Porsche 935: Why the ‘Baby’ went straight to the museum

The German Racing Championship, the most popular racing series in Germany during the 1970s and early 1980s, had two engine capacity categories: one for engines up to two litres and one for larger engines.

Whilst the privately entered Porsche 935s were more or less unchallenged in one of these categories (the 935 was practically unbeatable in its class amongst production-based racing cars), BMW and Ford battled it out for the points in the smaller class. So whilst one make was able to revel in securing one division victory after another, the other two had to share the division victories in a rare show of unity.

This led, time and again and with increasing frequency, to unfriendly comments; after all, the Porsche drivers were simply sweeping up the championship points without any opposition from other manufacturers.

Porsche initially didn’t react at all, then took offence, and finally the sporting – and even more so the technical – ambition of the Zuffenhausen-based team flared up.

Manfred Jantke, Porsche’s racing director at the time, recalls: “That’s when we came up with a daring plan. We could build a 935 with a reduced engine capacity for the smaller category and make a statement there. No sooner said than done. The ‘935 Baby’, as it was known internally, had a displacement of 1.4 litres in line with the turbo factor and produced 380 PS. The real challenge, however, was to slim down the heavy 935 to the weight limit of the two-litre class.”

As a result, the car even dispensed with the usual forced-air cooling of the engine in favour of a cleverly controlled airflow cooling system. The bodywork was stripped of all non-essential parts, such as support brackets and air deflectors. It was a bare chassis that was barely functional, with load-bearing capacity that was only just sufficient. Even the air deflectors behind the oil coolers at the front of the car were omitted for weight-saving reasons, so that the hot exhaust air from the coolers flowed directly through the interior of the car.

At the Norisring in 1977, Porsche entered this 935 in the two-litre class. Neither the race organisers nor the competition were aware of this coup; they assumed the entry was a formal error – until the ‘baby’ rolled onto the starting grid in the smaller category as if it were the most natural thing in the world. At the wheel was the top-class driver Jacky Ickx (Jantke: “We certainly weren’t giving anything away”).

On race day, as was so often the case in Nuremberg, it was sweltering. Ickx overtaxed himself in the thin-walled car; after all, he was sitting in the hot exhaust air from the front radiators. He managed to make it back to the pits, where he collapsed and was taken to the nearest hospital to cool down.

Contrary to the original plan, the team felt obliged to put ‘The Baby’ on the starting grid a second time.

A few weeks later, at the next-but-one DRM race at Hockenheim, the competitors were now aware that the car existed. In the cool weather, the ‘Baby’ performed fabulously. Ickx outclassed the field of two-litre cars and won the race by a 40-second margin.

Jantke: “Porsche considered the mission accomplished, and the little 935 rolled straight into the Porsche Museum. The ‘Baby’ was never raced again. We’d really only built it for a short sprint – and to teach the competition a lesson.”