RUF presents mind-blowing 1,000hp flat-eight

Festival of Speed is at its best when introducing the wild and wonderful - RUF might have taken the biscuit

Goodwood can be a weird and wonderful place during Festival of Speed. Stay out long enough in this year’s stifling heat and you can witness the debuts of Denza’s melding of hypercar performance and sports car pricing. A Mercedes CLA with 680hp. Or the world’s most powerful manual production car. Yet you can also see a decidedly old, less-than-cohesive-looking Ruf with a thoroughly special engine.

This CTR3 mule car doesn’t look especially ‘2026’ at first glance, and nor does its engine sound too 21st century either: tucked beneath that lengthy rear-deck is a mid-mounted 4.8-litre eight-cylinder boxer engine. Known internally at Ruf as the Erprober – or Tester – it produces a fairly meaningful 1,000hp and 1,000Nm (aka 738lb ft), both figures round and clean enough to represent kick off points rather than finished, homologated figures. Anticipate more.

“The Boxer 8, or B8, will announce its unique sound during the Supercar Run twice per day from Friday through to Sunday, driven by racing legend Tanner Foust,” we’re promised. Ruf is naturally quick to point out the CTR3 body is merely a mule with which to host the debutant B8 on its first public experience – expect something different to conceal engine once full production begins.

“There are moments in a company's history that define the future,” Alois Ruf says. “For Ruf, the Boxer 8 is one of those moments. A boxer-eight has never been part of our story, or anyone else's in this form, so we decided to write a new chapter in automotive history. We look forward to letting the engine speak for itself at Goodwood.”

Sending such an early prototype into the Supercar Run leans into something Ruf proudly calls its “hidden in plain sight” testing philosophy, and perhaps the inevitable social media commentary – or baleside chit-chat at the event – will help define quite where the B8 goes next. While its use of an existing CTR3 – albeit one lengthened by 100mm to swallow the new engine – is designed to keep the headlines low-key, painting the car in a Yellowbird-aping livery ensures no one’s going to miss the Foust-driven prototype.

Excitingly, the engine is hooked up to a six-speed manual transmission. A car for thrills and involvement and not pure lap times, then. Handy when that pesky Denza Z has 50 per cent more horsepower.

Flat-eights are uncommon, of course, but do come with a backstory: Porsche campaigned them across the 1960s, in Grand Prix and sports cars right up to its Group 6 reg 908, a few of those later engines sneaking into period 914 road cars. Minnesota brand Runge has also announced its own 5.3-litre flat-eight for its R3 sports car which, handily, can slot into a 964 chassis.

Perhaps a far more joyful sparring match can take place across the Atlantic – and in turn a whole new sub-category of sports car open up before our eyes. At the very least there’s another, rather intriguing noise to keep your ears pricked for during the relentless Goodwood hill activity.