Porsche's GT boss says regulation, not rivals, is now the harder fight
Andreas Preuninger has run Porsche's GT division for nearly 25 years, has not missed once across 26 models by his own count, and says the hardest part of his job now is not building a faster car. It is keeping Brussels out of the way of a good one
Andreas Preuninger spoke to Autocar at the Sunstede Festival, the Porsche Experience Centre Silverstone's celebration of 75 years of Porsche in the UK, where a sell-out crowd treated him less like an engineering executive and more like a headline act. That reaction is earned: Preuninger has been in charge of Porsche's GT road cars for almost the entire century, and in that time has built the closest thing the industry has to a guaranteed hit factory. His actual challenge these days, he says, is not designing around competitors. It is designing around regulators.
The customer relationship is treated as the actual product
Preuninger describes something close to a feedback loop between his team and Porsche's GT owners, built on the idea that the engineers are fans first. Five years ago, Porsche surveyed around 5,000 GT owners across ten countries and seven regions on how they used their cars and what they wanted next. The answer, he says, was unanimous everywhere: a car that talks to the driver, with a transparent, honest, puristic feel, communicating exactly what it is doing in real time. “If we like the cars, we can be 99.99 percent sure the customers will as well,” Preuninger says. “It's a very simple thing, but it works.”
Regulation is now harder to beat than physics
Asked whether emissions and active safety rules have made his job tougher, Preuninger does not hedge. “We have to try even harder to overcompensate for the things that Brussels comes up with that we have to put in cars,” he says, noting that 99 percent of customers do not want to be distracted by the resulting gizmos. Porsche's answer on the current 911 GT3 is a single swipe that switches off all the mandated systems at once, a workaround built to stay on the right side of the law while still giving purists the car they actually want. New technology is not the enemy in itself, he adds. The real constraint is weight: a GT car that only comes alive at high speed has failed at the one thing a GT car is meant to do.
The GT range split because one car could no longer do both jobs
Preuninger points to the 997 generation as the last era when a single GT3 could satisfy both a lap time obsessive and someone who just wanted a light, nimble road car, back before dual clutch gearboxes and the technology needed to be genuinely quick on track. That is no longer true, so Porsche now runs the RS models as dedicated track tools and cars like the 911 S/T for drivers who want the analogue experience without the complexity. “We have almost an even share on both sides,” he says, “and the audience for GT cars has widened substantially in the past ten years.”
Manual gearboxes and naturally aspirated engines are the brief, not nostalgia
Preuninger frames the survival of manual gearboxes and naturally aspirated engines in his cars as a direct response to what owners and his own team actually want, not a heritage exercise. He carries the responsibility deliberately: “Everybody working here likes the idea we are working on a car that nobody needs but everybody wants and which produces smiles.” He tells the story of an American veteran serving in Afghanistan who fell in love with the 997 GT3 RS after reading an interview with Preuninger in a care package from his mother, and who wrote to Preuninger by hand once he had bought one after returning home. “They're looking for someone to be thankful to,” Preuninger says. “You can't normally do that with a consumer product.”
Trust with buyers now runs ahead of the reviews
Porsche's GT cars regularly dominate driver's car contests, including this title's own Britain's Best Driver's Car, but Preuninger says the more telling signal comes before any review is published. Orders arrive as soon as a car is revealed, without buyers waiting to see how it tests. “We have never let them down, not one single time,” he says. “In the last 26 models my team has made, every single one was a big success. I'm not boasting. It's true.” He credits specialist media directly, saying testers and the average GT buyer think alike, which gives outlets unusually high influence over Porsche's own customer base.
Strong residual values are a side effect, not the target
A 997 GT3 4.0 now trades for close to one million pounds, and Preuninger insists that is not the point: his team builds cars to be driven, and limited production runs exist because of tooling and manufacturing limits, not manufactured scarcity. The durability case backs him up. Porsche tuning partner Manthey has calculated that around 70 percent of all Nürburgring tourist laps are now driven in a Porsche GT car, and Preuninger knows an owner whose 991 GT3 RS has covered 60,000 miles, 50,000 of them at the Nürburgring, needing nothing beyond tyres, brake pads and discs. “You can drive it all day, no matter what the temperature, and drive safely home again,” he says. “The car does not feel as if it has suffered.”
Getting the current GT3 right meant fighting a ceiling, not chasing a number
Asked which of his 26 cars was hardest to get right rather than which is his favourite, Preuninger names the current GT3 without hesitation. Legislation ruled out a straightforward power increase, so his team borrowed the 911 S/T's gearing and sharpened it for country roads, then leaned on the Weissach Package to cut weight instead of adding horsepower. “In the past, we wanted to give the customer enough reasons to really want a new one, and we will continue to do so,” he says. “A facelift is always more problematic than a new platform, but I think it worked pretty well.”
AutoNext Take
The genuinely striking thing here is not that Porsche's GT cars are good, that much has been established for two decades, it is that Preuninger describes his job today as playing defence against Brussels rather than offence against Ferrari, McLaren or anyone else building a rival driver's car. That is a real shift in what it takes to keep a naturally aspirated, manual optioned sports car alive in 2026, and a one swipe workaround to switch off mandated safety systems is a small but telling detail about how much engineering effort now goes into simply staying legal without losing the point of the car.
Whether that fight stays winnable is the only open question worth asking him again in five years. For now, a customer base that orders before the road tests land, a 60,000 mile Nürburgring warrior needing nothing but consumables, and a hand written letter from a soldier who bought his GT3 RS because of an interview are not the kind of things a company can manufacture through marketing. Preuninger's closing line, that readers are in good hands for years to come, is exactly what a GT boss would say either way. The 26 for 26 record is the only reason it is worth believing him.
