[V3] Porsche LMP1/98

/!\ I guess it will be a trend on those car presentation, post is gonna be long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ /!\

I already globally told the story of this car in my previous post about it, it started as a Jaguar XJR-14, was bought and transformed into a WSC by Porsche to compete at Daytona in 95. After the Daytona test, the IMSA changed the rules to slow the turbo down to avoid a Porsche domination, in response Porsche retired the whole project. Funnily enough, a Porsche with a turbo engine won that race: the Kremer Racing Kremer K8.

Joest bought the car because it saw its potential and was proved right, because they beat the official Porsche effort twice in a row at Le Mans. Annoyed to be beaten twice by their own abandoned project, Porsche decided to integrate it into their efforts, with Joest still running the car. But Porsche though they could improve it, they changed the whole bodywork and put the 98 911 GT1 engines in it instead of the old 962 engine. But they did all of this way too late.

In Pre Qualification the car was unstable at high speed. A month later the car had some bodywork change and even during the week, it changed again ! They cut hole on the front body a bit like on the Toyota GT-ONE, and screw a weird vent on it, but that changed was banned and both cars DNF.

Interestingly, at Petit Le Mans, the most prestigious chassis got it last outing, and for that race, they put back the TWR engine and rear end in the car, making it the weirdest version of the car. Please note that I haven't made those changes on the 3D model, I lack quality picture of the rear and it's a huge change for just one version, maybe I should just paint the rear wing pillar in gray.

The LMP1/98 have only 1 finish to its name, a 2nd place at Petit Le Mans, and its only historic relevancy is being the worst version of that XJR-14 chassis and being on the camera when the 911 GT1 went airborne.

Now it's a car that has been present in my life for almost 10 years. I was making a 1998 24h of Le Mans mod for GTR2, but I was unhappy that we didn't have all the car of that year in the game (or that some had the wrong bodywork *look at the BMW V12 LM98* ), since nobody was really interested in those missing cars, if I wanted them, I had to do them, so here's how I ended up learning 3D. I was very happy with the V1 (see below), very proud that I managed to finish it, and it was fantastic when we got it running in GTR2, but then I don't remember, thing kinda died down and the car was never finished, it never got an interior, no livery was finished.
One of the unexpected upside, is that me making this car, inspired somebody else to learn 3d, and despite loosing contact for years, we ended up working together on the BMW and some other car recently.

Weirdly I still had it in the back of my mind, so years later, when I went back to a 3D school, one of my goal was to finish that Porsche and I kinda did, I made it for the demoreel we had to do in final year, but due to the deadline and covid lockdown, it wasn't ideal, I didn't check all the box I wanted, but the V2 (see below) looked nice, it was a big upgrade in quality and was decent enough, I once again wanted to finish it, but was bored of working on that car, I wanted to do something else.

Then, one december evening, thing turned sour, a scam modding team for Assetto Corsa managed to stole the car from Sketchfab where it was on display, but not downloadable (but there is software dedicated to pirate model from sketchfab), put it in game (badly) and sold it on their patreon. To this day I still hate them for that.
Thankfully it was very easy to prove the car was mine, they probably didn't expect me to be an Assetto player, the car was removed from sale but damage has been done, I was gutted and wanted the car to vanish from the surface of earth and was hesitant to ever make a racecar again.

One specific thing that made me angry was that the car was still unfinished in my mind, despite looking quite good and complete, so I lived with "I have to finish the porsche" in my head for a while until I was fed up of saying that to everybody, so I stopped working on my MG Lola and got back to work on the Porsche, and now here we are, it's done, as I always wanted it, all bodykit are here, even if nobody cares about the unraced Pre-Qualification one. Even if nobody noticed the Petit Le Mans variation (outside the winglet), it's here. Front chassis is here, whole engine is here, it's complete, and I'm finally happy with it.

That's how a unremarkable race car, with a convoluted history got very important to me, despite never saw it racing in period, never been in my childhood or never got to it in real life (I would probably be a bit mad if I see it now and notice a huge mistake on the model lol)

For a while I had the idea of making all livery the chassis 791/WSC-001 run, but why make livery when you can just make the car? :)
The whole family tree is coming next