Porsche 908/04 the return of the long tail:

Porsche 908/04 is the result of team work with contributions from 5 key people: Alan Derosier (Exterior Designer), Marcos Beltrao (Exterior Modeler / Rendering), Martin Peng (Component Modeler), Guillermo Mignot (Interior Designer), and Tom Wheatley (Image Retoucher).

We wanted to create a car that nobody makes anymore. A “back to basics” kind of feel, mainly focused on generating a feeling for the love of racing.

A car for real “Car guys” and “Piston heads” just like us. A car that would give you goose bumps just by imagining yourself driving it. Forget about sequential transmission with paddles shifter, there’s nothing like a good, old mechanical shifter. A purely manual car, like many Porsche guys miss nowadays. We wanted to give it an advanced look with a truly mechanical soul, the “form follows function” ideology of Porsche.

The idea was to make a modern interpretation of the 1969 908 LH. I, as designer, made the choice to have the longtail because Porsches with this feature have something genuinely unique. And until now nobody, as far as I know, has tried to create a modern version of it. In my opinion, it is a bit of a forgotten idea, so I thought it would be a “rebirth of an icon” that would generate nostalgia in car and Porsche enthusiasts alike.

From the beginning I wanted it to be clearly Porsche in appearance, creating the car in a way I believe Porsche enthusiasts would love. Porsche is one of the rare brands that has evolved from a strong heritage of unique design and identity . I didn’t want to ‘overdesign’ it, and from my point of view, objects with pure volumes and complex details will stand the test of time and define the way I see Porsche.

The challenge of the project was to work with real proportions. We did this car in a way it could be physically feasible, so we’ve actually worked with coherent dimensions and constraints such as seating position, visibility, headroom, door openings, ingress / egress, width, length, height…