Review: Silca 959 Gruppe B - Original Gravel Shirt
(2020) If ever there was a car we would attach Seasucker bike racks to and roll through town, it would be the Porsche 959 SC/RC. Since lot number 196 Porsche 959 sold for the low-low price of $5.95 million at Sotheby’s auction in 2018, that looks unlikely in the near future. What can be purchased sensibly is Indianapolis-based Silca’s 959 Gruppe B - Original Gravel shirt. Silca even takes care of the bikes on the car to relax our imagination.
But let’s talk about the Porsche 959.
For context purposes, the Porsche 959 Group B rally car is an extremely rare vehicle. There were only seven built, and Helmuth Bott, chief engineer of Porsche, wanted to display the ruggedness of the early supercar. In a rare factory move, Porsche supported the effort with the deep pockets of Rothman’s tobacco company. Pitted against the likes of Audi, Ford, Lancia, and Peugot, the formula-free racing format of Group B Rally proved fertile testing ground for manufacturers. What came from these proving stages were all-wheel drive and small-displacement turbos. Demands placed on Porsche to manufacture the race car by FIA, they instead turned their sights to endurance rally events.
In 1984, Porsche won the Paris-Dakar rally race, a 7,500-mile endurance event that departed Paris, France and ended in Dakar, Senegal. There were more than 400 entrants to the edition. Formula One driver Jacky Ickx had finished the 1984 event in a Porsche and was tapped to pilot a 959 for the 1985 event. That year saw none of the three Porsche 959s finish the event. In 1986 Porsche hammered the field with a 1-2 finish, and scored all three cars in the top six. The rarity of these endurance cars are solidified by Porsche who owns four of the seven cars used. Two cars are owned privately. One car was destroyed in 1985.
The Porsche 959’s example has bled into the current trend of gravel cycling. Competitive road racers have emigrated to gravel racing, seeking the same advantages sought after by Helmuth Bott. Take a supercar - or in this case, a road bike - and translate all the winning attitudes onto a gravel counterpart. It is not simply giving a road racing bike knobby tires, but competitive gravel event participants want it close: knobby tires, snappy handling, and similarly high bottom bracket clearance as on a road bike. Not too many riders want to do the 7,500-mile part, though.
When Silca produced the 959 Gruppe B tshirt, it had to be scooped up. As motor racing enthusiasts, we applaud the effort by Silca to dust off this rare car’s memory and add two Bianchi bikes to its roof in the graphic. They added a Sega hood advert as well as Vittoria and Bianchi bumper decals for a unique touch. Easy to overlook is the Castelli scorpion on the rear quarter panel. Perhaps someone with a winning bid of at least $6 million can live out this fantasy. Chances are if you can afford the car, you can probably afford to fly it to the old Paris-Dakar route, pull down the bikes, and go in search of the finest gravel Jacky Ickx could ever crush. If only gravel bikes came with such dramatic mud flaps as the 959. Since writing for creakybottombracket.com isn’t exactly raking in the American dollars, we will enjoy walking around the office in the Silca shirt. If you hear someone coming down the hallway pretending to buzz like a 3.2-liter twin turbo flat-six Carrera engine, we’re just imagining again. Just let us rattle past, Silca did that.
