Porsche 924 Carrera GT, Part 1: Found in Japan

Some project cars find you. This one had been waiting a very long time.

The photos in this first section come from the car's original sale listing and were taken by the seller in Japan, before the car came to us.

Our Porsche 924 Carrera GT spent somewhere between 25 and 30 years abandoned in Japan, untouched and forgotten. The last Japanese inspection (shaken) sticker on the window dates from 1987. That's the last time anyone officially said this car was fit for the road, and nothing seems to have happened to it since.

And there's one more thing that makes this car special: it's number 53.

What is a 924 Carrera GT?

For anyone unfamiliar with the Carrera GT, it isn't just a 924 with a body kit. Porsche built it in 1980–81 as a homologation special, a road car made so the 924 could go racing, and not just in any race. The target was the toughest of them all: the Le Mans 24 Hours. In 1980 Porsche entered three works race versions of the car at Le Mans, and all three made it to the finish, the best of them in 6th place overall.

The road car got a turbocharged, intercooled 2.0 engine with around 210 bhp, wider flared arches and that unmistakable bonnet scoop. Porsche built 406 of them.

The car that shouldn't exist

Roy Smith's The Porsche 924 Carrera: Evolution to Excellence (Veloce, 2015) is the definitive history of these cars, built on research in Porsche's own archives. It includes a register of every Carrera GT chassis known to survive, confirmed through owner and enthusiast records. At the time of writing, the register accounted for 260 of the 406 cars built. The other 146 were unaccounted for, lost over the years to accidents, neglect or simply time.

The register starts with the first eight cars, chassis 700001 to 700008, all of them in Germany. After that it jumps straight to 700054, a car in Italy, followed by 700055 in France and 700056 in Germany. In between there's nothing. According to the book, numbers 09 to 53 appear never to have been used, although the author notes this couldn't be confirmed.

Ours is WP0ZZZ93ZBN700053.

So the gap wasn't empty after all. Our car sits on the last number of a range that was believed never to have existed, and it isn't on the register of known cars at all. While the book was being researched, our car was sitting forgotten in Japan, which explains why nobody had found it.

What we found

We won't pretend it was pretty. Decades of neglect had left the car in a pretty bad state. But the most important thing was that it was complete. On a car like this, original parts are hard to find and expensive when you do, so having everything still there is what makes a project worth taking on.

The car had spent its years on the sunnier side of Japan, and it showed. Every rubber seal had perished, and any plastic the sun could reach inside the cabin had simply crumbled, starting with the dashboard.

The underside shots below were also taken by the seller in Japan, who lifted the car with a forklift to get them. Not how we'd do it, but they gave us our first look underneath.

On the ramp in the UK

When the car arrived with us in the UK, it went straight up on the ramp for a full inspection, still complete, exactly as it had come from Japan. The rust wasn't nearly as bad as we'd feared, which gave us a solid base to work from.

With the inspection done, we stripped the interior, and the car was ready for the next stage of its journey.

Next: Part 2: The journey to Hungary

Japan photos: original Car & Classic listing.