The car closest to the heart of German racing legend Hans-Joachim Stuck is one of the less storied examples of the Porsche 956/962. His 1987 ADAC Supercup winner been brought back to (almost) original...
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Autosport
2022-09-01T14:46:16Z
Ask Hans Stuck to name the favourite iteration of the Porsche 956 or 962 he raced, and he doesn’t go for one of the factory chassis in which he notched up his two Le Mans 24 Hours victories in 1986 and 1987. Nor one of the two IMSA GTP cars in which he scored back-to-back triumphs at the Sebring 12 Hours in 1987 and 1988.
Rather he plumps for a more obscure machine in which he enjoyed considerable success, one largely overlooked by the history books. And it is this obscurity that explains why the chassis in question has been restored to its former glory by the German manufacturer for the 40th anniversary of Group C and the launch of the 956.
Stuck picks the car he raced in the 1987 and 1988 editions of the ADAC Supercup, Germany’s very own Group C sprint series. He won the championship in Porsche 962C #009 in the first of those years and claimed a further race victory in the second on the way to third place in the points. He chose the final win aboard #009 as his Race of My Life in Autosport many years back.
Porsche’s successes with the factory team and its customers in the short-lived Supercup, which was effectively a replacement for the Deutsche Rennsport Meisterschaft and ran from 1986-89, haven’t been celebrated by the German marque over the years. Not, it can be said, in quite the same way as its achievements with the 956/962 in the world championship, at Le Mans and in the North American IMSA series and its big enduros at Daytona and Sebring.
The fleet of Group C and IMSA GTP racers maintained as runners by Porsche had a gap in it, and it was one that Armin Burger, motorsport coordinator at the Porsche museum in Stuttgart, set out to redress as the big 4-0 approached for Group C and the 956/962.
The idea arose, partly at least, by accident. Chassis #009 had long since been part of the museum’s collection, and like many of its cars was a runner, too. Long-time Porsche factory driver Pat Long raced it – “pretty hard”, he says – as recently as 2015 at the Rennsport Reunion Porsche extravaganza at Laguna Seca. But it wasn’t recognisable as the car with which Stuck notched up three wins from nine starts over its two seasons in the Supercup.
“We had this car in storage but I didn’t know its history,” says Burger, who is the bridge between the Porsche museum and Porsche Motorsport at the marque’s Weissach research and development centre. “So I looked at the dossier – we say ordner or folder – that Porsche keeps for each car and looked at its record. I thought, ‘Wow, this is the Supercup-winning car from 1987.’
Stuck won back-to-back titles in the Supercup sprint series aboard the 962, pictured in action at the Norisring
Photo by: Porsche
“In our collection we have Le Mans-winning cars, world championship-winning cars and cars that were successful in IMSA, but we didn’t have anything from the Supercup. I spoke to my bosses and did a little presentation saying that we should restore this car.” Put simply, Burger wanted to complete the 956/962 set: “The Supercup was a bit of our history that was missing.”
The reason that Burger and his team had overlooked the significance of #009 in the 962 story was the form in which it existed on being passed to the museum. It was used to test out the later aero spec with a centre-post rear wing introduced on the 962C for 1990 as Porsche became interested in the car again after Joest Racing’s victory at the Dijon World Sports-Prototype Championship in May of the previous year. It was retained in this spec as a kind of reference car after its transfer to the museum.
This particular 962C had led a peripatetic existence after its Supercup campaigns. It was loaned to Busby Racing for the second half of the 1989 IMSA Camel GT Championship, running with the team’s own bodywork from the pen of former Eagle Indycar designer Roman Slobodynskyj. It then became a development mule at the factory. It was used for aero and tyre testing – ahead of Joest’s switch from Goodyear to Michelin tyres in 1990 – and even to try out a four-wheel-steering system that never made it into competition.
Returning #009 to the form in which it won the Supercup with ‘Stuckie’ turned out to be a bigger job than expected for Burger and his colleagues. The car’s use as a development mule in its final active years ensured it had ended up a long way from its Supercup specification.
“We thought it would be relatively easy and that we could pull parts out of the stores,” says Burger, whose P

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