Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2024 i Classic Porsche

Glorious Goodwood. Granted, this is a well-worn reference used to describe the world-famous Chichester estate’s five-day horse racing festival, but to be honest, any event or visit to Goodwood can be considered ‘glorious’. Consider, then, how lucky I was to work with leading historic Porsche sales and restoration specialist, Export 56, in securing exclusive access to Goodwood for an entire day of photographing a selection of air-cooled classics. Yep, having the iconic Goodwood Circuit as a private playground for playing with Porsches is the stuff of dreams, but in mid-May, those dreams came true. In coming issues of Classic Porsche, we’ll be showcasing each of the rare and historically significant Porsches we got to play with. I won’t spoil surprises by revealing details of each and every car we sampled,…

When it comes to modern motoring, it’s easy for us to consider the only real difference between an electric vehicle and the equivalent combustion engined car is the powertrain, but there are other factors to consider, not least brakes. Of course, both types of car feature braking systems, and both require a brake fluid change, usually every two years, but this is about as far as the similarities go. “The requirement for electric vehicles is often completely different,” says David Kaiser, head of the research and development department at German automotive lubricant and additive giant, Liqui Moly (liqui-moly.com). “This is why we have developed a new DOT 5.1 brake fluid for EVs,” he says. “Essentially, because regenerative braking sees an electric motor also acting as a brake making energy for…

For decades, powerful eight-cylinder engines have been as much a part of the Porsche story as the traditional flat-six. Indeed, whether propelling a grand tourer, hypercar or SUV, Porsche’s eight-cylinder combustion engines enjoy an outstanding reputation, simultaneously embodying luxury, comfort and unbridled sportiness. In the wider motoring arena, the primary reason for the popularity of the V8 is simply the fact it need only be slightly longer than an inline-four with the same cylinder spacing, therefore having only minor impact on engine bay packaging — the slight increase in a V8’s required structural length is due to the offset of the two cylinder banks. The design has proved a successful ingredient for Porsche’s hybrid drivetrains, complemented by an electric motor fitted to the crankshaft flange, as per the mighty 918…

A colour change doesn’t necessarily impact a car’s career, but the repaint of this rally-ready 911 in 1999 certainly marks a change of fortune. Back in the day — this is to say, the 1990s, when it was a red Porsche — it belonged to legendary navigator, Beatty Crawford, and was driven by rallying gods (and goddesses), including Björn Waldegård, Jimmy McRae, Billy Coleman, Stig Blomqvist and Louise Aitken-Walker. Beatty and his star drivers enjoyed many successes in a litany of top-line historic rallies, from Ypres to Boucles de Spa, from the Jim Clark to RAC Historic. “I simply contacted my favourite sporting personalities and asked if they’d like to drive my 911,” he explains. “This is all I had to do. I paid their expenses, but they weren’t paid…

964 SAFARI Porsche came tantalisingly close to winning the East African Safari Rally in the 1970s. Along with the Middle East Rally Championships of the mid-1980s (dominated by Saeed Al-Hajri and his 911 SC RS) and the Paris-Dakar Rally (won in 1984 by Rene Metge and Dominique Lemoyne in the 953), the Kenyan classic is one of the most challenging motorsport events ever devised. Today, encapsulating the spirit of the tough Porsches put through their paces on these demanding contests, 911s customised to ‘Safari’ specification are hugely popular, as demonstrated by Singer’s megabucks All-terrain Competition Study (ACS), revealed in early 2021. Back in the real world, however, Kyrre Birkeland has just spent a week scrambling across rugged Alpine passes more than three thousand metres above sea level, all from the…

POLAND’S PORSCHE COMMUNITY TURNS OUT IN FORCE FOR LUFTGEKUHLT MEET Luftgekühlt, the hit Californian-born gathering of air-cooled Porsches, lay down new roots in Europe in mid-June, when the event visited Poland for the first time. The restored Dworzec Świebodzki railway station in Wrocław provided a stunning backdrop for more than two hundred of Zuffenhausen’s finest sports cars, with some travelling from as far as Scandinavia and the UK to soak up the special atmosphere. Near 3,500 visitors came together across two days for what was the largest Porsche event ever held in Poland, with Mateusz Klawiter, one of the organisers, confirming the event sold out quickly. “This is exactly what we’ve been dreaming of for many years,” he beamed. Former Porsche works driver and Luftgekühlt co-founder, Patrick Long, travelled from…

SUBSCRIBE TO Classic PORSCHE SEE PAGE 108 FOR DETAILS During the late 1950s, while senior engineers at Porsche struggled through studies for a successor to the 356, a new generation of Porsche family members was entering the business. Ferry Porsche’s eldest son, Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, joined the family firm in 1957. Butzi (as he was known) spent his first nine months at Zuffenhausen working with veteran engineer, Franz Reimspiess, learning the details of the four-cam Carrera engine, showcased elsewhere in this magazine. From there, Porsche the Younger moved over to the factory department run by stylist, Erwin Komenda, in order to gather knowledge about the design of car bodies. Ferry’s idea of having his son learn many aspects of the business was sound, but putting Komenda and Butzi in the same room…

993 BUYING GUIDE During the early 1990s, Porsche was in major financial turmoil. Its cars — chiefly the 964-generation 911, the V8-powered 928 ‘land shark’ and the 944, once Porsche’s most successful offering — were being assembled on separate production lines with few shared components. Meanwhile, impressively affordable, fast and well-built sports cars from the Land of the Rising Sun were eating into market share the Stuttgart brand enjoyed for many decades. The writing was on the wall: Porsche needed to radically cut costs by developing new vehicles alongside one another, regardless of the mammoth expense involved in overhauling the plant at Zuffenhausen and irrespective of the seismic change in thinking required across the company. A new way of doing things arrived with the adoption of Toyota’s Just-in-Time production methodology,…