It appears that MINI’s challenge to Porsche won’t play out at the racetrack. The following letter [via MotorAuthority] is Porsche USA’s Detlev Von Platen’s response to MINI’s Jim McDowell.
Dear Jim,
Imagine our surprise to discover our former employee, now the head of Mini, has challenged us to a head-to-head race. As you surely know, Porsche has a long history of racing success, with more than 28,000 wins over the last 60 years. In our early days, we pitted ourselves against the giants, so we’ve been in your shoes.
But as you also know, Porsche doesn’t race for fame, stunts or publicity. We race to challenge ourselves; we race to push sports car technology; we race to translate every win on the track to our cars on the road. If you need a reminder of our intent, please take a look at this short video: http://tinyurl.com/37xdjqx
While your challenge seems like a fun and lighthearted campaign, we’ll stick to racing the way we have over the decades. We welcome you at Sebring, Le Mans, Daytona or any other sanctioned race where there is more at stake than T-shirts and valet parking spaces. We also invite you to any of the thousands of tracks around the world where Porsche owners compete each weekend.Good luck with your race at Road Atlanta on June 21; we hope you enjoy the day.
Sincerely,
Detlev Von Platen
President and CEO, Porsche Cars North America
But as you also know, Porsche doesn’t race for fame, stunts or publicity.
Unless some Japanese johnny-come-lately humiliates our bread-and-butter sports car on it’s home turf, then it’s all about fame and publicity.
Exactly. Maybe they should have ended that with “…unless we know we have a good chance of losing.”
Quick! Somebody call Maximum Bob!
Two utterly pathetic aspects to this “response”:
1) The video above is 95% air-cooled cars. Porsche doesn’t make air-cooled cars any more, and has not done so for more than a decade.
2) Porsche’s bizarre insistence on withholding help from mid-engined Porsche drivers mean that MINIs have been whipping Boxsters for some time in Continental/Koni/Grand-Am Cup for some time now.
Jack – what about the new Cayman cup cars?
I know they’re only racing each other, but they’re finding their way into private party hands.
I beg to differ. If you know Porsche’s history they made air cooled cars til 1999 – thus the reason why most cars shown were air cooled. It would be pathetic if there were non Porsches in that video. I think you missed the point of “Porsche” and its “roots”. Mini has some roots but they wanted to be cute.
well, first off, the video is about “roots” not current line-up. so, duh, they used older cars which were air-cooled.
secondly, sounds like someone’s a tad bitter that the race didn’t happen. maybe still hurting from the cts-v challenge?
So…now the t-shirts they distribute will say “Porsche wouldn’t race us” or “Porsche compares us to them when they were small and scrappy” or somesuch? Or will they beat Porsche in a racing series or two, then make shirts that say “We beat Porsche on the track and the wallet”?
“I tried to race Porsche but all I got was this T-shirt”
You forget Porsche is a hedge fund now. Oh wait that was last year
I noticed the air cooled aspect of the vid as well, It told me “yeah we did that along time ago” I think the Mini campaign is brilliant, it will get what it wants, attention.
I like Porsche’s response better than I like some overhyped-yet-meaningless Porsche-Mini Challenge event.
Let it be settled on the tracks of the world, like it always is.
And watch out, Porsche — we all know you’re distracted making fast minivans and family cruisers these days.
Lets clear up some information and add a little objectivity – Porsche makes an SUV and a sedan (with up to 500 hp). If you ever driven a Panamera or Cayenne you will be astounded as to how well they drive. Porsche does not make a minivan.
However, didn’t Mini just create the Clubman and will soon be releasing a Mini based SUV (now in the pre-production stages).
we race to push sports car technology
This from a company built on a halo model whose biggest change in the last 50 years was the addition of water cooling 10 years ago?
The poster child for, “Don’t fix the problem.. just engineer around it.”
What?! OK, I agree with you purely from a logical standpoint.
But if you have ever come out of a corner in a 911 with your right foot to the floor and felt all that weight mashing the drive wheels to the pavement while a flat 6 (preferably air-cooled) growls and clatters way out back, you’ll know that sometimes you gotta engineer around a logical flaw.
Besides, it’s in all of our best interests to keep the Germans occupied with solving the riddle of the RR layout. Europe’s been relatively peaceful since the 911 came out.
