This is a Porsche 959 S, which had to be repaired and restored because of its low mileage

Many of us are fascinated when we discover a miraculously preserved car with only a few kilometers on board, sitting more parked than driven and becoming a kind of time capsule. But the truth is that sometimes, preserving a car unmoved can cause its condition to deteriorate more than if it were taken out from time to time. This Porsche 959 S, which we are talking about today, went through exactly such a history, accumulating only 4 thousand km on board in 30 years, and it was the stationary that damaged the condition.

The car is now after a fresh restoration by the Porsche factory itself, and the conclusions about the causes of its failure are made by Uwe Makrutzki, the head of the Porsche factory restoration department, so the best person to give a diagnosis to a classic Porsche and bring it back to the necessary condition with his team.

As I mentioned, we are talking about a Porsche 959 S, which means the version with more performance of the fascinating 959 model. This model was in the history of Porsche a moral predecessor of the Carrera GT and the 918 of today - so the model of supreme performance, taken to an absolute where neither development money nor manufacturing cost mattered. In 1986, when it was launched, this car could reach 315 km/h and was at that time the fastest production model in the world! More than that, during its production, this model was considered as the sports car with the most complex technology of all that existed at that time, just as perhaps Mercedes-AMG One is starting to be considered today.

This Porsche was also the first to adopt an all-wheel drive system, even though it was a supreme performance car. To design a 4x4 system for a car that can reach over 300 km/h was of the order of the fantastic back then. And the engine was a boxer, with 6 cylinders and two turbochargers. The engine itself remained air-cooled, but the cylinder head had a liquid cooling circuit, which added even more complexity. The engine had Bosch injection, had 4 valves per cylinder, and the turbines were sequential, acting at different speeds. As a result, the super complex engine produced 450 hp.

The engine was located at the back and was connected to a manual gearbox, with 5 normal gears and one additional offroad gear. It's as if you hadn't thought about the idea of ​​venturing offroad with a sports car, but this car ended up being used even in Dakar, in a motorsport pose, becoming a legend there as well.

Finally, the S version, which we are talking about today, was even more powerful than that. It had the same engine, but the turbines were bigger, giving it a power of 515 HP. And that made it capable of 339 km/h! The S version appeared a little later and was even rarer than the normal version. In total, only 292 production car of 959 were built, of which only 29 were in the 959 S version!

Therefore, it is clear why the original owner of this example wanted to preserve the car, knowing for sure that it will increase in value. By 2017, 31 years after its manufacture, the car had only 4,183 km on the board. Hardly enough to pass the break-in. But break-in is not done while stationary, and the car had sat almost motionless for years, with short and rare starts. Such complex engineering, without being put to work, degraded rapidly and the engine was showing signs of major problems. Frightened by the prospect of repairs costing hundreds of thousands of euros, the owner put it up for sale and former Formula 1 driver Nick Heidfeld bought it. He was the one who brought it to Porsche, for a complete diagnosis and repair.

The verdict was clear — all the innards of the engine suffered from the degradation of the oil inside, the drying of the seals, the short cold starts that did not allow the engine to reach the necessary temperature and to be able to drain its engineering systems. As a result, internal deposits formed, there were traces of cold oil burned in these short cycles. The engine was still running, but running it like that would have meant signing a sentence for it. So the people from Porsche recommended to the owner a complete restoration of the engineering.

The former F1 driver accepted and almost 4 years of work on his car followed, with all the engineering components disassembled, returned to the original factory condition and reassembled. The valves, for example, are covered with a special material that also contains sodium, and an engine that is started cold and stopped cold frequently favors the accumulation of residues on them. Now everything has been returned to the original factory condition, again, and when the chief engineer handed the car back to the owner, he also gave him a strict recommendation for the operation and preservation of the car.

Makrutzki says that the car must be started at least once a month and not only be started, but also driven, for at least 100 km. There may be two outings per month, totaling 100 km, but that figure of 100 km traveled in variable regimes of real life, including route or possibly circuit, allows the engine to reach the necessary revs, to reach the correct temperatures, to exercise its combustion correctly and to keep all its key components lubricated and functional. And such a car, even if it collects a minimum of 1,200 km per year, will end up in a much better mechanical condition over time than one that is parked in the garage and just idles from time to time, standing still, guarantees the Porsche engineer, Makrutzki. For a car to remain a car, and not a museum piece, it needs a minimum periodical movement, he says.