Porsche is a very special marque that has motorsport intertwined within its DNA from its earliest of days. As well as building Porsche’s prestige over the decades, racing has also helped forge evermore potent road car offerings that mere mortals could actually go and buy. Even today the 911 GT3 RSR helps inform the GT3 and GT3 RS models that prowl the roads. However, its most direct customer offering for the track was to come in the form of a Porsche 919 Street.
Porsche’s return to Le Mans during the LMP1 hybrid era gave the fruit of not one, but three victories at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Its chosen champion was the 919 Hybrid, a compact and lightweight design powered by a turbocharged 2.0-litre V4. It’s four-cylinder engine was complimented by a hybrid system that boosted overall output by nearly 400bhp. A small turbine in the exhaust system gave this LMP1 car’s power unit the unique ability to generate electrical energy under acceleration and deceleration.
Triple victory in hand, and another Porsche exit from Le Mans imminent, engineers were given the freedom to explore what the LMP1 racer could really do. Dubbed the 919 Evo, this variant totally ignores the rulebook that artificially restricts Le Mans racers. The net result? A machine that can set faster lap times than an F1 car, not to mention the fastest thing to ever lap the Nurburgring. Extreme aerodynamics, less weight and 1,140bhp makes it just about the most capable vehicle to ever possess four wheels.
Porsche also considered how else it could make use of the extraordinary 919 package. A concept study dubbed ‘919 Street’ was commissioned to explore how this car could be put in the hands of select customers. While Porsche doesn’t confirm it, we believe this project started as a means to make the 919 street-legal – hence the name. That phase must have passed quickly with the new aim of created a track-only hyper car for gentlemen racers taking precedence.
The 919 Street retained the same compact proportions of the racer, and was even set to use its advanced V4 hybrid drivetrain. Its aerodynamic package was slimmed down in search of a higher top speed, but a full 887bhp would have been deployable via all-wheel drive. The idea was to give the driver sat within its carbon monocoque a real taste of what the racer was capable of.
This limited edition car made it to full-scale modelling stage, with designers perfecting how the final car would look. It’s this 1:1 clay model that serves as proof of this model’s existence. However, while one team were getting the car’s proportions right, another was discovering just how difficult it would be to package the motorsport monster’s drivetrain.
Due to the sheer complexities of the 919’s hybrid drivetrain, a team of engineers is required to keep the car running optimally. This same group of experts are needed to start the car, something that takes around 45 minutes. Porsche discovered that without sending engineers all over the world at short notice for the lifespan of these cars, there wasn’t an easy fix to the model’s high maintenance needs.
Ultimately it was logistical impracticalities that cost the world Porsche’s answer to the AMG Project One and Aston Martin Valkyrie.
Keyword: The secret 900bhp Porsche supercar that never happened