This is not a Porsche 911. The Ruf SCR is a carbon-fiber creation from Germany’s Ruf Automobile made from the ground up to look like a 911. It’s not only better to drive than the Porsche but also one of the finest driver’s cars on sale today.

This story originally appeared in Volume 14 of Road & Track.

SIGN UP FOR THE TRACK CLUB BY R&T FOR MORE EXCLUSIVE STORIES

Longtime readers of Road & Track will be familiar with Ruf. In our July 1987 top-speed shootout, a Ruf CTR—nicknamed “Yellow Bird” by our staff—posted a 211-mph run that trounced the likes of Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Porsche itself. But that’s not where the story begins. The company started as a repair garage in Bavaria in 1939 and evolved into a Porsche tuner in the late Seventies. One of its first cars was the SCR, Alois Ruf Jr.’s take on the 1978 911 SC.

“The SCR was an SC Ruf; that was the whole idea,” Ruf Jr. says. “We brought back more 911 in that model than Porsche was giving it at that time because the 911 SC was a reduced 911.” Fit with a larger 3.2-liter flat-six and Ruf’s gearbox, the SCR was a critical and commercial success.

SKANDER KHLIF

In 2018, almost exactly 40 years after the introduction of that first SCR, Ruf unveiled a new one at the Geneva…