THE FANTASY HILLCLIMBER

The Fantasy Hillclimber

Our own take on how a Porsche 959 might have looked adapted for the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.

Every once in a while, you just have to dream. Imagine a world where, after taking the crown at the Paris-Dakar Rally, racing at Le Mans as the 961, and ultimately bowing out with the end of the ballistic Group B racing homologation, the engineers at Weissach found a perfect final send off for the 959, in one of the few truly unlimited races on earth.

That race is the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. For our team, there are few pieces of automotive film as captivating as Climb Dance, in which Ari Vatanen races to to the 14,115 foot summit of the legendary Colorado mountain in a blaze of dust and dawn light. Directed by Jean Louis Mourey and released in 1989, it captures the golden age of automotive technology like few others, where the understanding of combustion engines, turbocharging, aerodynamics, and cinematography all met to create something truly out of this world, and still plays in our minds nearly four decades since its release.

You are looking at the Tausendnägel - our take, in collaboration with artist Davide Virdis, on the dream created by that film - named after the thousands of rivets used to marry the bodywork to the car.

An imaginary, experimental, and wildly fast take on what was already the fastest supercar on the planet. It might not exist in the real world, but if you close your eyes, you can almost hear the twin turbos whistling at the Devil’s Playground as it takes the record.