Porsche Unveils Never-Before-Seen Photos Of Prototypes That Never Made The Cut

There are few brands that have such an interesting and driven history as Porsche. It’s not just their ever-burning passion to dominate the race track that intrigues us, it’s also the minds behind some of the company’s greatest designs. Thankfully, this past weekend, Porsche’s social media team has begun a 2 week-long campaign in which they reveal rare pictures of cars that never made it to the road or, even the racetrack.

The first picture that they released (see below) features a car that is a “teaser haring back to the days of sports car racing of the ‘50s.” The limited view of the car’s lines is obviously intended to get our underwear in a knot and force us to tune in for more but from what we can see, there are some assumptions afoot.

The big, curvy rear fenders, open-top, and frameless windscreen are good reasons to believe that the head of Porsche Design, Mark Mauer, was inspired by the legendary Porsche 550 Spyder. The license plate on the back also says “Little Rebel” which is a less than cryptic reference to James Dean’s “Little Bastard” car and his 1955 death from crashing his Porsche on a public road.

It could also be a Porsche 718 RS 60, which Porsche raced in the ‘50s along with the 550 Spyder. The 718 had the 550 Spyder’s same basic shape but with a larger safety structure behind the driver’s head and a more aerodynamic front end. Its name was also the inspiration for the new 718 Caymans and Boxsters. Either way, the license plate, and shape of the rear end have the 550 written all over it.

The second installment of secrets is a less-obvious guess. Captioned as “based on the racing car with which Porsche won 24 Heures du Mans”, this picture (see at top) sends some mixed signals. Porsche claims that while it was inspired by one of their Le Mans winners, it was originally targeted at “privateer racers”, or wealthy customers with race teams.

Porsche has and still is winning Le Mans all the damn time which makes narrowing down the field of victorious cars a little harder. Since all we get is the rear end in this pic, we immediately saw the huge fenders wrapping around the rear end and creating an outer-shell that exposes the taillights. This was a key design element of both the “Moby Dick” 935 and the 911 GT1 racecars.

However, Porsche already did a modern 935 reincarnation and made 77 of them. So, our bet is that Porsche had the 911 GT1 (Picture Above) in mind when building this prototype.

Are we wrong? Tell us what you think these German hieroglyphics mean.

Max Larsen is the Porsche reporter at Torque News. Since he was 15 years old Max was building old cars and selling them for profit, spawning his love for cars. He has been around Porsches his entire life. His grandpa had several 911s and he owned a Porsche 944 when he was younger, which made the auto-shop class cars a lot simpler. Reading old car magazines and seeing press cars at shows gave him the passion to write and pursue the industry. He is currently studying for Journalism at Western Washington University and writing for the racing team there locally. Follow Max on Torque News Porsche and on Twitter at @maxlarsencars. Search Torque News Porsche for daily Porsche news coverage by our expert automotive reporters.