Sean Gallup
Sixty years ago last month the first production Porsche sports car emerged from a temporary factory in war-ravaged Stuttgart.
And it wasn't long before the company's operation in the city's Zuffenhausen district was on its way to producing more than one million examples of these legendary sports cars it has built since.
The Porsche Museum, opened in 2009, is celebrating Zuffenhausen's six decades with a photo retrospective of the factory's history and an exhibit featuring the first Porsche 356 Coupe built there.
A look back at a timeless sports car company as it celebrates 60 years since its first production vehicle.
Porsche's links to Zuffenhausen stretch back to 1938 when the wonderfully named Porsche Konstruktionburo fur Moteren-Fahrzeug Luftfarzeug und Wasserfarzeugbau, which certainly covered just about all the bases, moved to the area from downtown Stuttgart, its location since 1931.
It was from Zuffenhausen that a design team headed by company founder and industry pioneer Ferdinand Anton Porsche created the Volkswagen and designed the prophetic aerodynamically envelope-bodied VW-based 60K10 intended for a planned but aborted Berlin-Rome open road race.
During the war years, Porsche de-camped from Stuttgart to a sawmill in the quieter Austrian village of Gmund - from which emerged designs for the VW-based Kubelwagen and aquatic Schwimmwagen, various tanks, a tractor and wind turbines.
At war's end, Porsche's old Zuffenhausen headquarters had managed to get hit by only one bomb, but was in the hands of the American army, which was at least paying rent.
That rent must have come in handy as the design office struggled back to its feet in Gmund under the guidance of Porsche's son Ferry, taking on odd jobs while its founder was being held in a French jail as a war criminal. He was released after 20 months without a trial.
One of those jobs, in 1946, was to design a Grand Prix racer for the Italian Cisitalia concern, which must have fired Ferry's enthusiasm as he set about another car project in 1947 with the rather prosaic designation 356 - numbers that were going to become legendary.
The first prototype built under the project 356 was a tubular-space-framed, mid-engined open cockpit design, using a Volkswagen engine turned backside foremost. It worked, but a different design was going to be needed for a production car.
The second effort was more conventional with a sheet metal platform and the VW engine the "right" way round, slung out behind the rear axle. This was clad in either coupe or open bodywork and some 50 were built in Gmund by 1948. They proved an immediate hit and it became obvious more volume would be required, which led to Porsche approaching a small Stuttgart body-building firm, Reutter Karosserie, to produce bodies which were assembled into completed 356s in a building on the premises.
The first production 356 was completed in Stuttgart on April 6, 1950 - 369 in total were produced that year. One of the first was given the nickname Ferdinand after being presented to the elder Porsche on his 75th birthday in September. However, he didn't get to enjoy it for long, dying on Jan. 30, 1951.
Ferdinand became a test car that in the next eight years racked up more than 400,000 kilometres while a wide variety of modifications, many adopted for production versions, were tried out. Ferdinand the 356 was originally fitted with a 1,086 cc VW air-cooled flat four tuned to produce 40 hp and had a four-speed gearbox, drum brakes and could hit a top speed of 140 km/h.
Porsche was definitely back in the car business and claiming its first international renown with a class win in the 1951 24 hours of Le Mans. It also returned to Zuffenhausen in 1951 and, by 1952, Porsche Plant 2 had been completed. Production of the 356 passed the 10,000 by 1956.
Porsche plant 3 in Zuffenhausen was opened in 1960, and in 1964, soon after the now iconic 911 was introduced, Porsche took over Reutter. Today all Porsche engines, the full 911 series and versions of the Boxster are built in the Zuffenhausen factories.
An unbroken line of superb cars followed the introduction of the 356 in the '50s and '60s - not all came out of the Zuffenhausen factory - but many are now part of the museum collection.
These include:
- The 356 in faster and better-equipped versions
- The awesomely fast little four-cam engined 550 Spyder in 1955 (the model James Dean was killed in)
- The Type 718 RS 60 Spyder of 1959/60 that won the Targa Florio and at Sebring
- The Type 787 Formula 11 racer of 1960 and the Type 804 Formula 1 car of 1962
- the 911 sports cars that went into production in 1964 and also that year the amazing 904 Carrera GTS Coupe, another Le Man class winner
- The sleek 908s of later in the decade
- The VW-based 914 sports car of 1969
- The 917s that gave Porsche its first outright win at Le Mans in 1970
Canadian racing fans were thrilled by the turbocharged 917 Spyder in the early '70s, later versions of which produced 1,100 hp in race trim and 1,500 hp for qualifying and were awesome machines in the hands of George Follmer and Mark Donohue.
The 911 has carried Porsche's name to fame on the street and the track with a wide range of models that include the 1973 911 Carrera RS 2.7. The Carrera name is attached only to exception models and the RS was all of that. Its 201 hp doesn't sound like much today, but was a sensation then.
The 911 Turbo of 1974 was another sensational road car of the period. In 1978, Porsche went rallying with the 911 SC Coupe "Safari" taking on the East Africa Safari Rally. Success eluded the company but the car looked great.
In 1977, Porsche broke with tradition by introducing the front-engined 928 with its V-8 and luxury level trim. This was followed in 1981 by the four-cylinder front-engined 944, and in 1982, the open-topped 911 SC Cabriolet. In 1984, Porsche won the first of its three F1 victories with the TAG-Turbo motor.
More 911 variants continued through the '90s and today Porsche, after more than 60 years, remains one of the most sought after sports cars in the world.
A look back at a timeless sports car company as it celebrates 60 years since its first production vehicle.