By the beginning of the 1980s, Porsche was already looking toward the future. The company had ended production of the 935 and was preparing the forthcoming 956 for the new Group C regulations in Europe, but across the Atlantic, Porsche privateers were facing a very different problem. IMSA had introduced its new GTP category for the 1981 season, opening the door to purpose-built prototypes with a variety of engines and ground-effect designs, while the 956 that Porsche was preparing for Europe could not compete in America because its design placed the driver’s feet ahead of the front axle.
For teams that had built their programs around the 935, there was no obvious replacement.
The response from the American Porsche racing community was characteristically inventive. Ted Field’s Interscope team acquired a Kremer K4, only to find during testing that it could not match the pace of the Lola T600, and John Fitzpatrick took a different K4 and heavily modified it before finding some success in 1982. Reinhold Joest pursued another route, building replicas of the famous “Moby Dick” 935-78. None of these efforts changed the fact that Porsche had already moved on, leaving its privateers to keep the old platform alive on their own terms.
ANDIAL decided to take that idea further.
Rather than modifying an existing car, the team built an entirely new one.
The ANDIAL 935L was a one-off in the truest sense, with only a single chassis ever constructed. Custom fabricator Glenn Blakely was commissioned to build the car from scratch, using a steel tube-frame chassis concept similar to the Moby Dick cars but without the benefit of factory drawings. The running gear came from Howard Meister’s 1981 935, giving the new chassis a direct mechanical connection to the car Porsche had already left behind.
From there, ANDIAL began reshaping the 935 around the demands of American endurance racing. The intercooling ducts were relocated through the tops of the doors, the intercooler moved to the center of the car, and the turbochargers and waste gates were repositioned along the sides. The changes were intended to improve weight distribution, simplify maintenance, and make the car more manageable to drive, turning a collection of familiar Porsche components into something that was distinctly ANDIAL.
It was not a factory 935, and it was not simply another privateer interpretation of one.
It was a Porsche built because Porsche had stopped building them.
The car entered competition in 1982 and soon demonstrated that the unconventional approach had merit. By the fall, it had been sold to Preston Henn, who entered it for the Daytona Finale in November with Al Holbert and Doc Bundy sharing the driving duties. Bundy’s off-track excursion left the car carrying damaged bodywork, but the ANDIAL Porsche still finished fourth overall.
Its performance was enough to establish the foundation for what came next, and the following season would see the car transformed into something considerably more formidable.
For the 1983 24 Hours of Daytona, the ANDIAL 935L appeared with full “Moby Dick” long-tail bodywork specially constructed for Le Mans, giving the already unusual tube-frame Porsche an imposing new shape. Beneath that bodywork was the same basic chassis that had begun life as ANDIAL’s answer to the changing IMSA landscape, now developed into what would become one of the most successful privateer 935s in American endurance racing.
The car was driven by Bob Wollek, Claude Ballot-Lena, A.J. Foyt, and Henn, with Wollek putting it on pole position with a qualifying time of 1:42.155. The team used a 3.2-liter engine during qualifying before switching to a 3.0-liter unit for the race, and even after both turbochargers had to be replaced early in the event, the Porsche continued to run at the front.
By Sunday morning, it held a one-lap lead.
The race had already taken a toll on several of its rivals. Early retirements from JLP, Interscope, Bob Akin Racing, and others kept the Swap Shop Porsche in close contact with the lead through the first half of the race, allowing the ANDIAL car to turn its pace into something more significant as the hours accumulated.
When the 24 hours were over, the one-off Porsche had won.
For ANDIAL, it was the ultimate validation of a project that had begun without factory drawings and existed largely because the company believed the 935 still had something left to give.
The Daytona victory did not mark the end of the car’s 1983 campaign. At the Miami Grand Prix, the Porsche was running fourth before making a pit stop, only for the race to be stopped by flooding during the stop, leaving the car classified ninth. A few weeks later at Sebring, John Paul Jr. put the car on pole, but the weekend quickly turned against the team when the Porsche ran over debris during practice, breaking an oil line and destroying the engine.
The crew worked through the night to repair the car and reinstall the engine before the race, but the effort ultimately went unrewarded when the replacement engine failed early in the event.
There was still another win waiting that season.
At the 1983 Paul Revere 250 at Daytona, the ANDIAL 935L returned to the top step, adding a second race victory to its record and further establishing the one-off Porsche as a legitimate front-running machine rather than an ingenious but temporary solution to Porsche’s absence from IMSA’s new generation of prototype racing.
The following year brought another strong Daytona performance. For the 1984 24 Hours of Daytona, Wollek, Foyt, and Derek Bell drove the Porsche to second overall, narrowly missing another victory but once again demonstrating the endurance and pace of the ANDIAL-built chassis. At Miami, Wollek and Foyt finished fourth, while Sebring produced another frustrating near-win.
The car was leading when it suffered a broken left-front upright. By the time the problem had been repaired, with Foyt himself assisting with the work, the Porsche had fallen to third.
It was becoming a familiar pattern with the 935L: the pace was there, the results were there, but endurance racing rarely gave the car an easy path to the finish.
Even so, by the end of 1984 the numbers were difficult to dismiss. The ANDIAL Porsche had won the 24 Hours of Daytona and the Paul Revere 250, finished second at Riverside in 1982 and at the 1984 Daytona 24 Hours, and earned the 1983 Daytona pole with Wollek’s 1:42.155 lap.
But the era that had created the car was beginning to disappear.
For the 1985 season, the 935L was retained as a backup to ANDIAL’s 962. The 935 itself did not race, while the newer 962 went on to win both Daytona and Sebring, providing a clear indication of where Porsche-based prototype racing was headed.
That made the ANDIAL 935L something of a bridge between two generations.
It had been conceived at a moment when Porsche’s factory effort had moved elsewhere, when IMSA was opening its doors to a new breed of prototype, and when American privateers had to decide whether to abandon the 935 or find another way to make it competitive. ANDIAL chose the latter, building a single chassis from the ground up and developing it far beyond the role of a stopgap.
There would only ever be one ANDIAL 935L.
That singularity is part of what makes the car so compelling. It was not a factory project, nor a straightforward continuation of Porsche’s production 935. It was a privateer’s answer to a problem Porsche itself had already moved past, shaped by ANDIAL’s own engineering decisions and ultimately fast enough to win one of endurance racing’s most demanding events.
The 935 had already reached the end of its factory life.
ANDIAL simply wasn’t ready to let it go.
