The Last Lap

1999 SRWC Donington

The Porsche 956/962 is one of the truly great cars in motorsport history. Even when Group C and IMSA were assassinated by the forces of darkness it continued as the platform for such evolutions as the Kremer K8. However eventually all things must pass and so on July 18th 1999, the last international race for the K8 took place at Donington, the fifth round of the Sports Racing World Cup. A double Dutch pairing of Bert Ploeg and Remco Papenberg in the former’s car finished 15th, some 14 laps down on the winning DAMS Lola. The final curtain……………..17 years after Jürgen Barth rolled out 956/001 at Weissach, amazing.

John Brooks, November 2013

One thought on “The Last Lap

  1. Stuart Radnofsky

    Nice shot and nice shot John. This car was (and is) the same K8 prototype (actually a K7 chassis no.) Thompson aluminium honeycomb chassis that we ran as a brand new car in 1994 as Project 100 / Gulf Racing at Le Mans 24H (Bell Donovan Laessig) – started on the front row and finished 6th overall, 1st privateer home as well (but no such trophy back then!)

    In case anyone is interested – I sold the car back to Erwin Kremer on the pit wall after that race (project was finished!), he sold it to Frans Konrad that winter as he was busy building carbon chassis cars; Frans raced it for 3 or 4 years and then sold it to Bert Ploeg. We bought it back off Bert after the 1999 season when he was switching to touring cars, returned it to 1994 Gulf livery and used it as a wedding car for Donovan’s marriage (there are special aero settings for cobbled streets fyi) before selling it to Gunnar Racing/Christian Zuegel before it ended up in Roald Goethe’s Gulf collection.

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