Ferdinand Karl Piech, the ex-VW group CEO and the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, is an icon who turned Volkswagen into the automotive giant that owns a multitude of prestigious brands. As he famously stated “All I ever wanted to do was build cars” and his early days at Porsche proved he was pretty damn good at it. One of the best examples to prove the same is the 1967 911R – the lightest 911 ever built!

The Origin Story

In 1966, just three years after the success of the 906 projects that became the basis for the iconic 917 Le-Mans winning racecar, Ferdinand Karl Piech was chosen to head Porsche’s R&D division, and boy, did he rise to the occasion! The 911 was a fairly new platform, but in that short time, it had already started showing its potential as an excellent all-around racecar with class wins at Le Mans and the European rally championship. So, his first order of business as the R&D chief was to apply Collin Chapman’s philosophy and shed as much weight off the 911 platform as possible to create the very first race-bred high-performance 911 to take on the highly coveted GT racing series. They started with the 160-horsepower 911S as a basis. With racing mechanic, Rolf Wutherich, by his side, they started replacing all the unnecessary metal with fiberglass, which meant the new car had fiberglass doors, bonnet, wings, and plexiglass panels taking place of all the…