This was obviously a very important battle during World War Two after which Germany lost the initiative in the Eastern front. However I'm still a little unclear as to what exactly happened during this battle. According to the Soviets this was a massive victory with the Germans losing hundreds of tanks but according to the Germans they permanently lost only a few dozen tanks with many damaged tanks being recoverable and inflicted horrendous losses on the Soviet tank forces in turn. Only the Allied landings at Sicily prevented turning their tactical victory to a strategic one. At least that's my impression of how this battle is portrayed in various online sources. Do we have a more accurate portrayal of the true version of events?
In his book Kursk: The greatest Battle: Eastern front 1943 LLoyd Clark argues that the decisive factor is not that the Germans lost more tanks than the Soviet Union(I am going to use SU for short), but that they lacked the ability to replace them.
Acording to Clark SU suffered 177 847 casualties, lost 1 600 armored fighting vehicles and 460 aircrafts opposed to the germans who sufferd 56 827 casualties, lost 252 tanks and 159 aircrafts(note that Clark uses "armored fighting vehicles" about SU and "Tanks" for german vehicles. This indicates that not all of the 1 600 soviet losses were tanks). As you can see SU lost considerably more men and vehicles than germany. The problem was that although germany showed great tactical superiority over SU, they were not capable to recover the losses suffered during the offensive. It was as Guderian later admitted "We had suffered a decisive defeat"
I hope this answered your question and would be glad to answer any further questions.
According to Dennis Showalter, in his work Armour and Blood, 'The German Army on the Eastern Front was neither bled white nor demodernised by Citadel's human and material losses' - what it did lose, however, was the initiative. The strategic initiative on the Eastern Front, held predominantly by the Germans since June 1941, was now solely in the hands of the Russians. However, for this victory, the Soviets paid a heavy price: some 2,000 Russian AFVs were lost to 250 German AFVs, and over 320,000 casualties to 54,000 German. Moreover, although the Red Army had wrested the initiative from the Germans, the disorganisation caused by the deployment of so many Soviet reserves arguably set back Stavka's plans for up to a year.
Kursk then, was not a 'lost victory' for the Germans, despite Manstein's claims, nor a decisive victory for the Soviets; it was a watershed, the Germans losing that great offensive drive that had characterised their earlier operations, and falling back increasingly on the defence, and the Soviets gaining that vital planning experience and flexibility that had been direly absent in the summer of 1941-42. If one wished to, you might even label Kursk a 'turning point' in the Second World War.
Showalter, Dennis, Armour and Blood: The Battle of Kursk (New York: Random House, 2013)