According to Ted Gushue, the editor in chief of Porsche’s in-house digital magazine, Type 7—and the founder of ERG Media—“The RUF family and the Porsche family have always maintained a close and cordial relationship, and RUF operates a very successful official Porsche service center on their campus in Pfaffenhausen. From an outside perspective, it appears to me that both brands are grateful for what the other has done to crystalize the global Porsche community.”

While RUF has defined the market for “Porsche” performance—the CTR3 Evo model has a top speed of 236 mph—their cars, which range from $750,000 and up, allow for unbounded individualism, and no less than 800,000 color options. RUF’s commitment to colorful self-expression is the brand’s most outward facing nod to an owner’s unique style, as its inner performance is stowed under a classic silhouette. All of this, according to Gushue, isn’t just good for RUF but is good for Porsche, too.

In the ’70s and ’80s, Porsche codified customization with the Sonderwunsch—or special wishes program. The commitment to the slogan “you dream it, they build it” led to some radical colorways for buyers—“Sepia Brown,” “Aubergine,” “Leaf Green,” “Oxford Blue,” etc.—who had the time and means to get what they wanted.

While still very much alive today in the Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur and its Paint to Sample (PTS) program which allows the buyer to create a unique colorway, actually getting an allocation for a PTS car is, well, nontrivial: Pulling a car off the assembly line to paint it a nonstandard color, or to personalize interior materials and stitching, tends to muck up the precise flow in Zuffenhausen or Leipzig.

Unique colors reflected the personal taste of Porsche’s founder, Ferry Porsche, who favored green cars, and Porsche as a result offered several unique greens dating back to various 356 models in the 1950s. At the Porsche museum in Zuffenhausen, Ferry Porsche’s personal 930 Turbo in dark green with a houndstooth interior is a featured and favorite car. As with so many things Porsche, the timing of expanded color choices was perfect: other marques followed and the PTS examples in rich browns, greens, orange, and grey have appreciated faster than the standard color variants in the frothy Porsche collector’s market of the past decade. 

(Note of caution: While special wishes can make dreams come true at Porsche, there are taste limits to what can actually be built, as Porsche exercises some degree of creative control and point of view in helping those lucky buyers with an allocation through the design process.)

It wasn’t until 1987 that the real symbiosis between Porsche and RUF began. That year, RUF released its iconic Yellowbird. “It was the undisputed king of the road and racetrack,” Gushue adds. “Its performance was literally a generation ahead of its competition, as evidenced by its records standing for many years into the 1990s. This car became a cult object, a mythical white whale in the car world, a true icon.” The color became as synonymous with RUF as orange is with Hermès.

Then a second moment arrived that solidified RUF in history. In the 1990s, a then-young video game developer in Japan named Kazunori Yamauchi was working on an automotive video game franchise for Sony called Gran Turismo. Yamauchi wanted to put a Porsche in the game. “They were blocked by EA Games in the U.S. who had exclusive worldwide rights to Porsche for their franchise, Need for Speed,” Gushue tells me. RUF was in the right place at the right time, bridging the gap between Porsche and Gran Turismo. “They licensed their name and the Yellowbird car,” he says, “thereby achieving two goals with one signature: A ‘Porsche’ would be present in the game, preserving its place in the minds of young car enthusiasts around the world, and the RUF name would be forever preserved among a generation who grew up on the game, some of whom would become lifelong customers of RUF.”

However fun it may be to drive a Yellowbird on-screen, being behind the wheel of a RUF in real life is one thing digital technology will probably never catch up to.