Race-honed, £1.2m recreation of a Porsche legend will go for gold in the hillclimb shoot-out this week
Californian Porsche tuner Gunther Weeks will bid for class victory on the Goodwood Festival of Speed hillclimb next week, with a 1000bhp-plus reimagining of the iconic Porsche 911 Slantnose.
Project F-26 – numbered for the amount of examples that will be built, at around £1.2m apiece – is a fighter jet-inspired recreation of the distinctive 935 Slantnose of the 1970s, based on the 993-generation 911.
It is powered by a twin-turbocharged (but still traditionally air-cooler) 4.0-litre Mezger flat six, co-developed with a racing firm to produce a colossal 1067bhp – a little more than the Ferrari 849 Testarossa, for reference – and some 750lb ft of torque.
Those outrageous reserves are sent through a six-speed manual gearbox and limited-slip differential to the rear axle, and should be good for true supercar performance figures given the carbon-bodied F-26 only weighs 1225kg dry – less than a Lotus Emira.
Gunther Works is hoping it will take the fastest time in its class when it runs up the hill at the Sussex festival next weekend, with ex-F1 and Nascar driver Scott Speed at the helm.
The company is likely to field the F-26 in the production road car category, the fastest of which at 2025’s event was the Koenigsegg Sadair’s Spear, which ascended the 1.16-mile climb in just 47.14 seconds.
The outright hillclimb record is still held by Gloucestershire-based McMurtry, whose 1000bhp electric fan car, the Spéirling, went from bottom to top in 39.08 seconds in 2023 – a record that is unlikely to be broken for some time.
