It begins in 1983, when Australian driver Vern Schuppan won Le Mans outright in a Rothmans Porsche 956, becoming the first Australian to do so since 1928. By the end of the decade, a Japanese conglomerate approached him about building a road-legal version of Porsche's dominant Group C racer: one car for each of their 50 hotels across Japan. Schuppan hired sixty people at a base in the UK, only a stone's throw from the Formula 1 teams and heart of the country's motorsport industry, and after more than £2 million in R&D, what emerged was a 600bhp twin-turbo flat-six race-derived monster with a claimed top speed that briefly made it the fastest road car on the planet.
A rare look at one of the few Porsche 962 Le Mans cars converted for road use.
The 962CR is one of the great what-ifs of the '90s supercar world, a Le Mans race car turned road car that nearly worked, and nearly ruined everyone involved in the process.
