Porsche’s Project Gold 993 Turbo Sells In 10 Minutes, Fetches $3 Million

Porsche Classic fired a shot across the bows of restomodders like Singer when it revealed its Project Gold, a brilliantly updated 993 Turbo with an old-school air-cooled engine. Now that one-off project has been auctioned off, and it sold for a heck of a lot more than expected.

After 37 bids were placed over the course of just 10 minutes, the Project Gold 911 sold for a massive €2.7 million – or about $3.08 million at current exchange rates.

That’d be enough to buy 10 new 911 GT2 RSs, or nearly twenty new 911 Turbos. The good thing is that the proceeds will go directly to the Ferry Porsche Foundation, which supports educational, research, sport, culture, and social initiatives in the Stuttgart and Leipzig areas where the automaker runs its main factories.

For all their generosity, the new owner will take home a spectacularly restored 993 Turbo of the kind Porsche last manufactured in 1998. The project took a year and a half to complete and encompasses over 52,000 new parts, including a 3.6-liter twin-turbo boxer six upgraded to 450 horsepower (335 kW, or 42 hp/31 kW more than the original) and 431 lb-ft (585 Nm) of torque (up by 33 lb-ft/45 Nm). The engine features larger turbos, an additional oil cooler, Motronic engine control unit and ceramic port liners. The whole thing was resprayed in Golden Yellow Metallic with a Cathodic Dip Coating primer.

Project Gold was just one of the lots offered as part of RM Sotheby’s Porsche 70th Anniversary Auction at the Porsche Experience Center in Atlanta. Though the auction house had yet to publish the full results as we went to press, it was surely among highest prices paid for any of the 51 vehicles that were on offer – save, perhaps, for the 959 Paris-Dakar rally machine that was estimated to sell for $3-3.4 million – especially since a 956 Group C prototype apparently didn’t meet its reserve price.