The Motul-liveried Pfaff 935: the only one in Canada!

Steve Bortolotti is the manager of Pfaff Motorsport, a racing team competing in several national and international events. Team CEO Chris Pfaff recently secured the keys to the ultra-rare Porsche 935 as his personal track-day toy. We gave Steve a call to find out more about the car and why the Pfaff fraternity believes Motul’s 300V is the best oil in the world.

The 935 is a super-exclusive, track-only vehicle from Porsche. It’s a factory-built racing car. Porsche only made 77 units for the world so it's a collector car. But it’s also a Porsche, so it deserves to see regular track use. Our company owner Chris Pfaff has fond memories of the 935 from his childhood. They prepped the cars at his father’s Porsche dealership in New Market, Ontario. That’s how his personal love and affinity for the 935 started. As time progressed and the business grew, Chris took over the dealerships. Porsche introduced this ultra-exclusive 935 and, as you can imagine, it had a very involved application process as there’s so many Porsche collectors in the world. Only a very select few get a chance to own one of these cars, and Chris was one of the fortunate ones.

He took delivery of it last December in Portugal at Portimao. He did a Porsche experience there, which was incredible. It’s the only car allocated to Canada. The car did some display for Porsche Canada at the auto show here. And now he’s using it regularly at the racetrack. And Chris has many, many offers of people trying to buy it off him. It’s a special car and something that he truly enjoys using at the racetrack. Oddly enough, we’re going to the track with him next week with it. If COVID’s done one thing, it’s given him a lot more time to enjoy the car than he would have otherwise. The car could race, but nobody’s crazy enough to race a car worth millions in wheel-to-wheel racing.

It’s as it came out of the box. All we did was put a clear paint protection film over the whole car. That’s why the carbon is a bit shinier than it would normally be. The plan is to put a bit more of an involved livery on it, but we just wanted to give Motul some exposure on the car. Every time we post on any social channels it goes wild. Motul is an amazing partner of ours and we truly believe in the superiority of its products. It’s not just marketing or sponsorship. We run Motul’s products in our race cars, or track cars and all in our personal ones too. The 935 uses Motul 300v engine oil and RBF700 in the braking system. It’s seeing a fair bit of track use and these products are great for that. No one has ever said a bad thing about 300V. Everyone knows it’s the best oil in the world.

It’s really a matter of making set up changes on the car for him. As temperatures change and the track conditions progress, we will make small alignment changes, damper adjustments, sway bars and so on. Every track day, after the first session we always do a hot bleed on the braking systems, and for that we use Motul’s new RBF700 product, which is second to none and gives him the feel to attack the corners. He’s actually not a bad driver. I’ll give him that.

Yes, I’ve been a passenger. It’s definitely an incredible experience feeling the overall power of the car. 700bhp is fast enough and then when you pair it with slick racing tyres it just becomes next level.

We’re a professional racing team, but we also do a fair bit of customer racing also. We have track-prep services for customer cars, mainly in the Porsche world but we also take care of an Audi RS3 TCR car. It’s the typical things like alignment, corner balance, the usual track services and track-side support. We also provide driver coaching. I oversee that whole programme and run our racing team. We’ve been doing some local racing in the Canadian Touring Car Championship since COVID. We’re currently leading the championship with a young driver straight out of karting. We’re making the most of the situation.