Apple's new CEO owns a Porsche 935, one of only 77 built
Apple's car project died in 2024. Its new chief executive races a Porsche
John Ternus became Apple's chief executive on 1 September 2026, and the most interesting thing about him is not in the press release. He is a mechanical engineer who spends weekends at a race track, and the car he takes there is one of the 77 Porsche 935s built in 2019. It cannot be registered for the road, and it was never meant to be.
John Ternus replaced Tim Cook after 25 years inside Apple
Ternus took over as chief executive on 1 September 2026, ending Tim Cook's fifteen years in the job. Cook has not left the company: he moved to executive chairman and keeps working on Apple's dealings with governments. Ternus joined Apple's product design team in 2001, became vice president of hardware engineering in 2013 and joined the executive team in 2021. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a mechanical engineer before Apple. This is a hardware man, not a finance one, and it shows in what he does with his time off.
The 2019 Porsche 935 has 700 PS and Porsche built exactly 77
The modern 935 sits on the 991-generation 911 GT2 RS, which means a 3.8-litre twin-turbo flat-six making 700 PS through a seven-speed PDK. The bodywork is a tribute to the 935/78 that raced at Le Mans, the tail-lights come from the 919 Hybrid, the mirrors from the 911 RSR and the tailpipes are titanium. Porsche capped it at 77 cars and started deliveries in June 2019. It is not homologated for any race series and it is not road legal, so a circuit is the only place it can legally turn a wheel. Porsche still works at this scale: the 911 GT3 Bergsport announced this week is limited to 100 cars.
Porsche revealed the 935 at Laguna Seca, the circuit Ternus laps
Porsche pulled the covers off the 935 at Rennsport Reunion VI in 2018, held at Laguna Seca in California. That is the same 3.602 km, eleven-turn circuit where Ternus runs track days. The Wall Street Journal reported that he laps it in under 1 minute 40 seconds. Apple's services boss Eddy Cue put it more plainly at the Miami Grand Prix in May, telling Reuters that Ternus drives a Porsche and does amateur racing, and that he had gone to Laguna Seca rather than the race. Apple and Porsche have their own history at that track: the two ran matching 1980s liveries there earlier this year.
Apple TV carries all 24 Formula 1 rounds in the United States
The new chief executive arrives with Apple already deep in motorsport. Apple TV became the exclusive American broadcaster of Formula 1 this season, taking every one of the 24 rounds over from ESPN. Cue said in May that Ternus is a serious Formula 1 fan and that his appointment would strengthen the relationship. That is not a small claim to test: American viewing figures for the sport are contested, Formula 1 has declined to publish them, and ESPN has reported that household reach fell after the switch.
Project Titan closed in February 2024 and CarPlay is what survived
Apple shut down its car programme on 27 February 2024, roughly a decade and several strategy resets after it began, without ever showing a vehicle. Ternus ran hardware engineering for most of that period, which makes him the executive who watched Apple discover it could not do to a car what it did to the phone. What Apple actually sells to drivers today is software on somebody else's dashboard. We tested CarPlay Ultra in an Aston Martin Vantage, where it takes over the instrument cluster as well as the centre screen. That, plus a broadcast contract, is the whole of Apple's car business.
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Apple spent about ten years and, by most accounts, billions trying to build a car and delivered none. Porsche designed, built and delivered 77 examples of a 700 PS track car inside a year, using an engine it already had. That contrast is the useful one, and it is not about competence. Apple is extraordinary at hardware it controls end to end and hopeless at hardware where the supply chain, the regulator and the physics all belong to somebody else. A car is the second kind.
So the number to watch under Ternus is not a car, it is dashboards. Apple's automotive footprint now consists of a screen layer it licenses to carmakers and a broadcast deal that runs in one country. If CarPlay Ultra is still confined to a handful of low-volume luxury brands when Ternus completes his first full year in charge, then Apple's car strategy really has shrunk to a logo on other people's instrument clusters. If a mainstream European group ships it across a full range, Apple has quietly won the part of the car it always wanted.
