This Air-Cooled Flat-Eight Engine Was Made for a Mid-Engined Supercar, But It Fits in a Porsche 964

• Runge Cars of Minnesota has released its latest creation, an air-cooled 5.3-liter flat-eight engine.

• Destined to power a lightweight, mid-engined supercar called the Runge R3, it’ll also fit in the engine bay of a 964-generation 911.

• Runge has built its reputation by hand-building cars in the style of the 1950s.

Globally, Porsche delivered more than 300,000 vehicles in 2024, the majority of them being crossovers. From a business perspective, that’s nothing but success. From an enthusiast’s view, at least the bottom line is keeping the lights on to build 911s. But what if you could get your hands on something that was more like the company’s old-school, built-in-a-lumberyard, air-cooled roots? You can, but it’s not from Stuttgart or Austria, it’s straight out of Minnesota, dontcha know?

Witness the latest creation from Runge Cars, a screaming flat eight engine with double overhead camshafts, four valves per cylinder, and air cooling. Displacing 5.3 liters, it’s a monster from the past given life again, a Jurassic Park approach brought to bear on the leviathans that ran at Le Mans. Built to redline at 9000 rpm, with a rev cut off at 10,000 rpm, it’s intended to be the heartbeat of the company’s upcoming R3 supercar, but it’ll also fit right into the engine bay of a 964-chassis Porsche 911.

Let’s back up a bit, as Runge Cars deserves a bit of an introduction. Founded just after 2010, the company is the brainchild of Christopher Runge, a former professional snowboarder who was working for Burton at the time but had a long obsession with cars from his teenage years. The early years sprang from serendipity: when buying a 1960s Porsche 912 in North Dakota, Runge found an array of old metalworking equipment, and he agreed to purchase it too.

He set about making cars built in the same manner as endurance racing specials of the 1950s, not replicas so much as tributes. In classic learning-by-doing fashion, starting in a Minnesota barn, his reputation began growing. Today, Runge Cars counts the likes of actor Gary Oldman among its clients. He has a Runge RS, an ultra-lightweight gull-winged car with a polished aluminum body, tubular steel chassis, and a 2.3-liter flat-four producing just shy of 200 hp.

While Runge hasn’t yet released dyno results for its new flat-eight engine, which it calls the Hetzer, it should be in the range of 600 hp. That’s not a colossal amount of power by modern turbocharged standards, but in terms of experience, a flat-eight engine shredding air molecules at 9000 rpm is bound to get the adrenaline flowing.

The Hetzer flat-eight is set to power the Runge R3, a mid-engined supercar with a target curb weight of just under 1800 pounds. Think a late-1960s Porsche 908, but built with modern specifications and precision.

However, as Runge’s creation was built to fit the footprint of an M64 Porsche 3.6-liter flat-six, there’s nothing to say you couldn’t fit it into the back of a vintage 911. Imagine the heads swivelling when you drive past in a 1980s 911 that sounds like the Mulsanne Straight in 1968.

Cost? Well, Runge already sells a four-valve cylinder head conversion for the M64 flat-six, and that costs $30,000. So, this thing is going to be expensive. But, in a world of Cayennes and Macans, this kind of experience is still worth the steep premium. Handmade. Precision crafted. Runge Cars won’t be building thousands of these engines, possibly not even a hundred. It’ll still sell every one it makes.

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