A friend of mine sent me these pictures of Bill Gate's Porsche 959 which is in for some service. The car "belongs to a Microsoft executive" he said, and is currently at a secret shop in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. To my knowledge, there are only 2 959's in the US. One belongs to Bill, the other belongs to Jerry Seinfeld. Now that's a rare company indeed.

The 959 is SO awesome.

Another big player at MS also imported a 959 with bill, and in this pic it's red. I think Bill Gates had a silver one.

http://www.forbesautos.com/advice/toptens/...paul_allen.html

His yacht is more impressive though
http://www.yachtcrew-cv.com/paulallen.htm
:o

There's more than 2 959s in the US, diesel. There's a shop about a half hour from my house that restores and converts 959s to meet US regs. There are dozens of them in the country now. I've even seen one being driven along Highway 1.

11,980km's?

A GrpB Porsche. I have to wonder if those guys care a flip about its rally heritage.

Probably not. I wonder if they care about anything beyond the fact that it looks good and is rare. Whatever happened to Porsche's rallying anyway?

I can guarantee you that Jerry Seinfeld certainly cares.

Who knows about Bill Gates... he has a thing for German cars.

Group B was cancelled just before the full Grup B rally version of the 959 was finished. The 959 was perhaps the car that fulfilled the Group B ethos the most, as it proved itself in the Paris - Dakar rally twice, and it won it's class for Broup B racing cars at Le Mans. It's because of this that the 959 is widely regarded to be the biggest "what if" of all the Group B cars, had Group B carried on it would almost certainly have been a championship contender.

This Group B effort from Porsche was expensive though, especially as the world went into an economic recession and predictably Porsche lost so many sales, wich in it's turn trimmed Porshes motorsport budgets back to the bone, so that they had to focus on just their core area of motorsports; GT racing. Rallying was out and engine supplying in F1 was also out. Their GT effort too was starting to fall apart with the Turbo Carrera loosing ground and long since outdated 962 that the Porsche factory had stopped develop in 1987, despite the 1994 Le Mans win.

Porsche did turn around with the new management led by Wendelin Wiedeking, and gradually Porsche's racign effort picked up in the mid 90s, but rallying was still not considered. The reason might be that no current car produced by Porsche fits the current WRC formula. The only kind of rallying effort done by Porsche lately is the Transsyberia with the Cayenne and of course the GT3 Road Challenge. (Video from that)