Starting in first gear
Good morning. In June 2023, Porsche showed the world an electric hypercar concept and promised it would become the fastest road-legal car around the Nürburgring. On Thursday, Porsche previews a new mid-engine platform under a different name. We'll spend most of today on what changed in between.
The one exception is British, green, and closing this afternoon at no reserve. Its restoration cost more than anyone has bid for the whole car so far.
In today's newsletter, we'll get into:
Auction Desk: A 1971 Aston Martin DBS V8 with its original Bosch injection and a Montana title.
One Big Story: Porsche's Mission X, and the "Mission S" platform it will preview Thursday.
Engineer's Corner: The 918 Spyder's hybrid hardware against what Porsche promised for Mission X.
Garage Economics: The one-off 963 RSP, and the business behind Porsche Penske Motorsport.
Let’s roll.
THE AUCTION DESK
This Aston's restoration cost more than its current bid
Aston Martin built 402 DBS V8s between 1969 and 1972. This one was sold new in Canada in 1971 and still wears the colors it was ordered in: Goodwood Green over Natural leather. Between 1999 and 2001, a previous owner spent about $126,000 Canadian on a refurbishment, roughly $85,000 US at the exchange rates of the time. It came to the US in the early 2010s, and the current owner bought it in 2017 and has added about 1,000 miles since. The odometer shows 72,000.
Underneath sits the 5.3-liter Tadek Marek V8, which Aston declined to publish an output for (estimates land around 315 hp). It is backed by a three-speed Chrysler TorqueFlite automatic and a Powr-Lok limited-slip differential, with a de Dion rear axle and ventilated discs at all four corners.
The detail that matters most is the Bosch mechanical fuel injection, and the fact that it's still there. Aston gave up on it in 1973 and went back to Weber carburetors for the Series 3 V8. The official reason was California emissions. Most historians suspect the bigger reason was that the injection was hard to keep in tune. Plenty of DBS V8s have been converted to Webers since. This one kept its system, and a known Aston specialist calibrated it and rebuilt the pump in the 2010s. The original system is the strongest originality point on the car, and the next calibration will need a specialist as well.
If the shape looks familiar, it's because the DBS V8 is the car the long-running Aston Martin V8 grew out of. The 1974 V8 Series 3 we covered in Issue #21, modified to Vantage flip-tail spec, sold for $250,000. That car carried $144,000 in documented modifications. This one carries an older restoration and the original injection.
My call: No reserve means this car sells today. A 20-year-old restoration, an automatic, and missing mufflers keep it out of the top tier. Original injection that runs and a strong paper trail keep it out of the bottom. I have it finishing between $77,000 and $85,000.
📈 Market signal: DBS V8 sales at auction over the past three years, most of them automatics, mostly fall between about $35,000 and $85,000, with a median near $73,000. Exceptional examples have cleared $195,000. Current US asking prices for first-generation DBS cars cluster around $73,000.
ONE BIG STORY
Porsche's electric hypercar concept is three years old. On Thursday we find out what comes next.
Source: Porsche
On June 8, 2023, at the opening of its 75th-anniversary exhibition, Porsche unveiled the Mission X: a low two-seat electric hypercar concept with Le Mans-style doors that open forward and up, a glass dome with a carbon-fiber exoskeleton, and a 2.73-meter wheelbase that matches the Carrera GT and 918 Spyder. Porsche placed it in the line of the 959, the Carrera GT, and the 918, and attached a list of targets:
Fastest road-legal car around the Nürburgring Nordschleife.
About one metric horsepower per kilogram of weight.
A 900-volt electrical system that charges about twice as fast as the Taycan Turbo S of the day.
Downforce well above the 911 GT3 RS.
Every one of those came with a condition. Porsche's wording was that the car would hit them if it went into series production. It hasn't, and the reasons are mostly financial.
In February 2024, Porsche's then-CEO said the company aimed to decide on production that year. Five months later, Porsche's design chief asked out loud whether the car should be an EV or a hybrid at all. No decision came. In September 2025, Porsche rescheduled its next-generation EV platform, moved an SUV it had planned as electric-only to combustion and plug-in hybrid power, and warned of about $3.5 billion in one-off costs for the year. By the time the books closed, those costs had reached about $4.4 billion. Group operating profit for 2025 fell to about $463 million, from about $6.3 billion the year before. Michael Leiters, Ferrari's former chief technology officer and McLaren's former CEO, took over as Porsche CEO on January 1.
