The first time Porsche stripped a 911 to nothing, and the template it set.
The car
In 1967 Porsche built a tiny run of 911s with one purpose, to be as light and as fast as the rules and the engineers could manage. The 911 R. Roughly twenty cars were built, a number small enough that the 911 R is among the rarest production-related 911s ever made.
The recipe was ruthless. Fiberglass body panels in place of steel for the hood, doors, and engine lid. Plexiglass in place of glass for the windows. The interior gutted, with thin bucket seats, no sound deadening, no carpet, none of the equipment that adds comfort and weight. The engine was a high-revving two-liter flat-six developed from the racing program, producing around 210 horsepower in a car that weighed startlingly little. The result was a 911 reduced to its absolute essentials, built to race.
Why it matters out of proportion to its numbers
The 911 R established the template that Porsche would return to for the next sixty years. Take the standard car. Strip the weight. Add the power. Build just enough to satisfy the homologation rules. Sell them to the people serious enough to want them. Every lightweight special that followed traces to this idea.
The 1973 Carrera RS 2.7, the car that made the lightweight concept famous, is the 911 R idea refined and produced in larger numbers. The 964 RS, the 993 RS, the GT3 RS line that continues today, all of them descend from the principle the 911 R set first. When Porsche revived the R name in 2016 for a stripped, manual, lightweight version of the modern GT3, it was reaching back fifty years to this exact car.
What it is now
An original 1967 911 R is a multi-million-dollar car on the rare occasions one comes to market. The combination of tiny production numbers, racing history, and its status as the genesis of the entire lightweight lineage puts it among the most valuable 911s in existence, in the company of the 1973 RS and the rarest competition cars.
But the value is almost beside the point. The 911 R matters because it was first. It was the moment Porsche discovered that the most compelling version of a 911 is often the one with the most taken away. Everything light and fast and stripped that the company has built since is a footnote to this small run of cars from 1967.