WSC60 Porsche 904/8

3d Model Conversion by: Mac Ten, enhanced by DrDoomslab.

Today the 904 or Carrera GTS remains as one of the finest and most successful Porsches ever constructed. It kickstarted a program of racing cars, that would eventually result in the all conquering 917. It also holds a unique spot in the manufacturer's history as the last dual-purpose sportscar Porsche ever built.

The radical 904 was the first Porsche to use a ladder-type frame – spaceframe construction was too expensive for what was, in essence, a production car – and glassfibre body, with the manufacturing turned over to Heinkel Flugzeugwerke in Speyer. It was novel in that the rather unevenly sprayed glassfibre body was bonded directly to the steel chassis to add stiffness, the upshot being that it was more rigid than the previous spaceframe cars. Also, the 904 was commendably light at 675kg, its 2mm-thick (give or take) glassfibre shell weighing only 85kg. The shark nose helped give a drag coefficient of 0.34, low for the time, and a top speed of 160mph, after reaching 60mph in 5.5 seconds from rest.

Three prototypes were constructed and tested heavily in the fall of 1963. After various modifications were carried through, the car was first shown to public late in November. Internally it was known as the '904', but it was marketed to the public as the 'Carrera GTS'. Today it's commonly referred to as the 904. Within two weeks all but 21 of the 90 examples available for the public were spoken for. Production started soon after in a completely new factory, constructed to produce the new 901/911 model. By April of 1964 enough examples were constructed to homologate the 904 as a GT.

Although it took until April for the cars to be homologated, the cars were already entered in various races. At Sebring the Lake Underwood and Briggs Cunningham driven 904 finished 9th overall and 1st in the prototype class. Throughout 1964 Porsche continued to develop the 904 and provided their customers with various new parts to keep the cars on the pace. Two of the works cars were fitted with a two litre version of the Formula 1 racers eight cylinder engine and later in the year the six cylinder engine finally made its introduction. These versions were not built in sufficient quantities to be homologated, so they raced in the prototype class only.

During 1964 and 1965, the Porsche factory team raced a total of three 904 Coupés with a 2.0 Liter version of the Type 771 flat-8 engine that was tuned to approximately 240 hp in the Coupé and increased its weight to 690 kg as opposed to a typical 904 GTS's 655 kg in race trim. The 904/8 Coupé usually stood in the shadow of its more successful GT cousin (Carrera GTS with a flat-4 engine) and the 904/6 Coupé that joined the 904/8 in the 2.0 Liter Prototype class for 1965 and already had chassis numbers that started with "906" in anticipation of becoming the production 906, which didn't happen. The best results that the 904/8 Coupé achieved in international endurance races were a pair of overall 3rd places in the 1965 editions of the Nürburgring 1000 km and Paris 1000 km, combined with the class win in the 2.0 Liter Prototype class on both occasions.

At Le Mans, however, the 904/8 Coupé never lasted beyond roughly the halfway point of the event before it succumbed to engine or clutch failures. The car already comes with accurate skins for each of the events that the three 904/8 Coupé chassis 904-008, 904-009 and 904-082 participated in or were brought to as a backup car during competition from 1964 to 1966.

The racing legacy of the 904/8 ended at the 1966 Nürburgring 1000 km race, where 904-009 was retrofitted to the 904 GTS's flat-4 engine and became the pioneer of live onboard TV coverage in motorsport by delivering the racing action straight from the cockpit of the racing journalists Paul Frère and Rainer Günzler to the living rooms of Germany's ZDF TV audience.