Porsche's Flachbau RS: Modern 911 GT2 RS Pays Homage to Legendary 'Moby Dick'

There is a photograph from Monterey Car Week that shows a white Porsche unlike any other on the road. Its front end slopes away at an angle that seems to defy convention, its hood bears a graphic that echoes a racing livery from nearly fifty years ago, and its rear wing stands tall enough to make a statement about what this car is meant to do. This is the Flachbau RS, a one-off supercar that Porsche built not for a museum or a collection of investors, but for a single enthusiast who wanted to own a piece of racing history reinterpreted for the modern street.

To understand what Porsche has done here, you need to know about the original. In 1978, Porsche's engineer Norbert Singer designed the 935/78 for Group 5 racing—a car so visually extreme that it earned the nickname "Moby Dick" for its massive white tail section and unmistakable silhouette. That 3.2-liter twin-turbocharged flat-six engine produced 850 horsepower. The car won its debut at Silverstone with drivers Jochen Mass and Jackie Ickx behind the wheel, though it finished eighth at Le Mans after mechanical troubles. Despite its brief racing career, Moby Dick became one of Porsche's most recognizable and celebrated race cars, a machine that defined an era of automotive excess and engineering audacity.

Nearly five decades later, a Porsche customer approached the company with a specific vision: take the slant-nose design that made Moby Dick iconic, graft it onto a modern 911 GT2 RS, and make it road-legal. Porsche accepted the challenge through its Sonderwunsch program—the company's bespoke customization service—working in collaboration with Manthey, the legendary racing outfit. The project took nearly three years from conception to the car's debut at Monterey.

The starting point was a 2018 Type 991.2 911 GT2 RS equipped with the Weissach Package, already one of Porsche's most extreme road cars. But Porsche kept the original powertrain and rebuilt almost everything else. The front fenders now feature louvers to vent the wheel arches. The headlights are ultra-slim and stacked vertically, a modern reinterpretation of classic proportions. A redesigned front bumper and the dramatically angled nose give the car its Flachbau identity. The paint is Grand Prix White, specially formulated using a historic Porsche from the company's own collection as reference. Exposed carbon fiber and matte-black accents run throughout. On the hood sits a U-shaped graphic—a nod to the Martini racing stripes that adorned the original 935/78.

At the rear, the transformation becomes even more aggressive. A massive wing with S-shaped mounts inspired by the 911 GT3 R Rennsport rises from the deck. This is not a fixed element; it can be manually adjusted to three different positions, with the high-downforce setting generating approximately 1,221 pounds of rear-axle downforce at around 211 miles per hour. The entire car was engineered to be lighter. Despite the original GT2 RS Weissach already being obsessively optimized for weight reduction, Porsche and its customer managed to remove nearly 32 kilograms more.

Inside, the transformation is radical. The rear cabin has been largely gutted. The Porsche Communication Management system, the audio equipment, sound-deadening materials, and floor coverings are gone. What remains is exposed metal and carbon fiber where conventional trim once lived. Even unnecessary wiring was eliminated. The result is a cabin that feels closer to a race car than a road car, though it retains everything needed for legal street use. This is not a car you buy for comfort; it is a car you buy to feel the machine.

Before the final car was built, Porsche subjected the design to the kind of validation typically reserved for production vehicles. Digital crash and airbag simulations were run. Structural analysis and aerodynamic CFD testing were completed. Three separate test vehicles were built to validate lighting systems, conduct wind-tunnel work, and perform real-world road testing. The development program included fifty laps of the Nürburgring Nordschleife and endurance testing designed to simulate roughly 150,000 kilometers of customer use on the rear wing alone. This is not a one-off built on a whim; it is a one-off built with the rigor of a production program.

The Flachbau RS also revives a tradition that Porsche itself had abandoned. In the 1980s, the company offered a slant-nose option on the 911 Turbo, inspired by the 935 race car. Between 1982 and 1989, Porsche built just 948 of these Flachbau models, making them among the rarest 911 variants ever produced. The new Flachbau RS takes that heritage and translates it into the language of the present—a singular, road-legal tribute to one of Porsche's most recognizable racing legends, built for a customer who understood that some cars are not meant to be driven like ordinary machines.