Porsche 911 With Ferrari V8 Swap Is Either Sacrilege Or Seriously Awesome

With all that in mind, we aren't sure there's a more unequal engine swap than what you see here. Yes, that's a Ferrari V8 shoved into the back of a Porsche 911.

This is going to rile some brand purists for sure. But for the rest of us, Jimmy Oakes' YouTube project sponsored by ENEOS is a wild blend of Italian engine performance, German chassis engineering, and a smattering of Japanese motorsport heritage. It's dubbed the Porrari, and it's a 1978 Porsche 911 SC now powered by a Ferrari-built Maserati F136 V8. Here's how it all came to life.

An Insane Amount Of Work To Make This Car Happen

The Porrari is on display at the first Formula Drift round held at Stafford Motor Speedway in Connecticut, and it absolutely looks the part in drift spec with its missing bumpers, RAYS VRX-10 wheels, a straightforward Porsche Guards Red paint job, and specially fabricated widebody fenders. However, while it looks like a car destined to be a drift rat, the 911's entire chassis was stripped and restored, the roof replaced with a carbon fiber roof skin, and a custom wiring harness fitted before work even started on the engine.

By Roger Biermann

A 996 Porsche 911 transmission is mated to the F136 V8 and fitted with a custom clutch and flywheel. The engine is then modified with individual throttle bodies from a BMW M3 S65 engine using 3D-printed custom adapters and trumpets. However, the 1978 Porsche 911 was air-cooled, and had a smaller engine, so cascading solutions led to a fuel cell replacing the fuel tank in the front to create space for a radiator, then a removable tunnel was installed down the center of the chassis to allow direct routing for water cooling.

This isn't the first time someone has shoehorned a V8 into the back of a 911, so the additional bracing fitted to allow the torsion bars to be removed isn't a surprise. In this case, the suspension is a set of custom Stance Suspension coilovers, and the brakes are based around four-piston Brembo calipers from the Porsche Boxster.

By Sebastian Cenizo

"This build wasn't about taking the easy route. It was about building something that makes people take notice and then showing them how we did it. In my opinion, it’s projects like this that keep car culture exciting." - Jimmy Oakes, engineer and YouTuber

Looking past the Ferrari engine, one of the coolest aspects of the build are the custom headers and exhaust system, fabricated by James "Bopper" Moran. The interior is stripped out with a racing wheel and seats fitted along with a serious roll cage. For getting power to the ground and actually controlling it, the Porrari rides on 17x9.5-inch front and 17x10.5-inch rear wheels, fitted with 235/40 R17 and 255/40 R17 Accelera 651 Sport tires.

While capitalism and corporations push us to believe that we all need the latest and greatest technology, or we'll be left behind, projects like this show us that some recycling and human skill-based fabrication can lead to epic creations. In this case, that skill created a now-widebody 1978 Porsche 911 powered by a Ferrari V8 pulled from a Maserati that revs out to 8,000 rpm. AI can't build this, software is unnecessary, it's not a ludicrously priced restomod, and it looks far cooler while oozing more passion than a $650,000 Ferrari.