Lined up in the pit lane before the 1994 Le Mans 24-Hours, is from the left: #36 962 Dauer Le Mans GT driven by Mauri Baldi, Yannick Dalmas and Hurley Haywood; centre is the street-legal 962 Dauer with rather appropriate Boeblingen region (Weissach) registration plate ‘P 962’; on the right is the #35 962 Dauer Le Mans GT driven by Hans-Joachim Stuck, Thierry Boutsen and Danny Sullivan
As the Dauer Porsche 962 LM GT celebrates its 25th anniversary (1994-2019), PORSCHE ROAD & RACE looks back at how this car came to exist at all.
It wasn’t built in the spirit of the regulations ACO race director Alain Bertaut argued, as they tried everything in their power to get the car outlawed. But the Dauer Porsche 962 LM GT was built to the letter of the law. Porsche engineer, Norbert Singer, had spotted a loophole in the regulations that allowed just a single road-registered car to be built in order to qualify for the GT1 class at Le Mans in 1994, and the Dauer Porsche would work perfectly.
Here is an extract from our interview with Hurley Haywood:
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But why use the 962 chassis which, by 1994, was more than a decade old? The idea to create a roadgoing 962 was born in Jochen Dauer’s mind as early as 1991. Dauer picks up the story, “Everything was finished and we wanted to show the car in Geneva in ‘93. But then the guy at Zakspeed burnt all the moulds so we had to start again from scratch. But we finished the car at the last minute, just in time for the Frankfurt Motor Show where we had a big presentation, and from this day on, everything went in the right direction.”
