Porsche Built a Car Just for Photography

A team of nine apprentices at Porsche Leipzig GmbH turned a high-performance Porsche 718 Boxster S sports car into one of the world’s wildest camera cars.

Perhaps most surprisingly of all, the apprentices who built the car as part of a training project did so way back in 2017, although Porsche only just this week detailed the project for the public. The heavily modified car was built to meet the precise practical requirements of filming and photographing Porsche cars at the company’s Porsche Experience Center in Leipzig, Germany.

As seasoned motorsports and automotive photographers know, timing and positioning are vital for nailing the shot. In many cases, the best shots happen on the road or track itself, meaning that photographers have to be in a dedicated camera car or have attached their camera to a vehicle for more remote operation.

Porsche has long utilized camera cars for recording testing sequences, shooting motorsports projects, and capturing photos for marketing. However, when Porsche’s older car could no longer keep up with its newer, faster cars, a team of apprentices floated an idea: Why not just build a new vehicle based on the 718 Boxster S? And that’s exactly what the nine second-year apprentices did.

Under the supervision of Porsche’s training supervisor, Carsten Pohle, the team of students put a Porsche 718 Boxster S under the proverbial knife. They removed the car’s soft top, installed a robust race-ready roll bar, created a photographer’s well in the front (since it’s a mid-engine car, the front is cargo space), and painted the car in a specialized matte-black finish to reduce reflections. They also added steel tube mounts to the car’s front, rear, and sides to provide more camera position options, and installed an elevated roll bar for a high-angle camera mounting location.

Naturally, ensuring the photographer’s safety was paramount to the project’s success. Both of the car’s luggage compartments, now photographer compartments, were outfitted with pads and harness systems. There are also harness mounting systems for other positions in the vehicle.

That’s not all. The modified Porsche camera car is fit for a professional photography and videography workflow as well. The apprentices installed new internal wiring to enable a direct connection from the camera to a laptop, which is securely fastened in the passenger’s seat. An onboard inverter powers all the necessary equipment, including the camera, laptop, and lights.

Since the team built the Porsche camera car in 2017, it has been heavily used for shooting at Porsche’s Leipzig track. It has also been used by external teams, including photoshoots for Motor Press Stuttgart. Porsche adds that the car was even used to film motorsport legend Walter Röhrl. The transformed Porsche most recently served as the primary camera car for the Tutto Bene Hillclimb near Lake Maggiore in Italy.

Image credits: Porsche