Turning the SC RS into a rallying icon

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the 911 SC RS and its involvement in international rallying with what we now know as the Prodrive team. It was this project, under the Rothmans Porsche Rally Team banner, that put the fledgling David Richards Autosport (later to be renamed Prodrive) on the map and led to their eventual domination of not just rallying, but success in many other forms of motorsport as well.
 
One person who has been integral to the Prodrive success story is its R&D director David Lapworth, who joined the company just weeks into the 1984 SC RS rally programme as its head of engineering and who remains there to this day.
 
“David [Richards] sold his dream to Rothmans that we would create the Rothmans Porsche rally team and that, by 1986, we’d be running a Group B 959 and we’d win the World Rally Championship,” recounts David today, with something of a wry smile. It’s easy to see how this might have been persuasive, given Rothmans’ title sponsorship of the hugely successful Porsche Group C team in endurance racing. Why not Rothmans-branded victories on the rally stage as well? Moreover, with the lure of a decent budget and the promise of the mighty 959, Richards had under contract the hottest young property on the driver market: the Finn Henri Toivonen.


 
Over the previous decade, the 911 had been a staple of the rallying scene, bolstering entry lists and sometimes achieving success in high-profile events, most notably in the 1978 Monte Carlo Rally. But the factory largely stayed away, apart from its attempts on the Safari Rally. Whether direct involvement could have led to world titles is a moot point; a well-prepared Porsche team probably could have given the Lancia Stratos et al a good fight, but Porsche didn’t have, or weren’t inclined, to spend the budget in the forests.
 
Fast-forward to the run-up for the 1984 season and a relatively small programme was put in place to create a car suitable for the new Group B rules. “They decided they would need Group B homologation,” Lapworth recalls, “so they prepared 20 SC RSs, which was the minimum to get homologation, and gave us a handful. There’s some debate over whether it was five or six, but I keep telling people it’s like Trigger’s broom. I’m pretty sure we got through six cars, but I’m not sure there were six chassis numbers…”
 
Counting the regular 3.0-litre SC as the base homologation car, Group B rules allowed for a run of just 20 cars to reach evolution status, hence the low manufacturing requirement to make the SC RS. The resultant car was a lightweight, raucous 911 very much to the traditional template. The 3-litre flat six featured mechanical fuel injection with six individual throttle bodies and made 255hp in road trim, but nearly 300hp on the stages. It featured Turbo rear arches and suspension, plus the front suspension from the ’74 Carrera and the brakes from a 3.3 Turbo. Alloy and GRP body panels along with thinner glass made it substantially lighter. The factory internally gave it the type number ‘954’ and the 20 cars were built at the end of 1983, ready for homologation inspection early in January of the new year.



“They provided us with this basic kit of parts that you’d need to turn them into rally cars as part of the deal David had done with them. We got our 911 SC RS from the factory and, frankly, it wasn’t fit for purpose,” says Lapworth, flatly. “To cut a long story short, their idea of what a rally car was and Henri Toivonen’s idea – well, there was a massive gap. Their expectation was that you’d drive the car to its capability, rather than drive it as fast as it could go and see what breaks. You couldn’t drive a car in the Middle East the way you needed to win the championship or give it to Toivonen to drive flat out around Corsica on tarmac stages without doing something with the car. We would call it a Group N car and it needed to be a Group B car. Some of the parts came from the Röhrl car from 1981.”
 
The young Prodrive team came up with a now-famous list of 100 things that needed fixing on the car after the first few rallies of the 1984 season. Meanwhile, the company had got in touch with Lapworth in March of that year and offered him a job.
 
“The reason I knew David [Richards] is that David had won the World Championship with Ari [Vatanen] and I was with Peugeot Talbot Sport with Jean Todt and Guy Fréquelin. In ’81, you were talking the MK2 Ford Escort and Sunbeam Lotus but, by 1984, you were talking the Peugeot 205 T16 [a mid-engined, turbocharged, four-wheel-drive rally car] so, to be fair to the [Porsche] factory, that [rapid evolution] was at least part of the problem. The car they provided could have beaten a MK2 Escort… Nevertheless, remember that the plan was to win with the Group B car; even we weren’t so arrogant as to think we were going to win the World Championship in the first year. We were going to take a couple of years to build the team; we just didn’t expect to be quite so far behind. Our more realistic benchmark might have been the Lancia 037, but even that was a proper rally car.”

 
Thankfully, Prodrive’s target was the 1984 European Rally Championship, not the WRC, and Toivonen entered into a mighty season-long battle with the Lancia 037 of Carlo Capone. “The Middle East and European Championships were a good way to get the team ready. We thought we were ready for the WRC, but no way were we!”
 
As for the 911, most of Prodrive’s attention was spent on making it durable enough. “We did some good stuff on setup, but that was very quick – to me at the time, it felt like common sense (too soft, too high, that sort of thing). We did that very early on, maybe over a month and one or two tests. But then it was nearly all practical stuff like fixing the oil system and the front end of the car was nowhere near strong enough – we needed more ground clearance and more reinforcement. We double-skinned them, with two inner wings and box structures to add strength. We basically spent the two years fixing things, ticking off things on that list.”
 
The biggest problem was that the 959 wasn’t on the horizon after all. Lapworth recalls it dawning on the team in two steps; first when there was no prototype running in early ’85 but Porsche were talking about going to the Paris-Dakar raid with the 959, and then by the end of the year when it became really obvious. Toivonen, who had been leading the European Championship, hurt his back and missed a number of rounds, eventually being beaten to the title by Capone.


 
As to whether the 959 could ever have worked as a Group B rally car, Lapworth is more enthusiastic about its prospects than some. “It could have worked. From what I’ve learned over the past 40 years, all the Group B cars were ill-conceived. I wouldn’t start with the engine in the back. If someone gives me a clean sheet of paper and says ‘Make it as fast as you can’, I’ll do some basic physics that tells me where the mass distribution ought to be and what the dynamic index should be, and it doesn’t look like a 911 – but neither does it look like a Metro 6R4, a 205 T16 or an Audi Quattro. But, in those days, with the best engineers around and if you’ve got no rules, what would you do? They made them look like Formula One cars for gravel.
 
“Prodrive rallied a 959 eventually, just once. Rothmans wanted to do the Pharaohs Raid but Porsche were disinterested, instead giving the team engines and parts and drawings and little else. Nevertheless, a car was built – and it won.”
 
Co-driver John Spiller recounted in Reinhard Klein’s book Rally Cars that the 460bhp car was “a sensation. It was capable of 185mph… and of planing on the sand, in that it would overcome the bow wave and perform as if the surface was solid concrete.”


 
Prodrive ran a MG Metro 6R4 in the 1986 British Championship and switched to the BMW M3 E30 once the Group A era began in 1987. By the early ’90s, it had formed an alliance with Subaru and has never looked back. As for Porsche, rallying has remained on the periphery of its radar. Even so, the stopgap had served its purpose and that’s something Lapworth believes today: “The level of work that we had to do to sort that car out was probably appropriate for our ability and our experience at the time. It was a good part of our learning curve”.