964RS and Griffith 500
Can the Porsche 964 Carrera RS and TVR Griffith 500 truly be compared? They may seem poles apart, but this pair has more in common than you might think. Can the underdog from Blackpool hold the Stuttgart icon to account?
On paper, the TVR Griffith 500 and Porsche 964 Carrera RS are surely incomparable. As a classic the Carrera RS is following in its hallowed Seventies predecessor’s tyretracks, commanding the best part of £240,000, more for low mileage or rare spec; the best Griffith won’t set you back a tenth of that. Porsche is a thriving multinational engineering giant, while TVR exists in name only nowadays, clinging on to the domestic affection for a firm that hand-built plastic-bodied sports cars in small numbers in its Blackpool factory. Ardent Porschephiles have probably lost count of the number of times it has won the Le Mans 24 Hours outright, even before the rest of the world’s classic sports-car races are taken into account. TVR, plucky contender though it was, remains a clubman’s favourite but a mere minnow even compared to compatriots like Lotus. There has never been a TVR equivalent of Porsche’s mighty 917 or 962 sports-prototypes, TVR hasn’t built a victorious Formula One engine, nor did firms ever approach TVR to design, say, skiing helmets or sunglasses.
And yet, this pair is comparable. Both represent the ultimate evolution of brand-defining engineering concepts laid down in the Forties, yet which wouldn’t outlast the Nineties. Both were born out of one-make race series which themselves resulted from the turmoil of the Eighties GT-racing landscape. Both have reputations for being fearsome to handle on the limit, the preserve of expert drivers only. And perhaps most pertinently, their performance figures are all-but identical, each offering 60mph in just under five seconds and a top speed of, as near as makes no difference, 160mph.
So with this in mind, is the Porsche 964 Carrera RS really worth every penny of £240,000? Or to put it another way, is the £20k TVR Griffith 500 one of the biggest classic performance bargains ever seen? Let’s find out…
Design and Engineering
On the surface of it, the Porsche 964 Carrera RS looks like a detail evolution of the original 1964 911. In fact, this Rubystone Red example – a colour unique to the RS but highly reminiscent of the lurid colour-coding so beloved by German aftermarket Porsche tuners in the Eighties – could almost pass for some creation of Ruf
