7,200 rpm redline.

Sequential turbocharging would later be adopted by Subaru (for the Legacy RS and Impreza Type RA), Mazda (for the RX-7 FD), and Mitsubishi, but in each case the implementation came many years after the 959. Porsche got there first, and they got there at the absolute highest level of implementation.

The “G” Gear

The 6-speed manual gearbox had a unique quirk that reflected the 959’s dual-purpose rally/road car origins. The first gear was marked “G” (Gelände—German for “terrain” or “off-road”). It was an ultra-short crawler gear designed for getting the car out of mud, sand, or snow in the context of the Paris-Dakar Rally. The gear ratio was so short that it was useless at any road speed; the car effectively started in 2nd gear for normal driving.

This detail—a crawler gear on a road-legal supercar—speaks volumes about how seriously Porsche took the rally application of the 959. They were not building a car that merely looked like it could compete in Dakar; they were building a car genuinely capable of winning it.

Zero Lift Aerodynamics

The body looked like a heavily modernized and smoothed 911, but every curve and detail was pure aerodynamic science.

Kevlar/Aluminum: The body panels were made from Kevlar and aluminum composites—both materials derived from aerospace and motorsport applications, and both largely unknown in road car production in 1986.
Zero Lift: It was the first road car to achieve “zero lift” at top speed (317 km/h / 197 mph), meaning it didn’t get light and floaty at high speed like earlier 911s (and like most other road cars of the era). This was achieved through careful management of airflow under the car using a flat underbody and front air dam, combined with a minimal but effective rear spoiler.

The zero-lift achievement was a significant engineering milestone. Most performance cars of the era generated lift at high speed—air flowing over the curved body created less pressure above than below, tending to lift the car off the road. Managing this was critical for stability at the 959’s top speed, which was the highest of any production car at the time of its introduction.

Active Suspension

The 959 Komfort featured a hydraulically adjustable suspension that could raise the car for off-road clearance, lower it to reduce aerodynamic lift at high speed, or adjust continuously to maintain optimal ride height regardless of passenger and fuel load. This system predates modern air suspension in mass-market vehicles by more than a decade and anticipated the active suspension systems that would appear in Formula 1 in the late 1980s.

The driver could select from four ride height settings using a rotary switch on the dashboard, and the system would maintain the selected height automatically. The sophistication of this system—in a road car, in 1986—remains remarkable.

959 Sport vs. Komfort

Komfort: The standard model. Included air conditioning, electric windows, the complex hydraulic suspension, and enough sound insulation to make the car genuinely usable for long-distance touring. This was a supercar that could be driven from Stuttgart to Monaco without exhausting its occupants.
Sport (S): The rare lightweight version. Removed the AC, rear seats, and the complex hydraulic suspension in favor of a standard coil-over setup. Only 29 examples of the Sport were built, making them among the rarest and most valuable of all 959s.

The Lost American Market

The Porsche 959 was never officially sold in the United States when new, because it could not comply with the NHTSA’s “bumper impact” test requirements without significant modification. Porsche chose not to undertake the crash testing given the limited numbers involved.

This legal situation created the absurd scenario of American enthusiasts—including Bill Gates and Ralph Lauren, both of whom had imported 959s privately—being forced to store their cars in customs bonded warehouses for years because the cars were not legal to drive on American roads. The U.S. government eventually passed the “Show and Display” exemption law in 1998, which allowed cars of “historical or technological significance” to be imported for display and limited driving. The Porsche 959 was specifically mentioned as one of the intended beneficiaries of this law.

The Financial Reality

The 959 lost money on every car sold. The asking price of $225,000 in 1987 (roughly equivalent to $600,000 today) was substantially below the actual cost of manufacturing each vehicle. Porsche’s internal cost estimates suggested each car cost significantly more to build than its price, with some estimates placing the loss per vehicle at $100,000 or more.

This was not a commercial failure in Porsche’s view—it was an R&D investment of strategic importance. The technologies developed for the 959 gave Porsche a decade-long head start over rivals in several critical areas.

Legacy: The Technology Transfer

Without the 959, the modern Porsche lineup would look entirely different.

The AWD system went directly into the 911 Carrera 4, which debuted in 1989. Every Porsche AWD system since is a descendant of the PSK.
The sequential turbo technology informed the development of Porsche’s VTG (Variable Turbine Geometry) turbochargers, which would eventually appear in the 997 Turbo and become a Porsche signature technology.
The tire pressure monitoring system fitted to the 959 was the first such system on any production road car—technology that is now mandated by law in every new vehicle sold in Europe and the United States.
The flat underbody aerodynamics became standard practice across the Porsche range.
The hydraulic active suspension laid groundwork that eventually produced the air suspension systems in the Cayenne and Panamera.

The 959 taught Porsche how to build the modern, technology-led supercar. Without the 959, the path to the 918 Spyder would have been far longer and more uncertain. Without the 959, there might never have been a Bugatti Veyron or a McLaren P1—because the 959 was the first car to demonstrate that extreme technology, reliably engineered and intelligently deployed, was more effective than extreme power alone.