Kremer Racing

Kremer-Porsche with Jürgen Neuhaus at the ADAC 1000 km race in 1973 .

Bob Wollek 1977 in the Kremer-Porsche 935 K2 # 007 00016 at the German automobile racing championship on the Nürburgring.

Kremer 935 K3 # 009 00015, winning car of the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans, in the Indianapolis Circuit Museum, USA.

Kremer 962 CK6 (1990), a further development of the customer racing sports car from Porsche.

Kremer-Porsche 935 K1 # 006 00019 at the 1976 Brands World Championship run in Silverstone / GB.

Kremer Racing is a car racing team based in Cologne- Ossendorf today , a sports car manufacturer and a specialized workshop that the brothers Erwin Kremer and Manfred Kremer founded in 1962.

Diverse company history

The racing team, which received active works support from Porsche at least in the run-up to the German Motor Racing Championship in 1982 and for the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1995 , has been represented almost exclusively with modified Porsche brand sports cars in national and international motor racing competitions since 1962. Exceptions were the 1994 ADAC GT Cup and the 24 Hours of Le Mans with the Honda NSX and from 1999 to 2001 the races with the Lola B98 / 10 Ford, including at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1999. The background to the temporary brand change was a Trade with the then Lola owner Martin Birrane , who swapped a new Lola B98 / 10 Ford for a Porsche 962C from the Kremer stock. This gave the traditional racing team from Cologne another updated chassis for the long-distance classic on the Sarthe .

Kremer Racing has gained worldwide recognition through the development and sale of small series racing sports cars, which were first built in the 1974 season on the basis of new factory bodyshells. With the advent of turbo technology, Kremer Racing built the 935-K construction series from 1976 (generations 1 to 4), which culminated in the Kremer-Porsche 935 K4 in 1981. Two units of the radical aluminum tubular space frame version were created. Both vehicles found US customers in 1982 and have remained in the United States to this day. In addition, Kremer Racing launched a total of 31 units of the most successful sporting and commercial milestone in the K series, the Kremer Porsche 935 K3. Twelve cars were built with new factory bodyshells, three more could be converted in-house, and with 16 further conversion kits, Porsche 934/5 and older Porsche 935 could also be retrofitted. Customers all over the world took advantage of this opportunity.

The first major success in the history of the still young racing team was the overall victory at the 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps on June 21, 1968 with the Porsche 911. In addition to Helmut Kelleners and Willi Kauhsen, company founder Erwin Kremer himself was a driver. The three founding members - in addition to Erwin Kremer, his younger brother Manfred Kremer and Hermann Bürvenich - took this as an opportunity to become more involved in automobile racing than before. On 13./14. June 1970 saw the first start at the Le Mans 24 Hours . Erwin Kremer and Nicolas Koob from Luxembourg won the class of GT vehicles up to 2500 cm³ displacement with the new Porsche 911 S 2.3, at the same time they took seventh place in the overall ranking. In the tenth time the team took part in the endurance classic, the 24-hour race in Le Mans in 1979 , drivers Klaus Ludwig , Don Whittington and Bill Whittington with the Kremer Porsche 935 K3 , chassis # 009 00015, achieved overall victory. It was the first triumph of a special production car over the favored prototypes. In 1995 he won the Daytona 24-hour race with the Kremer K8 Spyder #WSC 01, driven by Christophe Bouchut , Jürgen Lässig , Giovanni Lavaggi and Marco Werner .

Company founder Erwin Kremer died on September 27, 2006 after suffering a stroke two years earlier. On August 11, 2010, just a few days before the AvD-Oldtimer-Grand Prix 2010 at the Nürburgring , Eberhard A. Baunach, a graduate in business administration and banking from Cologne, took over the company. Since then he has been the sole managing director.

Extravagant Porsche racing cars

In the 1970s, Kremer Racing prepared Porsche vehicles of the types 911 , 914/6 and 934. With the Porsche 935 , Kremer Racing started a completely independent development with turbo engines in 1976. From then on, this new Kremer model series bore the additional letter “K”, supplemented with a number that marked the order of the individual evolutionary stages. A total of four different versions from K1 to K4 were created. This approach initially continued in Group C , which was introduced in 1982 : the Kremer-Porsche CK5 was also a completely independent development.

935 K1 (1976): the first 935 according to Group 5 to be built by a private team consistently outside the Porsche factory for the premier class of the brand world championship.
935 K2 (1977): Evolution of the K1, used for the first time at the ADAC Eifel race on May 1, 1977 at the Nürburgring and, with the Alsatian Robert "Bob" Wollek, immediately winner of the fourth round of the German automobile racing championship in 1977.
935 K3 (1979): the most successful variant of the Porsche 935. This vehicle had a technical advantage in the form of the air / air intercooler (in contrast to the factory Porsche, which was equipped with a less efficient water / air heat exchanger ). The Porsche 935 K3 won the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1979 and also dominated the German racing championship with ten victories in eleven races .
935 K4 (1981): completely new, technically complex variant of the Porsche 935 . Special feature: an aluminum tubular space frame as the load-bearing basic structure.
CK5 (1982): Group C sports prototype based on the basic design of the Porsche 936 - a bridging model before the Porsche factory delivered the first eleven Porsche 956s to its customer teams in 1983 .
962 CK6 (1990): Evolution of the Porsche 962C with a Thompson chassis partly made of carbon elements. Bernd Schneider achieved overall victory in the 1990 Interseries, Division 1, with such a vehicle type.
CK7 Spyder (1992): open sports prototype based on the technical basis of the Porsche 962C in accordance with the US IMSA-GTP regulations, used in the Interseries from 1992 with a 3.2-liter engine (overall victory in 1992 for Manuel Reuter ). In 1993 the Kremer customer drivers Giovanni Lavaggi and Tomas Saldana scored a double victory in the Interseries. In 1995 Tomas Saldana and Marco Werner appeared sporadically with the Kremer-Porsche CK7 Spyder. Together they finished sixth in the 1995 Interserie division .
K8 Spyder : Further developed CK7 Spyder in accordance with the international World Sportscar Regulations (WSC) for use in the 24-hour races of Daytona (1995) and Le Mans (1994 to 1998 inclusive).

Kremer also manufactured a single Porsche 917 short-tail coupe (KH) in 1981, which debuted in the 1981 Le Mans 24-hour race. Vehicles of the types 911 GT2 (from 1995) and 911 GT1 (from 1997) were also used in the 1990s.

Results

Victories in the sports car world championship

year	run	vehicle	Driver 1	Driver 2
1977	6-hour race at Hockenheim	Porsche 935K2	France Bob Wollek	United Kingdom John Fitzpatrick
1978	6 hours of Dijon	Porsche 935/77	France Bob Wollek	France Henri Pescarolo
	Misano 6 hour race	Porsche 935/77	France Bob Wollek	France Henri Pescarolo
	Vallelunga 6 hour race	Porsche 935/77	France Bob Wollek	France Henri Pescarolo
1985	1000 km race from Monza	Porsche 962C	Germany Manfred Winkelhock	Switzerland Marc Surer