People always say the Porsche 911 is the easy choice—that 911s are everywhere, and if you buy one, you’re just another 911 guy. But I firmly believe that if you’re not a Porsche 911 guy, you just haven’t driven one yet.
The RUF RT12 is the extreme version of that.
This 2007 RUF RT12 is currently available for sale on Cars & Bids. Check it out and bid here.
The RT12 looks like a 911, and to a degree, it is. (If you’re not yet a Porsche 911 person and need a little guidance to follow all the numbers and names I’m about to throw at you, please check this and this.)
RUF debuted the RT12 at the beginning of the 997-generation Porsche 911, which arrived after the 996 and ran from 2004 to 2011. Since new generations of sports cars usually start with base versions and get more extreme as the years go on, there wasn’t a 500-horsepower 997 Turbo in those early years. The RT12 offered a 997-style body with a 650-horsepower version of the 996 Turbo’s engine, making it a quasi-997 Turbo for those who didn’t want to wait.
But it wasn’t just an early 997 Turbo. RUF customizes and manufactures cars, meaning essential pieces of the RT12—like its body panels and transmission—are from RUF itself. The RT12’s six-speed manual is notchy and robotic, and its nose dives deep toward the ground. I first saw the RT12 in a showroom full of Porsches, and its front lip looked lower than that of a powder-blue 911 GT2 RS nearby.
The RT12 I drove cost in the mid-$300,000s new, and it has a RUF six-speed manual, all-wheel drive, carbon-ceramic brakes, a hydraulic nose lift, and more. I’m told it makes way more than the quoted 650 horsepower, and I believe it.
The showroom selling it, HCC Specialty Cars, told me how mean it was before I drove it: The clutch is heavy, the car wants to drive high speeds instead of low, and it wants to be fed serious gas to go into first gear.
I found it friendlier than expected. It got along just fine at low speeds, and once I was in the car, it had that classic 911 feeling: plenty of headroom, legroom, and body room, while centering the driving experience and the sight lines on me, the driver. The car encased me so well that I actually forgot how low it was to the ground; it just felt normal, and with sporadic uses of the nose-lift function, it never scraped.
The shifter notched and clunked into each gear like a piece of heavy but agreeable machinery. The thunk, thunk was satisfying with each shift, and the car could ease or bolt forward at my command.
Turbocharged cars often have a noticeable thing called turbo lag, where after you floor the car, you wait for the turbos to spool up before you get that extra burst of power. I’ve never understood complaints about turbo lag, and I especially don’t in this car—when the boost kicked in, the car shot forward. It felt like we were going to space, together.
My only complaint about the RT12 is minor: The nose lift automatically goes down at 20 mph instead of a slightly higher speed, meaning when you’re driving in the neighborhood, you often have to use the lift several times to go over elevation changes instead of keeping it lifted. But that’s something you get used to with time. I got used to it after about 10 minutes.
These days, RUF is among the likes of RWB and Singer Vehicle Design in the world of famous Porsche-adjacent companies. The company offers ultra-customization, and one of its reps, Marc Pfeifer, told me only about 60 total cars were built in the RT12 lineup. But RUF wasn’t always in the Porsche business.
The company began as a service station in a rural German town called Pfaffenhausen in 1939, run by a man named Alois Ruf Sr. and his family. Aloisa Ruf, his granddaughter, recently told the company’s story to Motor Trend.
She said Alois Ruf Sr. built a bus to transport Pfaffenhausen residents to major cities, and one day, a Porsche 356 zoomed past. Alois Ruf Jr., Aloisa’s father, was a little kid at the time, and he was obsessed with the car’s speed.
The 356 lost control and crashed, so Aloisa said her father and grandfather took the driver to the hospital. The driver was fine, and they offered to buy the wrecked car from him to fix it up. He agreed, and that set Ruf on the Porsche path.
The successor to the 356 was, of course, the 911.
In 1977, RUF was modifying 930-era Turbos to make more power, and in 1987, the company got its big break. It came with a car nicknamed the “Yellowbird,” and actually called the RUF CTR. The CTR showed up to Road & Track Magazine’s top-speed shootout that year, which took place at Volkswagen’s 15.5-mile German test track in Ehra-Lessien.
The photos from the test are rainy and dreary, featuring famous supercars like the Ferrari Testarossa and Lamborghini Countach. Among them, there’s a little car that looks like the offspring of a Porsche 911 and a rubber duck. That little duck hit 211 mph, winning the magazine’s “world’s fastest car” competition and getting a cover story from it.
The Yellowbird had a RUF badge and a RUF VIN number because Germany certified the company as a manufacturer, meaning that for a time, it was the fastest production car in the world. After the car hit 211 mph, the RUF group told Road & Track: “We could make it go faster, but there’s not much purpose in a road car going very much faster.”
Pfeifer told me the goal with a RUF is for it to be a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” and it is. To everyone around me, I was driving a normal Porsche 911, not an RT12. But to those who knew, it was special.
The RT12 is a high-dollar supercar for when you don’t want the attention and exhaustion that comes with a high-dollar supercar—and sometimes, that’s the ideal supercar to drive.
This 2007 RUF RT12 is currently available for sale on Cars & Bids. Check it out and bid here.
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