Back in October I took a look at a Ruf Cabriolet. Originally listed as a BTR3, the listing has been corrected to refer to the car as a BTR 3.4. Last time around one of our knowledgeable readers commented that there were injection differences between the two. There’s also been a pretty substantial price drop of $40,000 to a still nose bleed-worthy $200,000. Is it likely to find a home this time around?
Take two very desirable machines and stick them together and you get…? Well, for starters you get a car that I haven’t ever come across before. You also get a conundrum, but more on that later. Here we have a Guards Red 1992 Porsche 911 Carrera RS, a highly desirable and ridiculously wonderful machine in its own right. However, this isn’t a standard Carrera RS, but rather a Carrera RS whose 3.6 liter flat-six has been turbocharged by the wonder-workers at Ruf Automobile GmbH. That means 370 hp in one of the lighter 964 variants produced. It means a narrow-body 911 with a healthy does of power being delivered only to the rear wheels. And it means an object of much desire.
The Mint Green 1989 RUF RCT EVO Conversion we featured back in September is back up for sale. The price has come down a little bit, but we’ll have to see if it’s enough to counteract the higher mileage of what is certainly a unique 911.
I have to admit, I really don’t get fast convertibles. You could argue that the top down lets you hear the roar of the exhaust, I suppose. Or you could suggest that the faster the acceleration and higher the top speed, the more alive you feel as the wind rushes through your hair. It’s not that I don’t think certain fast convertibles aren’t attractive, mind you, or appealing in their own way. And some modern convertibles are downright amazing in their ability to channel the blowing atmosphere away from you. But in all honesty, once you’re above highway speeds, the expensive radio and million plus horsepower are lost upon me, obscured in a veil of churning oxygen, nitrogen, and other trace elements. Perhaps I’m in the minority and it could have to do with the not-always awesome New England weather, but I’d prefer a sunroof coupe in most applications – with some notable vintage exceptions like pre-War cars and Pagoda SLs. Of course, I suppose if you argued that you weren’t going to break the speed limit (okay, but not by much…) or head to the track, then the convertible arrangement offers you plenty of speed in for your driving pleasure and the thrill of the open-air experience. Want to know what it felt like to be the Red Baron, for example? This Ruf BTR3 Cabriolet could sure help:
For a few decades now Ruf Automobile GmbH has provided Porsche owners unsatisfied with the marque’s standard offerings the opportunity to have something that is quite a bit more special. In some cases, those builds look like entirely original designs where we might fail to recognize the original chassis upon which it was based, but most of Ruf’s work is easily identifiable and the untrained eye may not even realize these are any different from a standard Porsche. There has always been a serious sleeper factor to a Ruf build and it is that dedication to maintaining the refined nature of any Porsche that I think has made Ruf such a serious manufacturer and sustained its success. The example here, a 1989 Ruf RCT Evo, I think falls into that latter category of build that, for the most part, differs only subtly from the 911 from which it sprang. Under the exterior, however, lies a much more potent beast: 425 hp directed through a 6-speed manual transmission and delivered, in this case, only to the rear wheels makes for serious performance and an attention-holding driving experience. That’s a good 45 hp even above the 3.6 Turbo S! A Ruf build always has been a complete work enhancing each aspect of the car’s performance so, naturally, upgrades to braking and suspension are included to help keep that extra power under control. There are a few details of this RCT Evo that I would change: it doesn’t possess the interesting rear light treatment we see on some RCTs, the rain rails are still present, and Mint Green, though one of the special 964 colors, has never been my favorite. Those are minor niggles (well, other than the Mint Green exterior) and entirely aesthetic so we can rest assured the performance remains top notch. All together this is a special 964 and a conversion we come across much less frequently than those for the 930.
I’m always a fan of the showdown posts; no surprise, since I think I’m the only one who does them here! While it’s nice to highlight one car at a time, I’m just a fan of the opportunity costs; considering what my money could go towards otherwise. Plus, though we see comparisons of new cars in magazines and online fora, it’s not often that we have comparos including nearly 40 year old cars. While I usually highlight this type of comparison in my 10K Friday posts, today is a bit different and I believe the first time I have a showdown on Tuner Tuesday. I’ve rounded up a quintet of neat cars that are all modified from stock by some of the most famous tuners of the 1980s; which is the winner?
