Market Find: Nick Heidfeld's Ultra-Rare Porsche 959 Sport Heads to Monterey

Among the 46 cars RM Sotheby's is calling its Masterworks of Design offering at Monterey this year, one lot stands out for how rarely it surfaces at all. Lot 325 is a 1989 Porsche 959 Sport, chassis WP0ZZZ95ZJS905013, crossing the block on Saturday, August 15, carrying a pre-sale estimate of $5 million to $6 million. It is a former Nick Heidfeld car, restored to factory specification by Porsche Classic, and it is one of only 29 Sport-spec 959s Porsche ever built.

The 959 Sport was never meant to be a comfortable car. Where the standard 959 wrapped its all-wheel-drive, twin-turbo engineering in leather and adjustable ride height, the Sport stripped much of that away in pursuit of a lower curb weight. Porsche pulled the adaptive suspension in favor of fixed coilovers, deleted the air conditioning, stereo, and passenger-side mirror, swapped leather for cloth, and fitted a roll cage with racing harnesses. The changes shed roughly 220 pounds versus the standard car, and the 2.85-liter twin-turbocharged flat-six was tuned to 508 horsepower.

Getting the Sport into American hands proved harder than building it. Al Holbert, who ran Porsche's North American motorsport program at the time, pushed to bring a batch of Sport-spec 959s into the United States for collectors, but federal regulators balked, deciding the cars were little more than thinly disguised race machines and blocking the import. That regulatory standoff is part of why so few Sports exist at all: against a total 959 production run of 292 cars between 1986 and 1989, only 29 were built to Sport specification.

This particular example adds a layer of rarity on top of that. It's one of just 11 Sports finished in Grand Prix White, and RM Sotheby's lists it as one of only two Sports known to have left the factory with air conditioning fitted, a comfort option that ran directly against the model's stripped-out ethos. It was originally ordered by Timothy L. White of Ohio but, according to the auction listing, was ultimately invoiced and delivered new to a collector in South Korea in September 1989.

The car's more recent history is well documented. Former Formula 1 driver Nick Heidfeld acquired chassis 5013 in 2007 and, in 2017, commissioned Porsche Classic in Stuttgart to carry out a comprehensive mechanical restoration, reported by Porsche's own newsroom to have cost roughly €115,000 and to have included returning the Motronic engine management system to its original factory calibration. The work wrapped in December 2021. Porsche's press coverage of the project at the time corroborates the ownership and restoration details RM Sotheby's cites in its catalog description.

The current owner bought the car in 2022, making them only the third owner since it left the factory, and has put almost no additional mileage on it. RM Sotheby's cataloged the car at 4,788 kilometers, roughly 2,976 miles, a figure that reflects both its short ownership chain and the caution collectors tend to apply to a car this scarce. The auction house's addendum on the lot also notes that California emissions rules restrict the sale to a licensed dealer or an out-of-state buyer, a routine but important detail for anyone bidding from within the state.

At a $5 million to $6 million estimate, the 959 Sport sits well above where standard-specification 959s typically trade, a gap that reflects both the model's near-nonexistent production numbers and the documented, factory-backed restoration behind this specific chassis. Whether it clears that range at Monterey will say something about how the market is currently pricing the most extreme, least compromising version of one of the 1980s' most technologically important supercars.