Tuthill 911K

Interesting comments at just after 3:45 talking about the 3k revs after 8k 'I don't know what the next 3000 rpm have to offer, something actually unnecessary', sure it was tongue in cheek.

From the GMA website:

'The T33 has 90 per cent of its maximum torque available from 4,500 to 10,500 rpm, making it usable every day.'

So that's 300 lb/ft from 4.5 to 10.5k. I expect at at least the same %age from the 911K bearing in mind it has a substantially lower state of tune.

Just under £1 mill .

It will be wonderful to see as this project progresses ... I anticipate great things whatever the conjecture

I was at Tuhills early last summer when my car was being serviced...had a chat with them about builds. They told me about a very limited run of a handful of cars with an engine with 11k rpm limit. I asked about the power output and was told it was still under development and they didn't know what it would produce.

Appreciate I am not in the inner sanctum but I was as far as they were concerned a potential customer.

90% of maximum torque over quite a wide power band isn't entirely that rare. Most of the fairly well known high performance normally aspirated engines ie gt3s from quite a few generations, BMW NA M engines previously, R8 v10 etc.

Phew! Where to start! It has been an amazing journey so far, and my car is finally taking shape. I think it will be around 835kg including fluids and 50 litres of fuel, more or less.

Should be finished in the paint shop now, colour is amethyst pearl metallic (M4Z) with hand painted stripes in tobacco metallic and gold bronze metallic at the bottom of the doors etc where PORSCHE shows through in bare carbon. The quality of the paint is exquisite, inside the frunk, the engine bay, even underneath the car it is the same smooth and polished finish as the visible panels. The painted body before fitting of windows, lights etc goes to Topaz for PPF and then the car comes back to Tuthill for all the bits to be bolted to it etc.

Weight saving has been an obsessive part of Richard’s development work. Every part has been reviewed for weight saving potential, with an eye of course to longevity too. Most of the bolts are custom made titanium. We have carbon wheel rims for the Fuchs style wheels. Gearbox carrier is carbon fibre. And so on. The wheels are cool too in that you can see a small subtle band of unpainted carbon near the wheel centre, and if you look through the “spokes” you can see the inner rim is unpainted carbon. Subtle Like Tuthill, as they say. And the entire door is carbon fibre, not just the skin, with kevlar side impact bars. All the body panels are CF too. There is a carbon fibre roof sandwich panel with stiffening cross beams inside. The 911K logo on the engine lid is titanium too.

The engine was going to be a 2.8 but changed to 3.1. It was important to me to have good mid range torque and not just a top end screamer. And Richard listened. The exhaust is inconel. As said already on this thread, the engine has been on the dyno a lot, but not yet with the final exhaust and I am keen to see the outcome soon. I think they are pretty much there otherwise, a lot of testing and mapping done. I am sure they will err slightly on the conservative side rather than over stress the engine. When I drove the gold car, limited to 8000 at that time a few months ago, it was just incredible. With this kind of weight we don’t need 350-400bhp. It is more about the “emotion” and using all the revs. I am going to drive what I hope will be final mapping and final gearbox ratios in a couple of weeks. Richard is also working on different, lower ratios for gears 2-4.

The other abiding memory I have from driving the gold car a while back was how blown away I was by the suspension. You could drive slowly or fast over single track broken farm roads or nice fast A roads or twisty B roads, the car was composed and put the power down too. It was a real lesson in what a sophisticated 4 way passive setup can be made to do. Since then the dampers have been completely reworked with Motion control, so I cannot wait. Richard seems very excited about this, so I know it is going to be good.