The Brumos Porsche 935: Racing With a Zip Code
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Quick Takeaways
- Brumos Racing is one of the most decorated American endurance racing teams in history — and it operates out of a Porsche dealership in Jacksonville, Florida.
- The team won the Daytona 24 Hours twice with the Porsche 935, in 1978 and 1979, with driver pairings that included Peter Gregg and Hurley Haywood.
- The 935 started life as a 911 and was progressively modified beyond recognition — turbocharged, widened, lowered, and fitted with aerodynamic bodywork that bore almost no resemblance to the production car.
- The Brumos livery — white with red and blue accents — became one of the defining visual identities of American motorsport in the 1970s.
A Dealership That Won Daytona
The story of Brumos Racing is an unusual one in American motorsport, where factory programs and wealthy private teams typically dominate the upper levels of competition. Brumos began as a Porsche dealership — Brumos Motor Cars, founded in Jacksonville — and graduated into racing through the natural enthusiasm of its principals and a factory relationship with Porsche that provided increasingly sophisticated machinery.
Peter Gregg, who ran Brumos and drove for the team through much of the 1970s, was one of the most accomplished American sports car drivers of the era. He won the IMSA championship multiple times and the Daytona 24 Hours on several occasions, with a precision and consistency that earned him the nickname “Peter Perfect” from commentators who found his ability to avoid drama almost uncanny. Hurley Haywood, who shared driving duties with Gregg in the Brumos years, went on to win Daytona five times in his career — a record that still stands.
What the 935 Actually Was
The Porsche 935 began as a response to Group 5 silhouette racing regulations introduced in 1976, which required that a race car maintain the basic silhouette of the production car it was based on while allowing significant modifications elsewhere. Porsche took this to its logical extreme.
The 935 started as a 911 Turbo and was rebuilt from there. The engine — a turbocharged flat-six — was moved, modified, and eventually capable of producing over 750 horsepower in the most developed versions. The bodywork was widened dramatically to accommodate racing tires. The nose and tail were replaced with aerodynamic structures that retained the 911's general outline while sharing virtually no components with it. The result was one of the most visually aggressive racing cars of its era: wide, low, purposeful, and instantly recognizable at any speed.
The Livery
The Brumos livery is worth discussing on its own terms, because it's one of the more successful racing liveries in American motorsport history. White with red and blue accents, the number 59, and the Brumos name and Porsche script applied cleanly — it worked because it didn't try too hard. The colors were those of the dealership, applied to the racing cars without modification. The result was a visual identity that read clearly at racing speeds and photographed well in any light.
The 935's wide, flat surfaces gave the livery space to breathe. Other cars of the era sometimes overwhelmed their liveries with complex bodywork. The Brumos cars wore their colors with a clarity that has kept them recognizable forty years later.
Bottom Line
Most racing teams are funded by manufacturers or wealthy sponsors. Brumos was funded by people who sold Porsches to Jacksonville and genuinely loved racing. That combination — commercial roots, genuine passion, factory-level results — is rare in any sport and rarer still in motorsport.
