It might look like a Porsche 911, but the RUF CTR – better known by its nickname, Yellowbird – is very different from any 911 of the 1980s.
Just how different is something Matt Farah explores in the first episode of Hagerty’s new series, Modified, which looks at the cars that have been transformed or mutated well beyond their original design intentions.
What better place to start then than the Yellowbird – a car so potent it took Porsche itself two decades to beat in the quarter mile standing-start acceleration test, and more than three decades to better through the speed trap?
It’s a car also immortalised in an onboard driving video that ranks alongside Ari Vatanen’s Pikes Peak “Climb Dance” for legendary status, thanks to Stefan Roser’s smoking lap around the Nürburgring.
Farah walks through some of the details that separate the CTR from workaday 911s, from its twin-turbocharged engine to its dog-leg gearbox, before taking to the road and discovering what 463bhp in an 1150kg narrow-body 911 shell feels like to drive. If you can’t already guess.
Future episodes will delve into everything from a modified Jeep to a V8-powered Mazda MX-5, so make sure you subscribe to the Hagerty YouTube channel to be notified of each new video. If you want to try a Yellowbird for yourself though… well, there’s always Gran Turismo.
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