For Sale: A Safari Rally

Oct 18, 2023

This 997 Porsche 911 Carrera has been rebuilt into a Safari Rally-style car with new suspension, wheels, and tires. It also now has front and rear bumpers with integrated skid plates, and Recaro Pole Position seats with Sparco harnesses.

Power is provided by the correct 3.6 liter Porsche M64 flat-six, and it's sent to the rear wheels via a 6-speed manual transaxle. The car maintains its power steering, air conditioning, power windows, but it now also benefits from the addition of a hydraulic handbrake.

The long and illustrious racing history of the Porsche 911 began not on the asphalt but on the dirt, in January 1965 (just 16 weeks after it first went on sale) a 911 entered the Rallye Monte Carlo piloted by Herbert Linge and Peter Falk – and it took 5th place.

This is one of the original Porsche 953s, a car developed with an all-wheel drive system specifically as a testbed for the Porsche 959 – and to compete in the Paris Dakar Rally. Image courtesy of Porsche AG.

The rear weight bias of the 911 proved it could be invaluable in the right hands, allowing skilled drivers to almost steer the car with the rear end. In 1967 a Porsche 911 S came 3rd in the Monte Carlo Rally, and a year later in 1968 a 911 won the event for the first time – in fact 911s took the first two places.

This feat was repeated a year later in 1969, then again in 1970, establishing the 911 as a dominant force in the notoriously difficult Monte Carlo event.

Later in 1971 a specially modified Porsche 911 would take a hard-fought fifth place in the East African Safari Rally, a 5,000 km race across Kenya with a famously high rate of attrition. With lessons learned Porsche would return for a 2nd place in 1974, followed by another second in 1978.

Perhaps the most famous of all the rally 911s was the Porsche 953, a car officially named the Porsche 911 Carrera 3.2 4×4 Paris-Dakar but now simply referred to by its original internal Porsche number designation.

Above Video: This silent newsreel footage from the 1970 Monte Carlo Rally shows the cars competing, and it shows the victorious Porsche 911 at the end.

The Porsche 953 was a highly modified all-wheel drive version of the 911 that had been developed as the testbed for the then-in-development Porsche 959.

The 953 was built specifically to race in the 1984 Paris–Dakar Rally and remarkably it won the event outright in its first and only outing. It would be followed a year later by the Porsche 959 – it would be the 959 that would win the event in 1986. In fact the 959 would take both first and second place.

The car you see here is one of a modern breed of Porsche 911s that have been modified for rally use off-road. This genre has become so popular that Porsche surprised many in 2023 by releasing the Porsche 911 Dakar – an all-wheel drive off-road variant of the 911.

The car shown in this article started out as a relatively standard 1997 Porsche 911 Carrera, the 993 model with rear-wheel drive.

This Porsche 993 has been rebuilt for rally duties with new suspension, new wheels and tires, racing seats with harnesses, and hefty front and rear bash-plates.

The list of modifications applied to the car is extensive, the suspension has been uprated by BBI Autosport and it now has custom-built JRZ long-travel adjustable coilovers along with adapted control arms, links, and monoball bearings.

The brake rotors and pads were replaced at the same time that the suspension was being rebuilt, to ensure it was all fresh. The car now rides on Braid 16″ wheels fitted with 215/70 Yokohama Geolander A/T tires, which certainly do a good job of filling those wheel arches.

The original paint is Ocean Blue Metallic (L3AZ) however the car now wears an olive green wrap, likely to help keep stone chips and other damage to a minimum when being driven off road at speed.

The car is fitted with specially fabricated front and rear bumpers with integrated skid plates, and it keeps the original factory-fitted headlight washers, power-adjustable mirrors, speed-activated rear spoiler, sunroof, and dual exhaust outlets.

The most noticeable change to the interior, apart from the Recaro racing seats and Sparco harnesses, would have to be that no-nonsense hydraulic handbrake in front of the shifter.

Power is provided by Porsche's air-cooled 3.6L M64 flat-six featuring a VarioRam intake, the engine was factory rated at 282 bhp and 250 lb ft of torque when new, and the seller notes that an oil change has been done prior to placing the car up for sale.

Inside the car you’ll find Recaro Pole Position seats trimmed in black leather with houndstooth fabric inserts. A bolt-in harness bar has been installed in place of the rear seats, as they wouldn't have had a lot of use anyway, and the car is fitted with six-point Sparco harnesses.

It also has a new Momo steering wheel and a hydraulic handbrake to help you get around those hairpin turns.

The car is now being offered for sale on Bring a Trailer out of Yorba Linda, California. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can visit the listing here.

Images courtesy of Bring a Trailer

Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.

Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.