RUF Debuts a Twin-Turbo Flat-8 With 1,000 HP (!)

If you thought the future of European performance cars lay solely with electrification, then you’ve got to see this: a twin-turbo, 1,000-plus-horsepower flat-8 engine that RUF Automobile just debuted at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Petrol prices be damned!

Both RUF and the boxer engine are closely associated with Porsche, the former because they started out building high-performance cars based on Porsche models, and the latter because, well, the 911 (and 718 and 914). Today, RUF builds its own cars, though they tend to look a lot like Porsches. As does its latest engine.

The new powerplant—known internally by the vaguely cheeky-sounding name “Erprober,” German for “tester”—is a 4.8-liter unit in the highly unusual boxer format. For those unfamiliar with the engine type, this is where the two cylinder banks operate 180 degrees from one another, the pistons “boxing” each other. Subaru is the only other major manufacturer that uses the layout.

Fitted with two turbochargers, RUF says its boxer-eight develops more than 1,000 hp and 1,000 Nm of torque, which translates to just shy of 738 lb-ft. (Assuming that horsepower figure is metric, it’d also translate to 986 of our English-speaking horsepower, but “under 1,000 hp” sounds nowhere near as impressive.)

RUF has installed the engine in a test vehicle similar to its CTR3 mid-engine hypercar, which has been stretched by 3.9 inches to accommodate the larger engine, and connected it to a six-speed manual transmission. The car will make its debut at the 2026 Goodwood Festival of Speed this weekend, when racer, drifter, and former Top Gear USA star Tanner Foust will take the car for a weekend’s worth of twice-daily blasts on the Supercar Run. RUF is making a big deal about the sound the engine will make, and we’re with ’em. From the teaser videos we’ve seen, the RUF eight-cylinder has the chugging idle we expect from a horizontally-opposed engine, but it revs with a guttural Detroit-tinged eight-cylinder growl while the turbochargers whistle along. We can’t wait to hear it sing when Foust stomps on the throttle at Goodwood.

Eight-cylinder boxers are a rarity in the car world, although Lycoming has built several flat-8s for aircraft use. Porsche had good success racing eight-cylinder boxers in the 1960s. In 1969, the company built a pair of eight-cylinder 914 prototypes, dubbed 914/8, but the model never made it into production. Runge, a Minnesota-based boutique automaker, has announced a 5.3-liter air-cooled flat-8 engine it calls the Hetzer, which it plans to install in its R3 supercar, and Runge says the engine will also fit a 964-generation 911.

Why have so few automakers adopted the flat-8 format? The difficulty lies in packaging. These are relatively large engines, and the need for intake and exhaust plumbing to span two widely-spaced cylinder heads can make it difficult to integrate the engine with steering and suspension components. Hence, we imagine, the need to lengthen the CTR3-based test mule by nearly four inches to accommodate the prototype engine.

Will this flat 8 make it to production? RUF’s press release says the “B8”—it’s not quite clear if that refers to the car or just the engine—is “not yet a production model,” but rather serves as a test bed for an upcoming RUF vehicle. RUF refers to this as its “‘hidden in plain sight’ testing approach”. We take that as a barely-veiled “yes.” The B8-powered prototype will definitely be in plain sight this weekend, parked at the Supercar Paddock between runs.