Live Out Your 911 Safari Dreams With The Ruf Rodeo

After years of transforming Porsches into weapons-grade giant-killers, Ruf has turned its attention to making its own cars. Which, erm, still look like Porsches.

But we aren’t mad. Whether you’re looking at the CTR Anniversary or the SCR, the levels of want are sky-high. And now, the carbon tub both of those cars are built around has spawned a new variant - the Ruf Rodeo concept.

Clearly inspired by Porsche’s legendary Safari rally cars, and also Ruf’s “friends and customers” such as Ralph Lauren and Rodeo Drive Concours d’Elegance founder Bruce Meyer, the Rodeo is ready to tackle all manner of off-road obstacles. Ruf hasn’t revealed a whole lot about it in terms of technical info just yet, but we can see it rides much higher than its siblings and rolls on chunky all-terrain tyres.

The Rodeo also has under-body protection for when you push your luck on the rough stuff, and for when you’ve got it really wrong, there’s an attached spade for digging your way out of trouble. Handy.

The one thing Ruf has confirmed is the choice of power plants - it can be had with either the 3.8-litre turbocharged flat-six used in the CTR or the SCR’s naturally-aspirated 4.0-litre boxer. The engines - the work of Ruf itself - are good for 700bhp and 503bhp, respectively.

The off-road bits and the inclusion of a manually-adjustable four-wheel drive system will inevitably make the Rodeo heavier than the CTR and the SCR - which are both around 1200kg - but whichever engine is chosen, this is going to be a quick car. And also an expensive one - to give you an idea of how much the Rodeo might be if/when it goes into production, the SCR is around half a million quid.