The “barn find” that tops all of our other barn finds, perhaps once and for all!
Some of you may remember my other “barn find” threads – my first one on the
Liqui Moly Porsche 962-106b, or the one where we rescued the
Dauer Victor Computer Porsche 962-112 from a workshop in Germany, or the most recent one where we are currently bringing
962-108b back from the dead. Well, looking back, those are hard to beat, but I think this one may do it.
I am excited to announce that
Dempsey Motorsports has acquired what we believe to be the very first Dauer 962 car produced by
Dauer Racing GmbH in the early 1990s. What does that mean exactly? Well, it’s best to start with a definitive history of the Dauer 962 Le Mans. Note:
this history and the entirety of this post is information that I gathered from various experts, historical documents, notes, and discussions with various owners.
The Dauer 962 Prototype Car
History
In the early 1990s,
Jochen Dauer decided to create a venture that would transform the venerable Porsche 962 race car into a street-worthy road car. He wasn’t the first to do this (and might not be the last), as
Vern Schuppan with the 962 CR, and
Koenig with their C62, and a few others also attempted this, with varying levels of success. What makes Dauer’s car (officially called the ‘Dauer 962 Le Mans’ – sometimes abbreviated as ‘962 LM’) different was the implicit de facto support from the Porsche factory. Also different was the fact that Dauer used actual 962 race cars for his road conversions – not a newly minted chassis.
Every Dauer 962 was built upon an existing race car that had actual real race experience.
Some time after Dauer began development of his road car,
Norbert Singer (from Porsche Motorsports and the overall designer of the original Porsche 956/962) got wind of the project and came up with an idea for Porsche AG to capitalize on the Dauer cars for the 1994
24 Hours of Le Mans race. The rule books had instituted a new class of competition called the GT class at Le Mans, which specified that the car had to be based upon a road car, but only had to have a production quantity of one in order to qualify. Singer’s idea was to take the Dauer 962 Le Mans road car and “convert it” back into a race car that then would compete at Le Mans within the GT class.
The program was begun, and although supposedly kept ‘top secret’, word quickly got back to the governing body drafting the rules for the Le Mans race. They changed the rules a bit, trying to exclude the 962 (for one, by disqualifying the ground effects flooring that had made the 962 and other Group C cars so competitive in previous races). But some of the other GT rules stuck, like allowing the cars to run with a much larger fuel tank, which does generate a significant advantage. The bottom-line? Although the Dauer 962s were slower than other competitors, the added GT category advantages combined with the rock-solid reliability of the race-proven
Porsche 962 platform allowed Dauer to take
first place at Le Mans in 1994 over the highly favored
Toyota 92C-V cars.
The Dauer 962 Le Mans winning car with the #3 finishing car in the background
The 1994 victory was a great success for both Porsche and Dauer, and it pretty much cemented the Dauer 962 Le Mans as
*the* Porsche supercar to own (at least until the Porsche GT-1 came along). In 1993, the Dauer 962 Le Mans held the record for the
world’s fastest production car (251.4 mph), a record that was only bested by the
Bugatti Veyron (253.81 mph) more than a decade later (some record books don’t consider the Dauer 962 to be a “true” street car, having been built on the race cars, so they credit the
221 mph McLaren F1 with the title during those years).
Dauer continued to produce the 962 LM for more than a decade, although for various reasons, very few cars were actually produced. During the late 1990s, Dauer Racing GmbH purchased the remains of Romano Artioli’s reboot of the Bugatti nameplate,
Bugatti Automobili, at auction and subsequently built and marketed
EB 110 cars. To say this was a distraction was probably an understatement – Dauer Racing GmbH went bankrupt in 2008, and Jochen Dauer himself ended up in prison for while due to a conviction for tax evasion. The assets of Dauer Racing GmbH were all auctioned off piecemeal and parts, molds, cars, and tooling disappeared around the globe.
Jochen Dauer with two Dauer 962 Le Mans cars – both of which were sold to the Sultan of Brunei
The Dauer 962 Le Mans Cars
There’s a bit of mystery and mystique surrounding all of the Dauer 962 Le Mans cars. Unlike Dauer’s competitors, Koeing or Schuppan, indeed, all of the Dauer 962 LM cars were constructed / reimagined out of retired race cars with real racing history. How cool is that? Obviously, that limits the supply of available chassis and Dauer started with and used many of the chassis that
Dauer Racing had itself raced in various venues.
It’s not completely clear how many Dauer 962 Le Mans cars were constructed. For that matter, since they were all built upon retired race car chassis, then one could argue that they weren’t even really built at all – they simply modified race cars (which is one of the contentions of the outfits who don’t give the 962 LM the world’s fastest production car speed record). Some cars were constructed and then subsequently dismantled when the 1994 Le Mans opportunity with Porsche arose.
The best method to ascertain how many cars were built then might be to count the number of Dauer 962 LM bodies that were constructed.
The road cars’ bodies were constructed out of
carbon fiber and were a somewhat complex and complicated undertaking. The car was designed to have a fit and finish that would rival what customers had expected with refined cars like the
Porsche 959. With the exception of the very first “wind tunnel” body, and perhaps the first prototype body, all of the bodies were constructed by
Lola Composites LTD – a company well-versed in creating race cars.
LOLA Composites LTD tag that adorns one of the molds used to make the Dauer 962 Le Mans