Tuned cars from the 1980s were never particularly discrete, nor were they cheap or easy to come by. Tuners like Treser, in an effort to get more power out of the notoriously non-tunable CIS injection system that adorned nearly all German cars in the 1980s, got creative by taking a 928 fuel distributor for the V8 motor and sticking it on the inline-5 turbo unit. Others, like AMG, took the biggest motor they could build and stuck that into a bunch of different cars. Ruf turned up the boost on the 911 range by moving the turbocharged flat-6 into narrow-body cars. But none of this came cheaply, nor were these tuned cars always the most reliable. When it came to the period of electronic fuel injection, though, things started to change. The first chip-tuned cars also had some bad habits; my father’s chipping 944 Turbo, for example, runs quite rich and if you engage the cruise control, the computer believes you want to go 170 m.p.h. and plants the throttle wide open. But they’ve become increasingly reliable and almost a given; plus they’re cheap. On a car like my 1.8T Passat, you can get a reflash of the ECU with programmable modes for around $500; it can be done in just a few moments, and adds somewhere in the vicinity of 50 horsepower and 80 lb.ft of torque. As such, if you really want to go wild in a tuned car these days, simply changing the ECU to a hotter map isn’t enough. No, if you’re someone like Ruf, you’re still pushing the bounds – or, perhaps, compressing them:
What is the tipping point in modifying a car? It seems a delicate line which is easily crossed; one that once tripped over pushes the car in question into a free fall from object of desire to ridicule. Obviously, if someone opens up a J.C. Whitney catalog and orders all of the accessories available for their Monte Carlo, it’ll be a bit of a laugh. But what about when the ingredients are all top-dollar, high quality units? Let’s take this 911 for an example and break down the components: at it’s base, this is a 1977 911S Targa, or was. Now, by itself that’s an increasingly valuable commodity – so, it’s a good basis, right? Now it wears an updated 993 wardrobe; they’re a hot commodity, too. And who doesn’t love a cabriolet? Okay, so that’s a lot of people. But some people like them, right? How about the motor, a Ruf modified twin-plug turbo? Wow, put those names together today and you’ve got yourself a retirement plan. And while not the purview of these pages, if you haven’t been following auctions anything with the name Boyd Coddington attached to it has some serious value as well since his death. There has even been a spike in value of classic Recaro seats, and right now brown tones are still totally in vogue. So, with all of these individual bits added together, this car should be worth millions, right?
If you need a reminder that 1970s Porsches weren’t always worth a lot of money, look no further.
If you want to understand why Ruf managed to achieve its own status as a manufacturer in Germany, it can at least partly be explained by considering the R Turbo. Not satisfied with Porsche’s own twin-turbocharged variant of the 996, Ruf made their own. They completely disassembled the 3.6 liter flat-6, reworked a fair amount of the internals including the Variocam system and turbochargers, then revised the electronics by remapping the Bosch ECU. Then they fit this upgraded engine, in keeping with their history, into the narrow-body of the normal 911 Carrera. In order to do this, it required utilizing both GT2 and GT3 parts to make the package come together. You could opt for different states of tune starting with 520 horsepower – some 100 more than the standard Turbo, making the R Turbo one of the fastest cars on the planet. Take a look at the speedometer, for example, which sweeps well past 200 m.p.h.. Yes, the R Turbo could get there, too – with a reported 217 m.p.h. terminal velocity. 0-60 was achieved in under 4 seconds and in between, very little could stay with the thin Ruf. To deal with all of this speed, of course Ruf fit their own suspension coupled with bespoke Speedline wheels and some pretty giant Brembo brakes. On top of all that, you could select new R Turbo as a Cabriolet – something Porsche themselves wouldn’t offer until 2004. And as they always have, the modifications Ruf made were as seamless as the factory bits with accompanying reliability. It made for one quite special package:
The RUF BTR Cabriolet we featured back in December 2013 has come up for sale again, this time with a much higher price! The original auction, which did not sell, had an asking price of $199,500. The car then was relisted at $149,500 and still failed to sell. The current listing has it at $285,000, which is a lot. These are amazing machines with a fantastic pedigree and they have tended to do well on the market, a point which should continue to hold true in the future. But this is asking too much, especially given the previous auctions.
