You can now buy a Porsche 911 Turbo with a Formula One engine
Only 11 F1-engined 'TAG Turbo' Porsches will be built
BRITISH engineering firm Lanzante has revealed perhaps its most extreme custom car yet: a classic Porsche 911 that’s powered by a Formula One engine.
Full details on the project are yet to be announced but Lanzante has confirmed it’s acquired permission from McLaren’s motorsports department to install engines from its old Formula One cars into 11 specially-prepared Porsche 911s.
As the cars will be first-generation Porsche 911 Turbos, the engines used will appropriately be the turbocharged, TAG-branded Porsche V6s that McLaren used in its single-seaters from 1983 to 1987.
The V6s that Lanzante will shoehorn into its ”Porsche 911 TAG Turbos” will be genuine race engines too, with each one used at Grands Prix in the mid 1980s. The power unit that’s fitted to the car pictured above comes from the McLaren MP4/2 in which Niki Lauda won the 1984 British Grand Prix.
Lanzante’s limited-run Porsches are the latest in a long line of projects on which it has collaborated with McLaren. A one-off Lanzante “longtail” McLaren P1 GT was one of the star cars that debuted at the 2018 Goodwood Festival of Speed, and the company managed the team that won the 1995 24 Hours of Le Mans in a McLaren F1 GTR.
Though the idea of stuffing a 1980s Formula One engine into a Porsche 911 sounds novel, Lanzante isn’t the pioneer of that concept; McLaren did it itself, using a Porsche 911 Turbo as a test bed for the 1.5-litre racing engine.
