This Porsche 908-04 Concept Is What Motorsport Needs Right Now

The Gran Turismo Vision project started with the game’s founder, Kazunori Yamauchi, asking car companies to design their rendition of the ideal GT car.

A plethora of car manufacturers accepted Yamauchi’s challenge, coming up with different designs, more or less outrageous. Unfortunately, this particular Porsche isn’t one of them, as it has nothing to do with the video game saga.

Named the Porsche 908-04 Concept, its style was inspired from the prototypes created for Gran Turismo, but it’s the work of six talented independent designers. The vehicle was described as a “back to basics” project, a car for real “car guys” and “piston heads”, focused on generating a feeling for the love of racing.

The name wasn’t a dead giveaway of their intention to create a modern interpretation of Porsche’s 1969 908 LH, while the designer decided to give it a “long tail” due to the uniqueness this formabrought in the golden days of endurance racing.

Thanks to the legendary elongated back end, the 908-04 Concept is instantly recognizable as a late 1960s – early 1970s racer; just like a LMP1 car is instantly recognizable nowadays.

By using modern Porsche style cues, this rebirth of an icon grabs on to the past and present, bonding the German car maker’s heritage and design identity in an exquisite racing package. Its designer says the prototype is a purely manual car (like many Porsche enthusiasts miss nowadays) with a pure mechanical soul and a good, old mechanical shifter.

We wouldn’t have said no to a hybridized hardcore racing version of the 918, reminiscent of the past, either.