The 1977 #40 Martini Porsche 935/2.0 Baby (chassis #935 2 001) photographed at the Porsche Museum, Stuttgart, Germany in May 2017
Ernst Fuhrmann’s requirement to develop a significantly updated GT race car in 1977, would present a number of challenges for the Porsche race department. Just to make things interesting, the new car was to race in a class in which they had not competed for almost a decade. But the subsequent work resulted in the creation of one of Porsche’s universal favourites, the 935/2.0 ‘Baby,’ a race car that Norbert Singer and his team could be justly proud of.
The 1977 #40 Martini Porsche 935/2.0 Baby (chassis #935 2 001) photographed at the Porsche Museum, Stuttgart, Germany in May 2017
In 1977 Porsche competed in the World Championship of Makes, but many of their customers participated in the very popular domestic Deutsche Rennsport Meisterschaft (DRM). This series was divided into two classes, one for the up to 2-litre cars and one for the over 2-litre cars. The bigger class was dominated by customer 935s, where Ford and BMW found themselves out-classed, and so the other manufacturers turned their attention to the sub-2-litre ranks. With more manufacturers in this ‘smaller’ category, this had the effect of drawing the attention of the media and the public away from the larger displacement class where the 935 was king. To pour fuel on the fire, Ford and BMW said that this was where the ‘real racing’ was happening, and that Porsche was unable to compete in that class because they did not have a 2-litre race car.
This jibe did not sit well with Ernst Fuhrmann, who as Chairman of Porsche, took on the challenge and instructed the motorsport department to build a car that could compete in the 2-litre class of the DRM. This presented Norbert Singer with a couple of headaches, because Porsche did not even have a 2-litre production engine at that time, and the 2-litre DRM class had a very low minimum weight that would prove a real challenge for the 911 to get down to. Fortunately for Porsche, it was in just such circumstances that Norbert Singer thrived.
