Gijs van Lennep reunited with Porsche 911 RSR

What do you do if you have just finished restoring one of the most important Porsches ever to turn a wheel, back to the spec in which it achieved its most enduring victory? If you are Lee Maxted-Page, founder of the eponymous Porsche specialist, you put the car on a lowloader and return it to the scene of its triumph.

“We thought it would be rude not to,” says Lee of his decision to ship the Porsche 911 RSR (known as R6), from the company HQ in Essex to Sicily. “We just rocked up with the car – it wasn’t road registered – and we also brought Gijs van Lennep with us. It was a very cool day.

“At one point the police turned up and asked us what we were doing, but when we explained that this was the car that won the last Targa Florio they said, ‘Fine!’”

Maxted-Page spent months restoring the car to its Targa Florio specification after it had been re-discovered in the US. You can read about the project as it got underway in the May 2018 edition of Motor Sport. The finished car is a remarkable tribute to van Lennep’s victory: “We got Norbert Singer’s race notes from the factory and returned the car back to the very same set-up it had in April 1973. Gijs couldn’t believe it – the gear ratios, everything, was as it was when he drove it there last.”

The Maxted-Page team didn’t stick around too long in Sicily however: “After a while you got the feeling that you were being watched,” he says. “We didn’t want to outstay our welcome.” The restored car’s latest outing was at the far less menacing Goodwood Members’ Meeting, which you can read about overleaf.