Porsche retired its last mid-engined race car the only right way, by racing it
The right way to retire a race car is to race it
Porsche has just built the last 718 Cayman GT4 RS Clubsport, the final mid-engined racing car to leave Zuffenhausen before a new 911 GT4 R takes over in 2027. It could have gone straight onto a museum plinth. Instead Porsche handed it to two of its greatest drivers and sent it into a six-hour race at the Nurburgring, where it finished fourth overall on 1 August before retiring into the company collection. That is exactly how it should have been done.
A farewell run, not a farewell photo
The car ran the six-hour round of the ADAC Ravenol Nurburgring Endurance Series with Team 75 Motorsport, wearing a livery built entirely around the Porsche Museum: matte white for the facade, black for the window bands, grey for the forecourt, diamond patterns echoing the aluminium exterior, and museum typography across the bodywork. Fourth overall in a full endurance field is a genuinely respectable send-off, not a demonstration lap. As Armin Burger, Porsche's coordinator of historic motorsport, put it, the car does not merely narrate history, it continues authoring it.
Two legends, reunited by an old punishment
The choice of drivers turned the send-off into something better than ceremonial. Timo Bernhard and Jorg Bergmeister, both Porsche brand ambassadors, first became a pairing back in 2001 as a form of punishment, put in the same car by Porsche management after an on-track dispute between them. The punishment worked out rather well: together they won their class at the 2002 Daytona 24 Hours and then, in 2003, took overall victory there in a 911 GT3 RS against far faster prototypes. Reuniting them for the last mid-engined Porsche racer was a deliberate closing of a circle, and Bernhard admitted he had not read the small print, thinking it was a four-hour race until Burger told him it was six.
What actually ends here
This is more than one car retiring. The 718 Cayman GT4 RS Clubsport is the last mid-engined racing car Porsche will build in Zuffenhausen for the foreseeable future, closing a line that has produced more than 1,500 Cayman-based GT4 racers since 2016. The road-going 718 is already on its way out to make room for an electric successor, and this Clubsport, homologated only until 2027 and fitted with natural-fibre flax bodywork, is the competition side of that same goodbye to the naturally aspirated boxer six.
The 911 quietly takes back the last thing it did not have
Here is the part the tribute footage skips. The car replacing it in 2027 is not another Cayman, it is a 911 GT4 R. The Cayman has always lived in the 911's shadow by design, kept just far enough back that it could never embarrass the icon above it, and now even its entry-level racing niche is being folded back onto the 911. Porsche is consolidating around the one nameplate it will always protect, on track as much as in the showroom. It is the same brand whose future is openly electric, having just retained its Formula E manufacturers' title and campaigning the 963 in endurance racing with its heritage liveries in IMSA and a WEC calendar now finishing in Europe. The boxer six leaves the grid; the 911 badge, and the electric programmes, stay.
AutoNext Take
Send-offs like this are easy to get wrong. A last car usually means a quiet ceremony, a plaque and a slow lap for the cameras. Porsche instead put its final mid-engined racer in the hands of two men whose whole partnership began as a punishment, and asked them to go racing for six hours against people trying to beat them. Fourth place, earned rather than staged, is a far better epitaph than any museum caption.
But look past the emotion and there is a strategic tidiness to it. The Cayman spent its entire life being told not to outshine the 911, and its racing career ends the same way, with the 911 stepping into the class it used to own. That is not sad, exactly, it is just very Porsche: even the farewells serve the hierarchy. The naturally aspirated boxer six goes out with real dignity, the same way the last analogue engines are bowing out across the industry. Go and watch the documentary when it lands. Then listen to that flat-six one more time, because Porsche will not build a racing one like it again.
