The closest thing to a modern Porsche 959 is not a Porsche, and it makes 830 hp
The best modern tribute to the Porsche 959 is not being built by Porsche
The Porsche 959 remains one of the most revered cars of the 1980s, and nobody has recreated its spirit more completely than a young German independent whose surname carries a lot of history. Marc Philipp Gemballa has revealed the Marsien GT, an 830 hp, 959-inspired hypercar built on the current 911 Turbo S, and with it he has quietly done something Porsche itself never has: recreated both halves of what the 959 actually was.
What the Marsien GT actually is
Underneath sits a 992-generation Porsche 911 Turbo S, but only the doors and roof carry over. Everything else is new carbon-fibre bodywork evoking the 959, complete with a central bonnet fuel filler, GT2 RS-style front intakes and an aggressive diffuser, and the extensive use of carbon makes it around 75 kg lighter than a standard Turbo S. The engine is the headline act: a twin-turbo flat-six built by the legendary Porsche specialist Ruf, producing 830 hp and roughly 817 Nm, enough for a claimed 0 to 100 km/h in about 2.5 seconds and a top speed near 330 km/h, with a 900-plus hp second stage already in development. Just 30 will be built, the conversion alone costs around 890,000 dollars before you even supply the donor car, and it debuts at Pebble Beach with deliveries from late 2027.
Two Marsiens, two faces of the 959
This is the clever bit that a spec sheet hides. The original Porsche 959 had a split personality: it was both a Paris-Dakar rally-raid machine, built to conquer desert, and a road-going technological hypercar. Gemballa's first Marsien, launched in 2022, was the off-road interpretation, all long travel and dune-bashing intent. The new Marsien GT is the tarmac interpretation, lowered, stiffened and focused on road and track. Between the two cars, Gemballa has now recreated the entire dual character of the 959 more faithfully than anyone, Porsche included. That, not the horsepower, is the real achievement here.
A Ruf heart in a Gemballa body
Part of what makes the Marsien GT special is who built the engine. Those 830 hp come from Ruf, the storied independent that Germany treats as a manufacturer in its own right, and pairing Ruf power with Gemballa design is close to a dream team for Porsche obsessives. It places the car firmly in Germany's rich parallel-Porsche tradition, the world of specialists who treat the 911 as raw material, from 9ff turning a 911 into a Veyron-beater to Manthey building factory-grade upgrades and coachbuilders like Rubau reimagining the 718 as a windscreen-less speedster. The Marsien GT is, in effect, a supergroup of that scene.
Reclaiming a complicated surname
There is a human story behind the badge that is easy to miss. The Gemballa name carries a heavy, complicated history: Marc Philipp's father Uwe built a flamboyant, sometimes gaudy tuning empire in the 1980s and 90s, and was murdered in South Africa in 2010. Marc Philipp founded an entirely separate company under his own full name, and the work he is doing, restrained, reverent, obsessed with the 959 rather than with excess, reads as a quiet act of reclamation, turning a surname once linked to flash into one linked to taste. The honest caveat is that this is a rarefied object, 30 cars at close to a million dollars before the donor, in an increasingly crowded field of million-dollar Porsche-based specials and restomods. But few of them carry this much intent.
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It would be easy to file the Marsien GT under yet another 800-plus-horsepower Porsche special, because there are a great many of those now and the numbers all start to blur. That would be a mistake. What sets this one apart is not the output, impressive as it is, but the idea: a genuine, two-car homage to the greatest Porsche of the 1980s, split exactly the way the original 959 was split, and executed with a restraint the Gemballa name has not always been known for.
Add a Ruf engine, near-total carbon bodywork and a young man quietly rebuilding his family's reputation one exquisite car at a time, and you have something more interesting than a spec sheet. The Marsien GT is not the fastest or the wildest of the current crop of Porsche-based hypercars, and at this price it never needed to be. It might, however, be the most thoughtful, and the most personal. And in a field this crowded, that is worth far more than another hundred horsepower.