Then came last Wednesday's Capital Markets Day. Porsche said it is developing a mid-engined super sports car platform for a new model line above the 911, and that it will preview that platform this Thursday, October 15. The image Porsche released is captioned "Mission S." The same presentation committed new money to "brand-defining" combustion and plug-in hybrid drives, and Leiters told investors the 911 will never be electric. Porsche has not said what powers Mission S, and it has not said Mission X is dead. Reports last month said a production Mission X is increasingly unlikely, and that the new car could borrow hardware from elsewhere in the Volkswagen Group.
The Nordschleife target has also moved since 2023. The fastest road-legal production car on the full 20.8-kilometer lap is the Mercedes-AMG One at 6:29.090, set in September 2024. Porsche's own best electric time is 6:55.533, run in May by a Taycan Turbo GT with the Manthey kit on track tires. The 918's famous 6:57 from 2013 was on the shorter 20.6-kilometer layout used at the time. To keep its 2023 promise, an electric Porsche would need to find about 26 seconds over the best electric car it has ever built.
The takeaway: The Mission X targets were always conditional, and Porsche's finances have changed underneath them. Thursday's preview will show whether the next car above the 911 is built around a battery, an engine, or both. Porsche's strategy last week pointed toward an engine.
ENGINEER’S CORNER
The 918 and Mission X both use electric motors. Their batteries do completely different jobs.
Source: Porsche
Porsche never released a horsepower figure, a battery capacity, a motor count, or a weight for the Mission X. Its press kit does describe the hardware: permanent-magnet synchronous motors with oil fed directly along the stator's copper windings, a single-speed transmission, a directly oil-cooled battery with cells chosen for performance, a 900-volt system, and a battery mounted behind the seats as part of the car's structure. Set against the 918 Spyder, whose hardware is fully documented, that list says a lot.
The 918, as built (2013–2015):
Engine: a 4.6-liter naturally aspirated V8 with a flat-plane crank, 608 PS (599 hp) at 8,700 rpm and a 9,150 rpm limit. It descends from the RS Spyder's LMP2 race engine and weighs about 135 kg (298 lb). The exhausts exit straight up through the top of the engine cover, which keeps heat out of the engine bay and away from the battery.
Rear motor: about 115 kW (154 hp), sitting between the V8 and the seven-speed PDK, joined to the engine by a decoupler clutch. It also starts the engine.
Front motor: about 95 kW (127 hp) through a single fixed ratio, driving the front axle alone. It disconnects at 265 km/h (165 mph), where it would otherwise spin past roughly 16,000 rpm.
Battery: 6.8 kWh, 312 lithium-ion cells, about 138 kg (304 lb), liquid-cooled, mounted between the seats and the engine. It can deliver 230 kW.
System: 887 PS (875 hp) and 1,280 Nm (944 lb-ft), with regenerative braking up to 0.5 g. Electric range on the EPA cycle was 12 miles.
The number I keep coming back to is 34. The 918 battery delivers 230 kW from 6.8 kWh of storage, a discharge rate of roughly 34C, meaning that at full output it would drain from full in under two minutes. It was never meant to carry the car. It was a high-power buffer that took energy back under braking and returned it on corner exit, so the V8 could do the steady work. At 1,634 kg (3,602 lb) for a Weissach car, the 918 works out to about 0.54 PS per kilogram.
Mission X flips the job of every component.
The battery becomes the fuel tank. It has to hold enough energy for a full flying lap and deliver near-peak power for six-plus minutes without overheating and cutting output. On a fast electric car, the limit is usually heat, not capacity. Porsche's concept answers with oil: oil running directly along the motor windings and a directly oil-cooled battery, both aimed at holding peak power lap after lap instead of for one burst.
Power-to-weight nearly doubles. Porsche's own press kit rates the 918 at 0.5 PS per kilogram, so the target doubles it. At a 918-like 1,600 kg, the arithmetic says about 1,600 PS. Porsche never said that number. It's simply what the ratio requires.
Voltage goes up to keep current down. Resistive heating in a cable scales with the square of current. At the same power, a 900-volt system carries 11 percent less current than an 800-volt system, which cuts that heating by about 21 percent for the same conductor. That helps with charging and with long full-power runs. Porsche's stated reason is the same: more performance without added weight or heat losses.
The battery moves to where the engine was. Porsche's "e-core layout" puts the pack in a block behind the seats, where a mid-engine car carries its engine and where the 918 carried its smaller battery. Porsche says the layout allows a lower seating position than an underfloor pack, which matters in a car under 1.2 meters tall. The battery is also part of the rear structure, with cooling channels built into the body, much as a race car uses its engine to carry suspension loads.
