Marv’s Garage: When the supercars got RUF’ed up.

The Ruf CTR "Yellowbird" was the world's fastest production car, built by Alois Ruf Jnr in a small workshop in Pfaffenhausen, Germany during the peak of the First Great Supercar War. In 1984 3-time Le Mans-winner and legendary journalist Paul Frere invited a stack of the fastest cars on sale at the time to the high-speed test facility at Ehra-Lessien to throw down for a Road & Track story. Against Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini, and Aston Martin, Ruf’s STR took the crown and shocked the world.

R&T backed up in 1987 and nobody was mucking around. A Ferrari Testarossa and 288 GTO, and Lamborghini Countach QV repped Italy's finest, while Porsche had a pair of 959s, tuner Koenig brought 2 cars, plus an Isdera Imperator and AMG's Hammer sedan also came. But none could hold a candle to Ruf’s new head-kicker, the CTR (short for Group C, Turbo, Ruf). While it packed a 470hp twin-turbo 3.4-litre flat-six, the “yellowbird” as it was dubbed weighed just 1150kg, and it featured the same Bosch Motronic ECU as found in Le Mans-dominating Porsche 956 race car.

Both judges, Paul Frere and Phil Hill, agreed the Ruf was The Top Dawg with palm-wetting, bum-puckering performance that gave rushes like the best NY stock broker dancing powder of the day. The Ruf clowned them all with a 211mph top whack (that’s 339km/h in the New Money), 10mph clear of the next-fastest car.

Ruf later took their test driver Stefan Roser to the Nurburgring and the ensuing video, “Faszination on the Nurburgring”, would become the world’s first viral video. Ruf sold VHS copies and people bootlegged them like cheap liquor in 1920s Chicago. Once YouTube became a thing, a new generation fell in love with Roser pulling high-speed smoke-belching drifts at the world’s most dangerous circuit. Ruf only built 29 US$225K turn-key CTRs in 9 years, while another 30-ish punters had their Carreras converted to CTRs.