Lanzante 930 TAG Turbo Championship a trophy-winning screamer with F1 chops
British outfit Lanzante Motorsports, founded in the 1970s, developed a special connection to McLaren that solidified when Lanzante’s McLaren F1 GTR won the overall at the 1995 24 Hours of Le Mans. In 2018, Lanzante announced it had purchased about a dozen McLaren Formula 1 engines from the 1980s — not just any engines, though, but the TAG-Porsche TTE P01 motor, a 1.5-liter V6 that carried Niki Lauda and Alain Prost to three F1 Driver’s Championships. Cosworth made the engines more livable in a daily-driver, 1980s 911 Turbo, detuning the roughly 1,000 horsepower and 12,600 rpm in race spec to 503 horsepower and 9,000 rpm, while Lanzante got car it called the 930 TAG Turbo down to about 2,430 pounds. As the company works toward the end of production, it has announced the final three models will be upgraded variants call the Lanzante 930 TAG Turbo Championship with race-winning engines and more power.
Cosworth stepped in again to do more work on the mills, installing new pistons, connecting rods, camshafts, valves and springs. The V6 inhales through a new airbox and titanium-bodied turbos that shed 17 total pounds over the previous snails, and exhales through a new Inconel exhaust. A new water cooled radiator keeps the motor at temperature. The new Cosworth ECU plugs into what Lanzante calls “an all-new Formula 1 wiring loom.” overseeing a motor that now makes 625 horsepower and can spin to 10,250 rpm. Grunt runs through a re-engineered six-speed manual gearbox from a 993-series Porsche 911 RS and a limited-slip differential. The transmission is part of the reason the 0-60 time is listed as around 3.5 seconds; on the other hand, top speed is said to be around 200 miles per hour, roughly 40 mph higher than a 930 of the era.
Lanzante took even more weight out of the body. The earlier cars fitted a new carbon fiber hood and engine cover, and aluminum door skins. The Championship cars step up to F1-spec carbon fiber for the hood, roof, doors, and front fenders, and rear wing. Dymag magnesium and carbon 18-inch wheels from the same supplier to McLaren’s 1980s car replace the 17-inch RUF wheels on the earlier cars and bolt over upgraded carbon-ceramic brakes. Those pieces hang from the end of two-way adjustable Öhlins dampers.
Inside, engineers threw out almost all the luxuries like the climate control system, glass windows, power window and mirror mechanisms, and the leather-wrapped steering wheel. A set of carbon-backed Recaros with six-point BOSS-branded harnesses face a suede-covered steering wheel and sit ahead of a roll cage. The greenhouse is full of transparent plastic. Claimed weight is 2,048 pounds.
The engine credited with powering Alain Prost to the 1985 F1 title is going in the first 930 TAG Turbo Championship. It debuts at next month’s Goodwood Festival of Speed in a livery celebrating Prost’s 1985 helmet design, which itself celebrated McLaren sponsor Marlboro. Afterward, there will be two more, the last of the 14 total builds Lanzante planned, their engines celebrating Niki Lauda’s 1984 F1 championship and Prost’s second championship in 1986. If these are even possible to buy, they’ll command a healthy bump over the non-championship cars that each asked roughly $1.4 million.
