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Porsche recommits to Le Mans through 2018

Porsche is back at the forefront of sports endurance racing, and it has no intention of leaving anytime soon. The German automaker announced that it will stay in the LMP1 class of both the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the FIA World Endurance Championship through the end of 2018. So its rivals can look forward to a good three more years of heated competition at least. After winning at Le Mans a record 16 times, Porsche dropped out of competition for top honors in 1998. It returned to the front of the grid last year with the 919 Hybrid, winning the 6 Hours of Sao Paulo at the end of its debut season. Its greater victory, however, came earlier this summer when the revised version took a dominant 1-2 finish in the famous French endurance race. That put the team from Weissach in the lead for the World Endurance Championship, which it (spoiler alert!) further extended this weekend with another 1-2 finish in the inaugural 6 Hours of Nurburgring. "Motorsport is an important part of Porsche's brand identity – but not an end in itself. Racing has got to help the technology of future road going sports cars," said Porsche chief Matthias Muller in the statement below. "It was the revolutionary efficiency regulations that convinced us to return to top-level motorsport for the 2014 season. That we have managed to take the crown jewels of endurance racing in only our second year, with a one-two result in Le Mans in 2015 with our highly innovative and complex 919, is an outstanding testimony to the people in the Weissach research and development centre. The competition bears fruits and we see further potential for future synergy between the racing and road car programmes. This is why we have extended the programme." FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) and 24-Hours of Le Mans Porsche confirms LMP1 programme up to end of 2018 Stuttgart. Porsche continues racing into the future with the 919 Hybrid: The board of Porsche AG has decided to extend the Le Mans prototype programme until the end of the 2018 season. With its ground-breaking concept – a downsizing turbo engine and powerful energy recovery systems, combined with an extreme lightweight design – the racing car with a performance of around 1,000 hp serves as a research laboratory for future sports car technology. Matthias Muller, Chairman of the Executive Board of Porsche AG, said: "Motorsport is an important part of Porsche's brand identity – but not an end in itself.

Porsche celebrates 50 years of 911 with some excellent pics

The Porsche 911 is one of the most iconic sports cars of all time, and to celebrate the car's first 50 years, Porsche has released a stunning set of photos showing how far the 911 has come from the original back in 1963 to its current 991 generation. Unlike the recent 60-year photo spread that Chevrolet put together for the Corvette, though, Porsche's gallery only shows the original 911 and the current car.
Each time the 911 is redesigned, the car's front fenders, roofline and the shape of the side windows are key focal points. Even some of the interior cues have remained the same over the years, including the positioning of the ignition key on the left of the steering column and the five-gauge instrument cluster layout.
Scroll down for Porsche's press release breaking down the seven generations of the 911, and be sure to check out our gallery with plenty of high-res pics for you to download as a desktop wallpaper. In fact, we're providing these at 1920-pixels-wide instead of our usual 1280 wide. Enjoy!

There's a Porsche Cayman under here somewhere

What we have here is the work of Dubai tuner Royal Customs that is controversial even beyond its styling. The Middle East aftermarket house says it spent fourteen months developing a bodykit for the Porsche Cayman, and the results seem to be aimed at those who wish their coupe were a 918 Spyder - the nose, strake-filled and widened rear fender, carbon fiber wing and massive diffuser all cribbing some from Stuttgart's new hybrid supercar.
Even without a buyer, the Alpha One Concept is already controversial. When WorldCarFans posted on the Royal Customs car recently, German tuner Alpha-N Performance wrote in alleging that the Dubai package copies their design from two years ago, which was also called the Alpha One, a design with which it's clear the Dubai Alpha One shares numerous cues. We asked Royal Customs about its relationship to the Alpha One car, we were told, "Yes, there is a lot we can say about the remarkable similarities all of which will be explained by our press release by Mr. Emil from Autogespot. Please wait for the official release and you will have the full exciting story. It's an 'actual success story' and not a 'replication' story."
The response is referring to an "extensive report" on the car coming out of Autogespot. Royal Customs doesn't have the Alpha One Concept on its site yet, so we're still missing quite a few details on it, such as whether the Porsche engine has been given a similarly 918-ish workover. We do know that the company says each car takes 30 days to build and it will only build three of them, which is a number that should satisfy any haters and, even more so, its buyers. You can decide which side of the fence you're on by having a close look at it in the gallery above.