PORSCHE PUTS ROTHMANS 956 LIVERY ON ITS LAST 99X ELECTRIC

Two overall wins at Le Mans, four years apart, in the same blue and white paint. That is the record Porsche is putting back on track this weekend, and it is not going on a new car. It is going on the one about to retire.

The 99X Electric, Porsche's Formula E entry since the car's Gen3 debut, closes its racing career at the London E Prix on August 15 and 16, 2026, the final round of the season and a direct title decider. For that send off, Porsche has repainted the car in the colors of the 956, the Group C prototype that won Le Mans outright in 1982 under Rothmans sponsorship, then did it again in 1983. The 962 C, built on the same platform, added two more overall wins in 1986 and 1987. Between the two chassis, that blue and white scheme carries four of Porsche's outright Le Mans victories inside a single decade.

1982. Rothmans Blue. Two Overall Wins.

The livery Porsche is reviving is not a generic retro paint job. It is the specific scheme worn by the 956 that won Le Mans in 1982, when the car was new, and again in 1983 with a different driver lineup. Porsche has kept the navy blue, white, and red block striping from the original car but dropped the cigarette branding the 1980s livery was built around, since tobacco sponsorship in motorsport has been effectively dead since the early 2000s. What survives is the shape of the paint, not the sponsor that paid for it.

Finally Offline covered a version of this same 956 lineage in July, when collector Omar Martinez wrapped his own Guards Red Porsche 911 in the Canon sponsored 956 livery that Nick Mason of Pink Floyd raced at the 1984 24 Hours of Le Mans. That was a different sponsor on the same chassis family, applied to a street car by an outside shop. This is the factory going back into its own archive and putting the actual winning scheme on a car that still races.

Pascal Wehrlein Has Already Won This Weekend Once

Wehrlein is not walking into London cold. The Porsche factory driver won the brand's only London E Prix to date in 2024, and clinched his first FIA Formula E Drivers' World Championship on that same weekend. He arrives at this year's finale third in the standings, five points off the championship lead, which means the retro livery is not just ceremony. It is riding on a car that can still decide the title in the two races it has left.

Panel Lines Decide Where the Stripe Sits

Group C liveries from the 1980s were built to be read at speed, wide horizontal blocks of color lined up with a car's actual body panels rather than wrapped around curves for effect. The 99X Electric keeps that logic. The blue sits low across the sidepods, the white cuts across the nose where the 956's splitter used to sit, and the red stripe that separated Rothmans white from Rothmans blue on the original car reappears in the same position, just without the logo it used to frame. It is a livery that only works because someone matched it to where the panels actually break, not to where it would look good in a press photo alone.

Forget the Sponsor. Look at the Shape.

The 99X Electric is not retiring into nothing. Porsche has already presented its Gen4 Formula E car, the 975 RSE, for the season that follows this one, which is part of why the London send off carries real weight instead of reading as a marketing exercise. A team does not paint its championship contender in the paddock's most recognizable shape for a car with nothing left to prove. It does it for the car about to become the answer to a trivia question, on the weekend the trivia question still matters. Two Porsche 962 Cs, the 956's direct successor, turned up together at a Flatrock Motor Club track day earlier this year, proof the shape still draws a crowd decades after the sponsor left the door.

Porsche did not need to repaint the 99X Electric to remind anyone the 956 won Le Mans twice. It did it because the car retiring this weekend can still win a championship, and putting a car with something left to prove in a livery that already proved everything is the one version of racing nostalgia that earns its spot on the grid.