The best praise is one that other people copy. When Nissan bought a Porsche 959 in the late 1980s to help them work on the all-wheel drive system for the famous R32 Skyline GT-R, Porsche should have been pleased. It wasn’t; Porsche even tried to stop Nissan from buying one. Still, the study paid off because Nissan used what they learned from the 959 to make one of the best-driving all-wheel-drive cars ever. You could now buy the same 959 that Nissan experts took apart and put back together in Yokohama, Japan, if you had a few million dollars more. A 1988 Porsche 959 will be sold at auction by Broad Arrow on February 29 at an event in Amelia Island to the top bidder. This Porsche 959, on the other hand, is different from Nissan’s research car from 1988. In recent years, Canepa has fixed it up, repaired it, and updated it tastefully. It looks a lot like the original car and has a lot of the same attitude, but it is much more capable and powerful. This shows the best of what a 959 can do. Canepa says that everything has stayed the same since the fixes it made in 959. Every bolt and nut needs to be taken off, looked at, and then covered or changed to make it stronger or lighter. The supercar is now painted vintage Porsche Oak Green on the outside and tobacco brown on the inside. The paint was taken off by sanding, priming, and stripping each body panel. It doesn’t have the same color scheme as it did in 1988, but it still looks great. The engine, on the other hand, has been changed the most. The 2.8-liter twin-turbo flat-six engine that came from the factory made 444 horsepower and 369 pound-feet of torque. After getting the Canepa treatment, the twin-turbo flat-six engine from the 1980s now makes over 800 hp and 650 lb-ft of torque. This is because of the titanium connecting rods, revised cams, tungsten ceramic-coated headers, a better valvetrain, new Borg Warner turbos, and Motec engine management. Canepa says that its new six-speed manual gear lets it go from 0 to 230 mph in 2.5 seconds. This Porsche 959 that Canepa changed is one of the most interesting Porsches I’ve seen at a sale in a long time. It has been changed and improved in ways that keep its original look while making driving it a lot more enjoyable. But it also has an interesting history because it was the car that directly influenced the creation of one of the best all-wheel-drive sports cars ever. The price range for Broad Arrow is expected to be between $3,250,000 and $3,750,000. Is this price fair for what might be the most beautiful 959 ever?
