The only Porsche 928 that Alois Ruf ever built crossed the auction block at the 2026 Amelia Island Concours through Gooding Christie’s. Nobody met the reserve. A true one-of-one, commissioned by the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee — the richest man in South Korean history — and it couldn’t find a buyer.
Let that sit for a moment.
Ruf is a name that makes collectors salivate. The CTR “Yellowbird” is among the most celebrated modified Porsches ever created, a car that became an internet legend before the internet really existed, sliding sideways around the Nürburgring in a grainy video that launched a thousand screensavers. Nearly everything Ruf has ever touched was based on the 911. This 928R is the lone exception, and it just got a cold shoulder from the Amelia crowd.
Lee Kun-hee transformed Samsung from a regional appliance maker into a global titan that buried Sony. His personal car collection was staggering — pre-war Bugattis, Ferrari 250 GTOs, and a pair of Samsung-badged mid-engined sports cars he commissioned with help from Nissan, Kia, and Lotus. The man didn’t window-shop. He built things that didn’t exist.
When Kun-hee approached Ruf, the Pfaffenhausen workshop started with a body-in-white shipped directly from Stuttgart. No donor car, no used chassis — a blank canvas. They finished it in black over burgundy red leather, wrapped the steering wheel in Alcantara, and went to work on the 5.0-liter V-8, extracting 360 horsepower and 354 pound-feet of torque. Recently, Ruf itself fitted carbon-ceramic brakes and 19-inch five-spoke wheels.
It is, by any rational measure, the most compelling 928 on Earth.
But the four-speed automatic might be telling. So might the odometer: just under 1,600 miles. Kun-hee owned so many cars he barely drove most of them. This 928R was less a driving tool than a trophy, a billionaire’s whisper to Alois Ruf that money was no object.
The result is gorgeous and deeply unusual, a grand tourer that exists in a category of one — not quite a 911-based Ruf missile, not quite a factory Porsche GTS. That ambiguity is precisely where the auction market gets nervous.
The 928 has spent decades as the misunderstood Porsche — the front-engined, water-cooled GT car that Stuttgart designed to replace the 911 before the 911 refused to die. Values have climbed in recent years, particularly for late GTS models, but the 928 still doesn’t trigger the kind of bidding wars that air-cooled 911s do. Bolting the Ruf name onto it adds rarity but also confusion.
Collectors who chase Ruf want rear-engined, turbocharged lunacy. Collectors who chase the 928 want purity. This car falls between both camps, and no-man’s-land is a terrible place to hold an auction.
The car now sits in limbo, still technically part of the Samsung Collection’s dispersal but without a new owner. Many of Kun-hee’s cars remain held by the collection, and this one may rejoin the vault for a while.
Somewhere, someone with deep pockets and deeper taste is going to realize what was sitting on that Amelia lawn. A Ruf that isn’t a 911. A 928 that isn’t a factory car. A billionaire’s custom commission with barely enough miles to break in the tires. The auction room blinked. The car didn’t change. It’s still the only one Ruf ever made, and that fact will outlast every reserve price ever set.
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