FIFTY YEARS OF PORSCHE RS

MORE POWER, LESS WEIGHT, TRULY ICONIC. WE DRIVE FOUR OF PORSCHE'S FINEST, AND FIRST, RS MODELS AHEAD OF THE GT3 RS'S GLOBAL REVEAL

- BEN BARRY

MOTOR IS YET to get the official deep-dive on Porsche's upcoming 992 GT3 RS as we go to press, but I'd back myself to knock out the first drive now- how hard could it be?

Things haven't always been so nailed on for the Rennsport (or motorsport) derived 911, because when the Carrera RS 2.7 launched 50 years ago back at the 1972 Paris Motor Show, Porsche's sales boss thought it might shift ten units. A month after that revealed the 500 units needed for Group 4 racing had sold and Porsche kept churning RSS out until, by July 1973, they'd built 1580.

You know the rest - legendary status, heady $500k plus values - so it's a Porsche geek's wet dream to revisit not just the original RS in both Touring and Sport variants, picked from Porsche's own collection near Stuttgart, but to drive them back-to-back with their 964 and 993 air-cooled successors, plus interview the man who created the original's 'ducktail' rear spoiler. That should tide us over until the 992 quite nicely.

Tilmann Brodbeck greets us at Porsche's incredible storage facility in Kallenberg, a kind of Noah's ark of Porsche's heritage. The 77-year-old joined Porsche in 1970 after studying aerodynamics at Darmstadt University, and recalls how early on he developed the gumshield-like airdam to reduce front-end lift on the regular 911. Next thing, the 26-year-old engineer and his early-30-something boss Hermann Burst are called into development chief Helmuth Bott's office. Uh oh. "I was still very young," he tells us, "so you think something's wrong, but Mr. Bott explained our racing customers had big trouble with the BMW 1602 and 2002 and Ford Capri, because in the curves they were faster."