6 Porsche-Powered Things That Aren’t Porsches

Porsche is a company that’s had a hand in a surprising amount of vehicles you wouldn’t necessarily expect, from the Vauxhall Zafira to the Harley-Davidson V-Rod motorbike.

In most of these cases, though, Porsche’s help tends to be on the engineering side. The company is fairly protective of its own engines and doesn’t just hand them out to any Tom, Dick, or indeed Harry.

On those rare occasions its engines have found their way into non-Porsche vehicles, though, the results have been varied and often fascinating. Join us for a look at six non-Porsche vehicles that feature Porsche power.

Porsche B32

Yeah, yeah, this thing’s called a Porsche B32, has a Porsche VIN, and was assembled by Porsche, but that’s not fooling anyone. It’s quite clearly a T3 Volkswagen Transporter.

In fact, the B32 came about from Porsche’s need for a support vehicle when it was campaigning the 959 in the brutal Paris-Dakar Rally in the 1980s. To create it, it borrowed a fleet of T3s from its parent company and replaced their weedy flat-fours with the 228bhp, 3.2-litre flat-six from the contemporary 911 Carrera.

The gearbox, brakes and suspension components all came from the 911 too, and the consensus seems to be that the B32 could hit 62mph in just over eight seconds and a top speed of 115mph. Nobody’s quite sure how many were made, but it’s probably in the single digits, and a few found their way into private hands.

McLaren MP4/2

Porsche has dipped in and out of F1 a few times in its history, albeit only as a fully-fledged constructor for a few years in the early 1960s. It returned a few times to supply engines, though, most notably in the 1980s, when its savage 1.5-litre turbocharged V6 – wearing the branding of aviation and motorsports conglomerate TAG – took the McLaren MP4/2, driven by Alain Prost and Niki Lauda, to the World Constructors’ Championship in 1984 and 1985.

These turbocharged monsters were a lot more successful than Porsche’s next F1 powerplant, a 3.5-litre V12 developed for perennial backmarker Footwork Arrows in 1991. This engine was such a disaster that Footwork never finished a single race using it, and failed to even qualify for several. It was ditched after six races for a Ford-Cosworth V8 that wasn’t a whole lot better. The manufacturer has stayed away from F1 since then, although it came close to entering with Red Bull a couple of years back.

Lada Samara T3

We’ve already covered how Porsche had an unexpected hand in the engine of the Lada Samara, a small family car dating from the last years of the Soviet Union. Away from road cars, though, that partnership ran a lot deeper.

Lada entered the 1989 Paris-Dakar Rally with a prototype whose bodywork vaguely resembled the roadgoing Samara, but underneath, it sported a mid-mounted 3.6-litre flat-six from Porsche and the four-wheel drive system from the mighty 959. In 1990, it finished seventh in the Dakar piloted by none other than six-time Le Mans winner Jacky Ickx, and managed fifth the following year in the hands of eventual 1994 WRC champion Didier Auriol.

Mooney M20L

It turns out that an air-cooled engine makes quite a lot of sense in an aircraft. Funny, that. It was with this information that Porsche set about developing an aero version of the 911’s 3.2-litre flat-six in the ’80s.

Codenamed the PFM 3200, the engine made up to 240bhp if fitted with a turbocharger, and powered a number of light aircraft in the late 20th century. The most famous of these, though, was the Mooney M20L. Produced during 1988 and ’89, one of these planes was decked out in a Porsche Rothmans racing livery for promotional purposes, making it unquestionably one of the coolest aircraft this side of Concorde.

Airship Industries Skyship 500

Is it a blimp? Is it a Zeppelin? Is it an airship? Well, technically, it’s a blimp, because it doesn’t have a rigid structure inside its big… balloon thing. Look, we’re not experts on these things.

The Skyship 500 was built by British company Airship Industries throughout the 1980s, with six built. Power came from not one but two 3.0-litre turbocharged flat-sixes borrowed from the original 930 Porsche 911 Turbo. We’re not sure what enormous turbolag would feel like in a blimp, and we’re not sure we’d like to find out.

Kineo 27 Speedboat

Very fast and rear-engined – the typical speedboat is basically the Porsche 911 of the water. The Kineo 27, though, took that a bit further by borrowing its duo of engines from Porsche. They weren’t 911 flat-sixes, mind you, but special marine adaptations of the 5.0-litre V8 from the 928 (although the one in the video above is fitted with different engines from Mercury Marine).

The 27-foot boat was styled by Porsche Design, and set to be available through Porsche dealers in the US, but despite multiple attempts to get it off the ground, the project never made it past the prototype stage. A shame, really, because at one point, the Kineo’s creator, Horst Stross, was looking into twin-turbocharging both 928 engines for a total output of around 1000bhp. The idea of a Porsche-powered speedboat hasn't gone away, though – you can now get one with the electric motor from a Macan.