An 800-horsepower Porsche 911 GT3 RS with aftermarket twin turbos bolted to its flat-six was spotted again at the Nürburgring last week, and the ambitions behind it are getting harder to ignore.
SSR Performance, a German motorsport and tuning company, has been developing Project Leo since at least spring 2026. The recipe is aggressive but not complicated: take the 992.2 GT3 RS, which already makes 518 horsepower from its naturally aspirated 4.0-liter flat-six, and force-feed it with twin turbochargers. Reports from the Nordschleife suggest output north of 800 hp.
The torque figure hasn’t been confirmed, but if the power claims are real, it’s safe to assume the GT3 RS’s 343 lb-ft is getting a comparable boost.
What makes this interesting isn’t the horsepower number. Plenty of tuners can hit 800 hp. It’s the timing.
Porsche hasn’t sold a GT2 RS since the 991.2 generation ended production in 2019. That’s seven years without its most extreme, turbocharged track weapon in the lineup. SSR is building into an empty space that Porsche itself left open, and doing it with Porsche’s own hardware.
The bodywork changes visible in spy photos tell the story. The rear quarter windows have been replaced with air intakes, exactly as they were on the old GT2 RS. A new intake shroud wraps the rear quarters to feed those turbos.
The exhaust tailpipes have migrated from center-mounted to widely spaced at the outer edges of the bumper. Up front, there’s a deep splitter and vented fenders. SSR developed its own chassis and aero package, not just an engine tune.
And then there’s the lap record talk. SSR teased in a spring video that it planned to “break many, many records with Leo,” specifically calling out the Nordschleife as the proving ground. For context, the last GT2 RS with a Manthey kit ran 6:43.300 back in 2021.
The fastest current Porsche, a Manthey-equipped GT3 RS driven by Jörg Bergmeister, clocked 6:49.328 in June. Beating both numbers seems plausible with 800 hp and proper aero.
But the real target looming over all of this is the Mercedes-AMG One’s 6:29.090, set in 2024. Nobody has come close. SSR hasn’t explicitly claimed it will, but when you build an 800-hp Nordschleife weapon and talk about shattering records, comparisons are unavoidable.
The window to run fast laps at the Ring is closing as autumn weather rolls through the Eifel mountains. SSR may try to squeeze in an attempt before 2026 ends.
Porsche, meanwhile, is reportedly developing its own new GT2 RS, combining the GT3 RS’s aerodynamic architecture with an upgraded version of the 701-hp hybrid-turbocharged 3.6-liter engine from the new 911 Turbo S. Manthey, now fully absorbed into the Porsche family, would presumably handle the final track-focused calibration.
So the question hanging over Project Leo isn’t whether it can go fast. It almost certainly can. The question is whether SSR can deliver a finished product to customers before Porsche fills the gap itself.
And whether a tuner-built GT2 surrogate can hold its value, its credibility, and its warranty implications against the factory version that’s surely coming.
The Nürburgring clock is ticking. So is Porsche’s development timeline. SSR is betting it can move faster than Stuttgart.
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