The takeaway: The 918 added about 140 kg of battery and two motors to a racing V8 and, as a prototype days before its auto show debut, beat the previous road-legal Nordschleife record by about 14 seconds. Mission X would have required a battery large enough to replace the V8 altogether. Porsche's latest strategy points back toward the 918's approach, and the 918's market value suggests buyers never minded: an $845,000 car in 2015 now trades between about $2.3 million and $3.0 million.
GARAGE ECONOMICS
Porsche built one road-going race car for one customer. The customer was its race team.
In June 2025, during Le Mans week, Porsche drove a silver 963 prototype through the streets around the Circuit de la Sarthe. The car is the 963 RSP, for Roger Searle Penske. It's a tribute to the Martini 917 that Count Gregorio Rossi drove on the road in 1975, a race car registered in Alabama under the condition that it never be driven there.
The RSP was built by Porsche's Sonderwunsch special-request program with Porsche Penske Motorsport and Porsche Cars North America, on a new Multimatic carbon tub identical to the race cars (yes, the same Multimatic from Issue #32). Changes for the road:
Paint, not vinyl. Martini Silver in three layers of lacquer, color-matched to the Porsche Museum's records. Every racing 963 is wrapped.
Softer everything. Maximum ride height, Multimatic dampers at their softest setting, wet-weather tires on 18-inch wheels, covered wheel arches, a horn, turn signals, and a remap for pump gas.
A cabin, of sorts. Tan leather and Alcantara in the spirit of Rossi's 917, a padded single seat, and a 3D-printed cup holder sized for a Porsche travel mug.
Power is the race car's: up to about 680 hp from a twin-turbo 4.6-liter V8 and the shared hybrid system. That V8 was developed from the 918's engine, which was developed from the RS Spyder engine Penske raced in 2006 through 2008. The RSP ran in France on manufacturer plates under special permission, and Porsche says it will remain a one-off. Porsche has not said whether Penske paid for it. A customer 963 cost roughly $2.9 million new, so with the conversion, a reasonable estimate puts the RSP near $4 million.
The partnership explains why it exists.
The race team. Porsche Penske Motorsport began racing in 2023, running factory 963s from Mooresville, North Carolina, and from Mannheim, Germany. The Mannheim base is a former Porsche dealership that Penske Automotive Group has owned since 2008.
The results. Three straight overall wins at the Rolex 24 at Daytona (2024 through 2026), every major IMSA GTP title in 2024 and 2025, and the 2024 world endurance drivers' title. Cadillac took this year's IMSA titles, but Porsche won Petit Le Mans on October 3, its first overall win there with a prototype. Le Mans remains the gap: second place in 2025, by 14 seconds.
The retailer. Penske Automotive Group reported $31.8 billion in revenue for 2025 and holds 25 Porsche franchises, 10 in the US and 15 abroad. In July, Penske Corporation and Mitsui proposed taking the group private for about $3.8 billion.
The history. Penske's Porsches won the Can-Am titles in 1972 and 1973, and his RS Spyders dominated their class in the American Le Mans Series.
Then the money got tight. Customer teams were estimated to spend $9 million to $12 million a season to run one 963, and Porsche has never published what its factory program costs. In October 2025, with profits collapsing, Porsche ended its factory program in the World Endurance Championship after the season and kept only the IMSA side, which Penske runs in the US. The current commitment runs through 2027.
The takeaway: Porsche cut half of its prototype racing program and kept the half run by the partner who also sells its cars in the US and abroad. By that measure, a one-off road car costing roughly $4 million, less than half of one customer team's annual running budget, is an inexpensive way to thank that partner. The real number to watch is 2027, the last year of the current commitment.
🏁 THE COOL-DOWN LAP
The 356A found its number. Friday's 1956 Porsche 356A coupe sold for $66,100 which fell smack down the middle of my $62,000-$72,000 prediction Friday morning.
265,512 vans. Ram is recalling ProMaster vans from the 2022 through 2026 model years, including 1,874 electric ProMasters, because water can get into the power-steering wiring harness and cut assist without warning. Owner letters go out November 17.
51 plants. The industry group Autos Drive America counts 51 light-vehicle assembly plants operating in the US this year, down from 52 five years ago. That complicates claims that tariffs have set off a factory-building boom.
75 miles versus 300. In a BMW-commissioned survey of 1,005 US adults, 73% said 75 miles or less covers their daily driving. And 42% said they'd want at least 300 miles of range before considering an EV.
Thursday, October 15. Porsche previews its mid-engine platform. We'll cover what it showed, and what it didn't, in Friday's issue.
That's a wrap. See you Wednesday — same inbox, lower gear.
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