Porsche secretly built the v-10 le Mans race car 25 years ago

Porsche released the Carrera GT in 2000 with a naturally aspirated 5.5-liter V-10 unique to the car. But the engine was not originally intended for that purpose.

Instead, it was originally developed for the Le Mans Sports Prototype Race Car, which was first canceled before the competition. This car is known as the LMP2000, or the 9R3 mentioned internally, and Porsche did not publicly mention the car until a few years later.

A year before the Carrera GT debuted on the world stage at the 2000 Paris Motor Show, only one example was ever built. It is currently in the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart and Porsche recently marked the 25th anniversary of the car by taking it to the company-owned Weissach test track.

The automaker took this opportunity to invite Alan McNish, 1 of the original test drivers of the car.

In the late 1990s Porsche was already successfully competing in top・level endurance races, including the 24 Hours of Le Mans, with the 911GT1 and LMP1-98 race cars. The LMP2000 was developed as a successor to those cars and was scheduled to make its motorsport debut in 2000.

However, Porsche, with its limited budget and staff resources at the time, eventually canceled a project that would focus on the development of the first Cayenne, which would give Porsche the necessary funds to launch the Carrera GT.

The V-10 derives from an early design that Porsche designed for Formula 1 in the early 1990s but never used, displacing only 3.5 liters. Porsche had supplied the F1 team with the V-12 in 1991, but after the disastrous run of that season, the automaker withdrew. The V-10 was designed to replace the overweight V-12, but Porsche was already out of F1 before development was completed.

The V-10 will eventually power the Carrera GT, but it will take more than 10 years to do so.