Building The Ultimate 993 Track Machine

Gunther Werks has made a habit of producing truly desirable machines, usually based on older Porsches. It’s latest creation, the GXR-Evo made its debut at the recent Monterey Car Week. The GXR-Evo is a late-993 Porsche 911 reduced to its bones, rebuilt with carbon fibre, and pointed squarely at track days, time sheets, and the sort of owner who thinks modern cars are too civilised. Gunther Werks describes it as a salute to the unfiltered end of driving, taken further than the usual air-cooled machines allow.

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A hard-as-nails 993

The process starts with a donor 993 that is stripped back to the bare structure, then remastered with money, time, and a fair amount of engineering. Gunther Werks already builds reworked 911s, but the GXR-Evo is cut from a different cloth. Its intent is track performance, so the familiar Porsche steel body gets binned in favour of a full carbon-fibre shell shaped for airflow and grip rather than daily use.

The aero package is the giveaway. Up front, a deep splitter with dive planes loads the nose, while the front fenders are vented to help clear high pressure build-up from the wheel arches. At the back, the rear window is replaced by a vertical stabiliser in the style of a Le Mans prototype, feeding a huge rear spoiler that does the real work of keeping the tail in line when the speeds climb.

Aircooled power

The mechanical centrepiece is a naturally aspirated 4,0-litre flat-six developed by Rothsport Racing, the kind of Porsche specialist you call when you want an engine that can live flat out on a racetrack. Output is about 340 kW, and the redline sits north of 9 000 /min. On paper that already sounds eager. In the metal, it should be properly feral.

Drive goes to the rear wheels through a reworked Getrag six-speed manual gearbox. A dual-clutch box would have diluted the company’s “raw” intenr. The GXR-Evo is built around revs, throttle response, and the sort of mechanical conversation that only survives when the car has a proper clutch pedal and a driver who is willing to use it.

Race ready

Underneath, the GXR-Evo gets JRZ three-way adjustable dampers with remote reservoirs, Brembo Pista brakes, and magnesium wheels. There is also a competition-grade tyre pressure monitoring system.

The cabin keeps the same theme. Gunther Werks says the car remains street legal, but that status feels more like semantics. Inside, the layout centres on a single carbon-Kevlar seat, a six-point harness, and an F1-style steering wheel. Ahead of the driver sits a MoTec digital dash with a lap timer, plus race and qualifying modes for when the car is being set up around prevailing track conditions. Safety and pit-lane hardware are part of the package too. The list includes an eight-point roll cage, a digital rear-view mirror, a helmet cooling system, fire suppression, and a built-in air-jack system.

Gunther Werks is also taking the ownership experience beyond the car itself. It has teamed up with sim-rig specialist MYSIM, and each of the 15 owners will receive a bespoke racing simulator matched to the car, right down to a steering wheel that mirrors the one in the actual GXR-Evo.