Thank Frankel it's Friday: Are Porsche about to go rallying?

Earlier this year Porsche took an old Cayman GT4 road car, made a rally demonstrator out of it and asked factory driver, Le Mans winner and rally enthusiast Romain Dumas to skid it about a bit. The plan was just to gauge response to the idea of a Cayman rally car and it’s fair to say said response was enthusiastic. To say the very least.

So enthusiastic indeed that when I raised the subject with Porsche Motorsport boss Frank-Steffen Walliser at the Los Angeles motor show this week he said simply: “Rallying would be a very good extension to our motorsport portfolio.” As a long time reader between Porsche lines, I think I can say with some confidence that if he can get the idea past the board, Porsche will build the car. Similarly, I don’t think he’d be talking to the likes of me about it, unless he had a pretty shrewd idea that the board wouldn’t need much persuading.

Why go rallying? Walliser is not short of reasons. For a start, rallying as much a part of Porsche heritage as sportscar racing. It may not have been involved as a factory team for decades, but it’s worth remembering that among very many other achievements, Porsche scored a hat-trick of victories on the Monte Carlo rally between 1968 and 1970, has won five European Rally Championships and two Dakar Rallies.

But, he says there are sound commercial reasons too – an affordable rally car allows Porsche a competition presence in parts of southern and eastern Europe, South America and Asia it currently lacks.

Walliser also confirms that he’s been talking to both the World Rally Championship authorities and the FIA about the possibility of a Cayman rally car competing in the R-GT category. Lacking four-wheel-drive, the Cayman would only be suitable for tarmac rallies but Walliser has crunched the numbers and is sure the demand will be there. His analysis shows that there are 1,600 rally cars in active use in Germany alone, and that he’d only need to sell 100 Caymans around the world for the project to be viable. He also points out that whenever Porsche enters a new competition category, other manufacturers tend to come piling in too, massively expanding interest in that sphere of the sport. He quotes the example of the GT4 class of racing car, which was pretty small when Porsche got involved and now has 11 factory manufacturers involved. And Porsche has sold over 400 GT4-specification Caymans on the back of it…

So I think it is near enough a given that Porsche will return to rallying, and it won’t be that far away. Walliser says it will take between a year and 18 months to develop the car once the project has been signed off. It is also certain that the car will be based on the forthcoming Cayman GT4 that we’ll see early next year. So if he gets his skates on and gets board approval promptly, we could see Porsche back in the World Rally Championship as soon as 2020. If you watch a video of Dumas in the GT4 demo car and hear the noise of its flat-six engine, you may well conclude the new car cannot come a moment too soon.