The Porsche 959 is the car that invented the modern supercar. When it arrived in 1986 it carried computer-controlled all-wheel drive, sequential twin turbos, adjustable suspension and the world's first tyre-pressure monitor, and at 197 mph it was the fastest street-legal car on earth. Porsche built it to go rallying, lost money on every one it sold, and saw it banned from American roads for over a decade. Today the 959 is a blue-chip collectible worth well past a million pounds.
This piece is about the 959 in particular, not the wider 911 story that iconcar covers elsewhere. Figures come from Porsche's own records, Wikipedia's spec tables, and RM Sotheby's and Classic.com auction data, checked in August 2026. Contested numbers, and there are a few, are flagged as such.
What is the Porsche 959?
The 959 is a technological flagship Porsche built between 1986 and 1988, conceived to homologate a Group B rally car and sold as the most advanced road car of its day. Around 292 road cars were made, a number set by the 200-car minimum the racing rules demanded. Under the familiar 911 silhouette sat almost nothing the standard 911 shared.
Its engine was a 2.85-litre flat-six with two turbochargers, derived from Porsche's 956 and 962 Le Mans cars, producing 450 PS. What set the 959 apart was not the power but everything wrapped around it: a car that could cross a desert, lap a circuit and cruise at 190 mph, all from one showroom.
What made the 959 the first modern supercar?
A stack of world firsts made it modern, most of which are now standard equipment on ordinary cars. The 959 read the road and adjusted itself in ways nothing else on sale could, and it turned a turbocharged engine from a light switch into something smooth. The table below lists the innovations that mattered.
| Innovation | What it did |
|---|---|
| PSK all-wheel drive | Computer-controlled torque split, up to 80% to the rear, with selectable maps for dry, wet and snow |
| Sequential twin turbos | A small turbo spools low, a larger one adds boost high up, curing the on-off lag of 1980s turbos |
| Tyre-pressure monitoring | The first on any production car, needed for sustained 190 mph running |
| Hollow magnesium wheels | The first of their kind, sealed to the tyre so even a cracked spoke triggered a warning |
| Six-speed manual | The first production six-speed, with an off-road "G" gear before first for the rally roots |
| Adjustable suspension | Electronically adjustable ride height and damping, wrapped in a 0.31-drag body |
The engine kept one foot in each era, with air-cooled cylinders and water-cooled four-valve heads, a bridge between Porsche's past and its future. Weighing about 1,450 kg in an aluminium and Kevlar body, the 959 reached 60 mph in around 3.7 seconds. Much of this list looks unremarkable now, which is the point: the 959 got there first.
Why was the 959 built for a race it never ran?
The 959 was designed to homologate a Group B rally car, and Group B was abolished before the road car reached customers. Porsche showed the "Gruppe B" prototype at Frankfurt in 1983 and engineered the whole car around that goal. The rules needed 200 road cars, which is why the 959 exists in the numbers it does.
Then the category collapsed. After Henri Toivonen and his co-driver Sergio Cresto died in a fireball on the 1986 Tour de Corse, motorsport's governing body banned Group B for 1987. Series deliveries of the 959 only began in 1987, a year after the racing it was built for had ended. The most advanced rally car of its generation never contested a single Group B stage.
Did the Porsche 959 win any races?
Yes, in the desert rather than on the rally stages it was meant for. Its all-wheel-drive forerunner, the 953, won the 1984 Paris-Dakar outright with René Metge. The 1985 attempt with 959 development cars was a disaster, all three retiring, but in 1986 the finished 959 Paris-Dakar cars scored a crushing one-two.
| Event | Result | Drivers |
|---|---|---|
| 1984 Paris-Dakar | 1st (in the 953 forerunner) | Metge / Lemoyne |
| 1985 Paris-Dakar | All three retired | Works development cars |
| 1986 Paris-Dakar | 1st and 2nd | Metge / Lemoyne; Ickx / Brasseur |
| 1986 Le Mans (961) | 7th overall, class win | Metge / Ballot-Léna |
A single circuit-racing version, the 961, ran Le Mans in 1986 and finished seventh overall, then crashed and caught fire on its 1987 return, after which the programme stopped. Only three 959 Paris-Dakar cars and one 961 were ever built, and all four survive in the Porsche Museum.
