The Birth of Ruf Automobile

Ruf Motor Company is a giant in the tuning industry. The company's documentary film, "Ruf: Love at the Red Line," chronicles its 80-year history.

Ruf Automobil began in 1939 in an ordinary garage opened by Alois Ruf Sr. in Pfaffenhausen, Germany.

In the documentary, Ruf Jr. explains that one day in 1963, a Porsche 356 passed his father's bus and crashed. His father took the driver to the hospital and had the car repaired. This was the beginning of Ruf Jr.'s love for Porsches and a solid business repairing and maintaining sports cars.

Ruf began selling his own modified Porsches in the late 1970s when Porsche scaled back its 911 lineup in favor of the 928. Porsche wanted to replace the 911 with the 928, which never happened, but created a niche for Ruf's tuned 911s.

Shortly thereafter, Alois Ruf, Jr. began to conceive of the car that would perpetuate Ruf Automobile's reputation, the CTR Yellowbird. The project began in 1979 as the 945R and was planned to be powered by a 450 hp twin-turbo flat-six derived from the engine used in the Porsche 935 racing car. The actual Yellowbird was launched in 1987 with a 911 Carrera 3.2 bodyshell and a 3.4-liter twin-turbo flat-six producing about 460 hp.

The Yellowbird gained worldwide fame when it won Road & Track's "World's Fastest Car" contest in 1987 with a top speed of 211 mph, beating out Ferraris and Lamborghinis. The only high-speed shakedown was on the German Autobahn on the way to testing. Alois Ruf Jr. said.

In 1989, Ruf followed up with a video, "The Enchantment of the Nürburgring," again starring the CTR. The in-car footage and stunning drifting made this arguably the first viral automotive video, but it was distributed on VHS at a time when the Internet did not exist.

Another important element of Ruf's mystique is the "Gran Turismo" video game series; in 1998, producer Kazunori Yamauchi tracked down Ruf Jr. at a hotel in Japan and obtained permission to use Ruf cars in the game. According to Yamauchi, he wanted Ruf to appear in the game because of the heroic status of the Ruf brand among car enthusiasts.

Ruf gradually branched out to other Porsche models and even a Volkswagen van, taking on the challenge of building a car from scratch: the 2017 Ruf CTR resembled the original Yellowbird, but with custom-made carbon fiber chassis tub and bodywork It was equipped with a Ruf has continued the theme in recent years with other retro-looking cars and restomods of some 1990s models.

For more on the company's history and factory work, check out the video above.