Petrolicious, the creator of quality, original films and articles for classic car enthusiasts, has released its latest video, featuring Gen Shibayama’s Koenig 962, a street car directly related to Porsche’s legendary Group C racer.
After a couple of years away, the Petrolicious website and YouTube Channel has been recently rebooted by duPont REGISTRY Group, and new films are now dropping every Friday. Petrolicious celebrates the inventions, the personalities, and the aesthetics that ignite a collective lust for great automotive machines, and it seeks to inform, entertain, and inspire its community of aficionados and pique the interest of those who have been missing out.
Today, Petrolicious takes up Gen’s story…
The 962 wasn’t built to follow the leader, and it didn’t really fit within the confines of the rules. But Porsche found ways to make it fit, barely. They didn’t meet the regulations, they worked around them. Group C may not have wanted the 962 and if they saw it coming, it was too late to rewrite the rule book. And by the time anyone figured out how dangerous it was, the thing had already won everything.
Born from necessity after the 956 was banned in IMSA for its pedal box being ahead of the front axle, the 962 took shape as Porsche’s workaround to keep competing on both sides of the Atlantic. It was never about innovation for innovation’s sake. It was survival. A longer wheelbase and new safety compliance got it through the door in America, while it continued to dominate across the pond.
It was one car following (barely) two sets of rules. But it was still a prototype. Still a blunt-force win delivery system. Still one of the last truly dangerous race cars we’d ever see. Group B died in 1986, buried under its own violence. Group A came next, safer (boringish), slower (kinda boring), more civilized (pretty boring). The cars were undeniably cool, born from real street cars, but it just… wasn’t… Group B.
Group C outlived it all briefly, but it was the last time manufacturers were allowed to build deadly weapons disguised as race cars. And when it all came crashing down in the early 90s, there were leftovers.
Retired cars, wrecked tubs, race-worn spares. Some went to collectors. Some vanished. One of them, widely believed to be chassis CK6 02, ended up in Munich. While no definitive source ties the Japanese Koenig 962 street car directly to CK6 02, it’s the strongest candidate based on race history, construction details, and its timeline. The car raced at Spa, Silverstone, Monza, and the Nurburgring before disappearing from the paddock and reappearing, improbably, with plates.
Koenig was known for doing things that probably shouldn’t have been done. Twin-turbo Testarossas. Widebody SECs. Anything excessive and aggressive, they were into it. But turning a Porsche 962 into a road car? That was something else entirely.
Koenig added just enough to get a plate on it. A different nose with pop-up headlights. A basic interior with seats and vents. A custom immobilizer, a power switch, and a fuel pump prime that had to run for thirty seconds before the car would even think about starting. It still had a 650 horsepower twin-turbo flat six. It still had its original race hardware underneath. It still wanted to assault you.
Eventually, the chassis ended up in Japan. In the hands of Gen Shibayama. A man who understood exactly what the car was, and what it demanded.
“This car will kill you if you make a mistake,” he says. “But if you drive it the way it should be, it handles corners super well.”
Gen had already tangled with the Porsche turbo myth. He wrecked a 930 in Tokyo years earlier, caught out by classic lift-off oversteer. It became personal. A mission. He worked his way through the air-cooled Porsche catalog until he landed on the most extreme of them all.
“The Porsche 962 is the ultimate turbo Porsche. Therefore, I had to have it.”
The car is barely a road car. You have to remove the steering wheel to climb inside. You start it in stages. Kill switch. Battery. Fuel pump. Ignition. The turbo lag is enormous. The boost is violent.
Koenig only made three. Two survive. One lives with Gen in Japan, the other is hidden in a European collection. The third is lost to time, or the extreme secrecy of an unknown collector.
The Koenig 962 was not a one-off fever dream. It was inevitable. It was the logical conclusion of what the 962 already was. A car that never should have been allowed to exist, finding a second life it never should have been allowed to live. A race car that beat the race rulebook once, and then beat the government’s rulebook the second time around. Not as rebellion but almost as habit. It’s what the car was always built for.
