We open with the result that should change how you think about your own garage: a 1989 Porsche 959 Sport, the road-going version of Porsche's Group B-derived supercar, sold for $7,045,000 at RM Sotheby's, comfortably beating the $5,945,000 paid in 2018 for one of only three works Paris-Dakar rally cars, in the legendary Rothmans livery, the actual thing that raced across Africa. For six decades, racing history was the trump card in this hobby. Not this week.
From there, the pattern holds across the rest of the catalogue. RM's 1993 Porsche 911 Carrera RS 3.8, one of just 55 built and delivered new to a racing outfit in Aachen before spending 20 years in Japan, made $2,040,000. That is roughly four times the price of a standard 964 Carrera RS sold the same week. A 993 Turbo S in Zenith Blue, the last air-cooled 911 Turbo ever built, sold for $967,500 against two standard Turbos at $500,000 each. And a factory Flat-Nose Targa, the definitive symbol of 1980s excess, made over half a million dollars, roughly on par with a 964 RS.
But the most useful evidence of the week came from two nearly identical 2016 Porsche 911 R models. One had 168 miles on the clock, the other almost 6,000 – a decade's worth of driving between them. Both sold for exactly $830,000. The market didn't blink.
In Part 2 of our series, we unpack what that means for anyone who owns one of these cars: whether the first few thousand miles really are 'free', and where Porsche's Rennsport market stops being priced fairly and starts looking like what could become a bubble.
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