Alois Ruf has made a career out of turning Porsches into something transcendent. But while the world obsesses over his 911-based creations, one anomaly slipped through the cracks of history—a single, solitary Porsche 928 that earned the Ruf name. Now, 36 years after it was born, the one-of-one 1989 Ruf 928R is heading to the auction block.
Gooding & Christie’s will present the car at the Amelia Island sale on March 5th, with pre-auction estimates sitting between $400,000 and $500,000. For a 928, that’s stratospheric. For the only 928 that Ruf ever touched from the ground up, it might be a steal.
This wasn’t some bolt-on job. Ruf started with a body-in-white—a bare, unpainted shell pulled straight from the production line before Porsche could lay a finger on it. That distinction matters enormously.
It means the car carries a legitimate Ruf W09 VIN, not a Porsche VIN with aftermarket parts catalog receipts. In the eyes of collectors and registries alike, this is a Ruf automobile, full stop.
The man who commissioned it was Lee Kun-hee, the late chairman of Samsung Group and one of South Korea’s most powerful industrialists. Lee was a serious car collector, the kind of buyer who could pick up the phone and ask one of the world’s most exclusive tuners to build something they’d never built before. Ruf obliged, completing the 928R in September 1989 with a special plaque bearing Lee’s name inside.
Under the hood, Ruf reworked the 5.0-liter V8 to produce 360 horsepower and 354 pound-feet of torque, up from the standard 928’s 316 hp and 317 lb-ft. Those numbers don’t sound earth-shattering by modern standards, but in 1989 they put this grand tourer in seriously rarefied air. The one concession that might make purists wince is the four-speed automatic transmission—though given its role as a flagship luxury piece for a billionaire chairman, it fits the character.
The exterior wears black paint over a Wine Red leather interior that looks like it could have been stitched yesterday. An Alcantara-wrapped steering wheel and Ruf-embossed headrests complete the cabin. You won’t find a single Porsche crest anywhere your eyes naturally land.
The odometer reads just 1,568 miles. After spending decades in the Samsung Collection, the car was reacquired by Ruf following Lee’s death in 2020. The company performed a mechanical restoration and added a few period-sympathetic upgrades: 19-inch Ruf wheels to accommodate carbon ceramic brakes, a modern-internals classic-look radio head unit, and a new exhaust system.
For context on what a 928 can fetch at auction, consider that the 1979 Porsche 928 from the Tom Cruise film Risky Business sold for $1.98 million a few years back. That car had Hollywood provenance but was otherwise mechanically unremarkable. The Ruf 928R has genuine engineering pedigree, a one-off build history, ultra-low mileage, and a connection to one of Asia’s most legendary business dynasties.
The collector car world loves a good story, and this one has layers. A reclusive Korean billionaire. A German tuning house that never repeated the experiment. A car that sat in near-museum conditions for decades before being mechanically refreshed by its original creator.
When the gavel drops at Amelia Island, expect the bidding to get aggressive. Cars like this don’t just come around once in a while—this one literally came around once, period. Whether it lands at $400,000 or blows past the half-million mark, whoever takes it home will own a piece of Ruf history that can never be duplicated.
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