Can You Believe Porsche Designers Created The 906 Living Legend Study In 2005?

The Porsche brand’s history often serves as a source of inspiration for the company’s designers, even when developing the cars of the future in their design projects.

It’s the case with the Porsche 906 Living Legend study you see here, a 1:1 hard model created by the design team in 2005. As the name suggests, the Porsche 906 street-legal racing car from 1966 served as inspiration for the proportions and body design of this vision of a super sports car.

That is evident in the details such as the red contrasting front bonnet and the layout of the headlights, which immediately bring to mind the old racer and its unforgettable victory in the 1966 Targa Florio in the hands of privateers Willy Mairesse and Gerhard Müller.

See Also: Porsche 906 Hommage Is The Race Car The World Needs To See

Mind you, the Porsche 906 Living Legend’s purpose is not just to pay tribute to the 1966 racer, as designers experimented with several elements. For example, Porsche says the study plays with the possibilities of creating a stylistic association between light sources and air intakes.

“The design process for such visions is very free. It is not necessary to keep to pre-defined product identity characteristics. For example, the headlights were positioned in an air intake as a futuristic light source,” explains Michael Mauer, Porsche’s design boss.

“When we were later developing an identity for our electric models, we took another look at these designs. The radical idea of simply integrating a light source in an opening instead of a glass cover seemed appropriate for us. We are now approaching this ideal.”

Another design experiment put into practice by the Porsche 906 Living Legend was shaping the body as two parts inserted in each other, with the gap between the elements used as a ventilation duct for the powerful engine mounted behind the cabin.

For Michael Mauer, this a key feature and you’ll probably realize Porsche used it on a production model – the 918 Spyder hybrid hypercar. “Modern hypercars are greatly dependent on their aerodynamics and openings resulting from the enormous ventilation requirements,” Mauer says. Another dramatic design feature of the 906 Living Legend is the integration of the taillights into two steeply projecting vertical fins.