
Not wanting to take the wind out of German tuning firm 9ff’s sails, the Porsche 9ff GT9 is still playing catch up with 257mph Shelby Super Cars Ultimate Aero TT though, which seems to have been brushed under the floor mats amid all the back-slapping.
Dortmund-based Porsche tuning outfit 9ff re-positioned the 987bhp 4.0-litre twin turbo-charged lump in the middle of the supercar that started its automotive life as a Porsche 996 – confusingly what Stuttgart boffins refer to the 911 as - to encourage better all round weight distribution.
The whole chunk of metal, wiring looms, valves and plugs amounts to less than half that found beneath the Veyron’s eye-pleasing cover, yet is still wholly responsible for 710lb-ft of torque.
We say based, but it’s ‘based’ in the same way that anything with 2% of its original parts remaining can be classed as ‘more or less identical’.
All the other key components have been cast asunder in favour of carbon fibre and wood, so effectively detractors could argue that it’s technically not the fastest road-going Porsche taking into account the parts that make up the sum total. But that’s just being pedantic.
Somewhere along the line, placed on a stretching rack and coming 30cm worse off in length and 12cm in height, the six-speed (optional sequential transmission) Porsche 9ff GT9 would quite possibly have become airborne had these more ground-hugging modifications not come into effect.
The Pappenburg test track in North-east Germany was where the Porsche 9ff GT9 set the record straight, yet interestingly it’s actually more pedestrian than the Veyron in terms of 0 – 62mph, 1 second more lick-to-lag as it turns out, recording the acceleration benchmark dash in 3.4 seconds.
The underlying production deciding factor was that if the 9ff tuning could make the 996 more lairy – even marginally more in-your-face than a Veyron – than its mission would have been accomplished, and it would give them the momentum to make the tweaked model into a limited run of 20, and setting potential buyers back €476Ks or $785,595.
LAST WORD; .
As Clarkson found when attempting to shoehorn himself into his beloved Ford GT, anyone over 5 feet 8 inches might find it near impossible to get into the 9ff GT9

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