Porsche is well known for building some of the greatest race cars in history, meticulously crafting its machines to take international victory on almost every stage motorsport visits. The German brand has more Le Mans, Daytona, and Sebring wins than any other manufacturer, and its production-based GT3 series of racers have been dominating all kinds of privateer circuits for decades at this point. This, however, will be the first time one of Weissach’s finest GT3s has ever competed in the low-buck “Lemons” series. (Note: Antipodean Lemons is not affiliated with the North American 24 Hours of Lemons series.)
When a grip of car geniuses in New Zealand stumbled upon a Porsche GT3 Cup in a junkyard with crash damage, they decided it was in their interest to bring the machine back to life. Porsche’s lovely 3.6-liter flat six drivetrain was long gone, but they had a welder and probably a few pints of Speight’s Original.
James Dawson
The budget for this low-buck racing series, as you probably know, is far below the cost to build a real GT3 race car drivetrain — by an order of ten. So how on earth would you power a GT3 race car without a big race team budget? Easy, grab a wrecked Ssangyong Actyon Sports and get to chopping.
Where did this thing come from?
When I first heard about this project, I had to know more. I’m a sucker for low-buck fun and weird powertrain swaps, so I reached out to team boss James Dawson for more insight. Apparently the chassis is a real deal 911 GT3 Cup that competed in the Bahrain 12 Hour endurance race “when it was a Porsche.” Luckily Dawson has a sense of humor, because he absolutely needed one to follow through on this fool’s errand. Dawson went on to tell me that he uncovered the wrecked tub at a “Porsche wreckers” and when the shop heard about what Dawson had planned for the car, they just gave him the shell. The front was crunched and wasn’t really worth anything more than scrap metal, so he was basically doing them a favor.
James Dawson
James and his buddies got the car on a frame table and pulled it as straight as they could before getting to the business of figuring out how to mate the damn thing to a box-tube body-on-frame Ssangyong SUV chassis without making it twenty feet tall and even more terrible to drive.
What’s a Ssangyong Actyon Sport?
The front body panels for this car were obviously crunched in the crash that made the chassis useless. The team needed some front end panels, and pulled from another wrecked Porsche to make this one whole again. Apparently all of the front panels came from a wrecked street GT3, bought on the cheap.
James Dawson
In a weird bit of serendipity, Dawson and his team managed to fit the Porsche with an engine from Stuttgart, by way of Korea. Ssangyong didn’t have the kind of money to develop a smooth and reliable engine, so it simply bought 2.3-liter inline-fours from Mercedes-Benz. The E23 version of the venerable M111 engine was available in the C-class, E-class, and Vito across the 1990s, but you could get it in a Ssangyong product as late as 2014. The Actyon Sports pickup was one of those. In this application the engine made about 150 horsepower and about 130 lb-ft of torque. That’s a few hundred shy of the 997 GT3 Cup’s original engine, and it certainly doesn’t sound as nice, but it still looks like a butt load of fun.
Them’s the brakes
Dawson figured out that he could cut up the Ssangyong chassis to create new front and rear subframes to mate with the Porsche chassis. At the front he welded in the engine cradle, and out back the differential carrier. Then a tunnel had to be cut through the floor of the Porsche to give somewhere for the transmission and driveshaft to go. The Ssangyong was right-hand drive, and they’d be using the steering and front suspension, so the GT3 had to be converted to right-hand drive as well. If you didn’t already know a ton of effort went into this project, you should by now. If Dawson had set his mind to world peace instead of this wild hybrid Korean/German project, he might have achieved it by now.
As an added bit of interesting lore for the car, Dawson’s final message to me about the car was all about the brakes. “You may not believe this, but the front brake calipers are off my 2005 Ford GT, which was converted new to a GT3 Matech car.” Okay, so this guy is the real deal, and so is the car. Hopefully one day I can hop a flight to NZ and see the ingenuity behind this car first hand. It hasn’t raced yet but hopefully will hit the track soon, as they just got it running this week.
