For 25 years Porsche has kept its LMP2000 in the deep dark caverns of its private museum collection, rarely showing the car to anyone outside the company’s payroll. In recent weeks, for the anniversary of its first test, Porsche Heritage had the car recommissioned and returned to the track for open lapping with one of the drivers who tested it in 1999, three-time Le Mans winner Allan McNish. For a car with such promise on the international racing stage to have died an ignominious death in obscurity, there must have been extenuating circumstances.
In May of 1999 the Porsche board ordered development of the car be scrapped, and the car was put into storage. For several years Porsche denied the car even existed, despite spy photography and leaked internal documents.
This car was built around a 3.5-liter version of the Formula 1 V10 that Porsche built to replace its awful F1 V12 of the 1991 season. Ultimately Porsche decided to scrap its F1 efforts and the engine was shelved for several years. Building on Porsche’s overall Le Mans win in 1998 with the 911 GT1-98, the company was looking to develop a new car for the new LMP900 class, competing against Cadillac, Panoz, Chrysler, and Audi. That last one is critical, however.
The rumor of the day, which I to my core fully believe to be the unvarnished truth, is that Volkswagen Group chairman Ferdinand Piëch came to an agreement with then Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking. The agreement amounted to billions of dollars being fed into Porsche’s corporate coffers in the form of an engineering contract to develop a joint luxury SUV project, which would become the Porsche Cayenne, Audi Q7 and Volkswagen Touareg. As part of the contract, Porsche would cancel its LMP2000 program and allow Audi to take a shot at winning Le Mans overall a few times with its newly developed R8 Le Mans Prototype. Audi didn’t want competition from Porsche at the 24 Hours, and Porsche wanted a shitload of money. So the car was quickly and quietly swept under the rug, and Porsche went on to sell absolute bucket loads of Cayennes all over the world.
While I would still have loved to see how the LMP2000 would fare against the Audi R8 (which won Le Mans five times between 2000 and 2005), it was probably for the better that Porsche got the contract to develop the Cayenne and keep Piëch happy. The big lux SUV is far and away Porsche’s most popular model in the company’s history, after all.