A NEW BREED OF HERO

Launched at the turn of the millennium, the GT3 badge has already earned a place alongside RS, CS and turbo in Porsche lore.

- NEIL WINN

If you have ever missed a deadline, forgotten an anniversary or had to send a belated birthday card to a best friend, then a career at Porsche might not be for you. At the Stuttgart marque, the celebrations never seem to stop.

Last year, Porsche honoured 60 years of the 911 while simultaneously marking its own 75th birthday. This year, the focus shifted to 50 years of the turbo, with commemorative events across the globe.

Yet amid all the fanfare, another milestone has been quietly circled in our calendars for quite some time - one that, rather surprisingly, many enthusiasts might have overlooked.

We're talking about the 25th anniversary of the 911 GT3 - a genre-defining machine that, since its 1999 debut, has set the benchmark for high-performance cars.

To mark the occasion, the Porsche Museum team has invited us to the Austrian Alps to drive its pristine 996 Gen 1 GT3, and to meet the man who led the project back in the late '90s: Roland Kussmaul. For those unfamiliar with him, Roland is very much the enthusiast's engineer.

Known for his boundless energy and versatility during his four decades at Porsche, his enviable CV includes overseeing its rallying operations, competing on the Paris-Dakar, leading the technical development of the Cup racing cars, developing the iconic 964 Carrera RS, and testing everything from the 908/03 to the 956.

It's no surprise that Andreas Preuninger, Roland's de facto successor, once claimed: "I learned everything I know about cars, and most of what I know about 911s, from him." Despite his wealth of experience, however, Roland and his key Porsche Motorsport colleagues Hartmut Kristen (vice president of sales and marketing for special and rare vehicles) and Herbert Ampferer (director of the division) found the GT3 project uniquely challenging not from an engineering perspective, but from a cultural one.