It was early April this year when our photographers last caught sight of the Porsche 911 Dakar and the prototype looked almost ready to transform into a production model. However, it turns out that development work on the elevated sports car isn’t finished yet and we have a new batch of spy photos showing another test vehicle lapping around the Nurburgring.
Our spies in Germany caught this 911 Dakar with different ride heights on every lap. The simplest and most logical explanation would be a stronger underbody mounted air suspension. It’s just a theory but from what we see in the attached gallery, it looks like the lifted coupe could indeed be fitted with an adjustable air suspension.
23 Pictures
Except for the suspension, this prototype looked exactly like the previous ones we saw earlier this year. Fender extensions, redesigned front and rear bumpers and additional air intakes on the bonnet complete the design adjustments compared to a regular 911. We don’t know if there’s additional LED lighting somewhere in the front fascia, but the amount of black tape suggests there might be details that remain invisible to the eye at the moment.
As for the Dakar name, it’s still not official, but it seems like the most likely option for the high-performance coupe. Just recently, rally legend Walter Rohrl accidentally used the 911 Dakar hash tag in an Instagram post alluding to that name instead of the Safari suffix, but that post was quickly deleted soon after.
We don’t know all the details surrounding the 911 Dakar’s hardware, but we believe the base offering will be the Carrera 4S with all-wheel drive. If that is indeed the case, the vehicle will feature a 3.0-liter twin-turbocharged flat-six engine behind the seats producing 443 horsepower (329 kilowatts) and 390 pound-feet (528 Newton-meters) of torque. . More powerful variants could also be launched.
At the moment we have more questions than answers but we hope everything will become clear very soon. There’s no debut date set by Porsche, although we suspect the debut will come sooner rather than later.