Why did the 959 nearly bankrupt Porsche?
Porsche sold every 959 for far less than it cost to build. The launch price was DM 420,000, about 225,000 dollars in 1987, while the true build cost is estimated to have topped 450,000 dollars per car. By most accounts Porsche lost around 200,000 dollars on each one.
The car also arrived roughly two years late and, thanks to the Group B ban, with no racing job to do. Reliability and appeal were never in doubt, but the economics were brutal. It is a familiar pattern at the top of this market, where the most ambitious cars often lose money when new and are worth fortunes later, a theme our guide to what makes a classic car worth millions returns to again and again.
Why was the 959 banned in America?
The 959 was never certified for United States emissions or crash rules, so US Customs simply impounded the ones that arrived. Bill Gates and Paul Allen both bought 959s and both had them held at the border, Gates's example stuck for around 13 years while he paid storage fees to look at a car he could not drive.
Their frustration rewrote federal law. Lobbying by Gates and the collector Bruce Canepa produced the "Show or Display" rule, which took effect on 13 August 1999 and lets historically or technologically significant cars be imported and driven up to 2,500 miles a year. The 959 did not just break speed records. It broke the law open for every forbidden import that followed.
What is a Porsche 959 worth today?
A standard 959 Komfort trades in the 1.4 to 2.2 million dollar band, and the rare Sport sits far above it. Auction results from 2025 and 2026 show the spread clearly, with condition, mileage and variant deciding where a given car lands. The lightweight Sport is the prize: only about 29 were built against the Komfort majority.
| Car | Price | Sale |
|---|---|---|
| 1987 959 Komfort (Canepa Stage One) | $2,040,000 | RM Sotheby's, Monterey 2025 |
| 1988 959 SC "Reimagined by Canepa" | $2,865,000 | RM Sotheby's, Miami 2025 |
| 1988 959 Sport (record) | $5,505,000 | Public auction, 2026 |
The story writes its own irony. A car that lost Porsche a fortune when new is now a store of value, its worth built on scarcity, technical significance and provenance rather than on the numbers alone. Where such cars go from here is the subject of our look at classic car values in the EV era, and the 959 sits with the fellow analog icons we cover in the McLaren F1 GTR as blue-chip machines the market is unlikely to make again.
Porsche 959 versus Ferrari F40: technology or lightness?
The 959 and the Ferrari F40 launched into the same moment and answered it in opposite ways. The 959 threw technology at the problem, with all-wheel drive, adjustable suspension and electronics, and weighed about 1,450 kg. The F40 stripped everything away, ran rear-wheel drive with no driver aids, and weighed roughly 1,100 kg. One was the fastest car in the world; the other, many argue, was the best.
Neither answer was wrong, and the market prizes both. If the 959 is the ancestor of every computerised supercar since, the F40 is the last word in analog purity, as our guide to the Ferrari F40 sets out. The 959 also seeded the all-wheel-drive turbo line that runs straight to the modern Porsche 911 Turbo, which is why its ideas long outlived its production run.
Frequently asked questions
How many Porsche 959s were made? Porsche built about 292 road cars between 1986 and 1988, with the total rising to roughly 337 once prototypes and pre-production cars are counted, plus a final batch of eight assembled from spare parts in 1992 and 1993. Only around 29 were the lightweight Sport.
Why couldn't you drive a Porsche 959 in the United States? It was never certified for US emissions or crash standards, so Customs impounded imported cars, including Bill Gates's for about 13 years. The 1999 "Show or Display" law finally allowed them in, capped at 2,500 miles a year.
Is the Porsche 959 or the Ferrari F40 the better car? It depends on what you value. The 959 is faster and more capable through its technology, while the F40 is lighter, purer and more visceral. Collectors treat them as the two definitive supercars of the late 1980s, and both are now worth millions.