“Europe’s been relatively peaceful since the 911 came out.”
Wickedly funny reply!
Fair point. I was fairly tongue in cheek when I said that anyway. I have 2 Rotary engine cars in my garage and 2 more sitting in my side yard, so I really can’t throw a lot of stones in the “engineering around the problem” glass house….
I wonder if one of those rotary engines will fit in a 911’s engine bay…
Yep
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUEcTQF4vtY
(Other examples out there, but that’s the first one I found.)
whoever thought of a rotary powered 911 is just simply brilliant.
The rear engine isn’t a “problem” – otherwise Porsche wouldn’t be consistently kicking ass year after year.
Its a problem for noobs who don’t know what trailing throttle oversteer is.
If you know how to drive a 911, you know how to charge in hard, get your braking down, and avoid lifting mid turn. You know that a gentle decrease in throttle input will get the car rotating like nothing else, and you know that once the apex is cleared you can floor it and the weight transfer will hook up those rear wheels so you can blast out of the corner.
If the rear engine is an ideal arrangement, once one knows what trailing throttle oversteer is, why are there no modern GT, prototype or bespoke open-wheel cars with this arrangement?
Without a doubt, Porsche has done amazing things with the 911 to cure the inherent problems of a weighted pendulum behind the rear axle. There also seems to be little doubt that a Cayman with the same power as a 911 is a superior sports car. This is not to say that mid-engine layouts don’t have their own problems, not the least of which is finding room for passengers, but in terms of sports and racing car design, the rear engine layout is an eddy in the river of automobile design progress.
“There also seems to be little doubt that a Cayman with the same power as a 911 is a superior sports car.”
In the recent Car and Driver magazine Lightening Lap around the VIR Grand West course the 911 Carrera S and Cayman S made the same lap times although the Cayman was down 65 hp (17%) to the 911.
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q4/the_lightning_lap_2009-feature
The relevant quote from the article:
“Down 65 horsepower to the 911 Carrera S, the 320-hp Cayman S still managed to match the time of its more powerful and expensive kin. How’d that happen? Credit the balanced mid-engined chassis that provides abundant, easy-to-exploit grip.”
As an owner of a 996 Carrera that I track I couldn’t agree more with cretinx. I have yet to be passed by a mini, although I have been passed by a few Miata’s!!!
Is it true that the race Mini wanted to do against Porsche was simply an autox with cones in the parking lot at Road America (and not actually race on the track – where it would get its ass kicked).
This was a trap. The race wasn’t going to take place on the actual road course, but rather some Mini-designed autocross. It’s like those comical comparisons in minivan ads or Ford Fiesta ads. “The new Megabox XXLS comfortably seats a team of 9 headed for soccer practice. How many people can you fit in your 911, or rather, how many 911s do you need to haul 9 soccer players and their gear?” Ha-ha.
Miatas can whup Corvettes under some conditions and I imagine that given the right course, a Mini could beat a 911.
The Ford spot compared the turning radius of a Lamborghini to the Fiesta, yeah, it’s true and it’s cute, but if Ford publicly threw down down a gauntlet at Lambo, do you really think Lambo would show up and say, “It’s ON!”
The “race” was probably engineered to exploit whatever advantages the Mini has over a 911 so that Mini owners could have a chuckle at Porsche’s expense. Even if Porsche would win, it’d be viewed as a gorilla beating up a Chihuahua. Porsche did the right thing and handled it pretty well.
This weekend is the 24 Hours of Le Mans. In the GT2 catagory there will be six Porsche 911 GT3 RSRs and two BMW M3 GT2s. (BMW of course owns MINI.)
May the best marque win on a level playing field!
There will also be two Chevrolet Corvette C6 ZR1s and five Ferrari F430 GTs, as well as a Jaguar, an Aston Martin, and a Spyker. A veritable sport car racing ethusiast’s paradise!
So now we have our answer.
At the 2010 24hrs of LeMans the GT2 finishers were 1 Porsche, 2 Ferrari, 3 Porsche, 4 Ferrari, 5 Porsche, 6 BMW, 7 Porsche, 8 Porsche, 9 Spyker. (Neither Corvette finished, neither did the Jag nor the Aston Martin.)