The Little Car That Could

A remnant of the family's seed business survived in the western part of Germany, in the form of an office in D�sseldorf, and for a while Von Hanstein busied himself with that. But there were two uncles in the firm as well, and as he recalls it, "It just wasn't big enough for us all. I decided then," he says, "to see if I could make a business out of what had been my hobby, and I started looking for work in the automotive field."

His first automotive work was for Vespa, the Italian motor-scooter firm. Two years later he joined Porsche as racing director.

It was quite a job, in those early years. "There was very little money," Von Hanstein remembers. "We didn't really have a racing team, or any kind of an organization; there wasn't much besides me and a couple of cars. I often was my own advance PR man, my own race organizer, my own photographer, my own mechanic and my own driver. When we went to the Targa Florio for the first time, we had one car, one mechanic and the Italian driver, Umberto Maglioli. We did our practicing in a Fiat 500. Last year when we went to the Targa Florio we took seven cars in all, including practice cars, and went down a week ahead of time. But in the first attempt we won—just as we did last year.

"We also entered the Carrera Pan-americana along about that same time—the old Pan-American race from Guatemala to the U.S.-Mexican border. We had two cars in that one, and when we finished, a mechanic and I loaded one of the two into a truck, drove day and night across the southern U.S. to Miami and there dispatched ourselves to Nassau for the Speed Week. I drove and finished in fourth place."

Since those days, of course, the cars as well as the conditions themselves have changed a good deal, not always to the pleasure of the purist Porsche customers. When, for example, word got around last year that a Porsche with an automatic transmission was in the making—it went on sale in the U.S. in October—a groan went through the ranks, and one had the feeling of an idol toppling. But Ferry Porsche had an answer in keeping with the traditions of the company:

"When I make a model change, I make it because technical developments force me to do so—because we have reached the limits of the model produced so far, and it will no longer hold the technical developments we now need to put into it. The semiautomatic transmission that we are now making is a case in point. No one can deny that there are times when an automatic transmission is desirable—as, for instance, when driving in city traffic, which is, alas, the sad lot of most automobile drivers today. There is no question but that it saves the driver work and saves the engine wear. But the big trouble with an automatic transmission has always been that it does not necessarily do what I, the driver, want it to do in a given situation: it has a mind of its own, and this is not to be tolerated in any automobile.

"For this reason, an automatic transmission could never be considered for one of our cars—until we developed one that would obey the driver. This is what we have now: a transmission that will save the driver's nerves and energies in city traffic, but that will obey him instantly on the highway, because he can at any moment still select whichever gear he needs in a particular situation."

This seeming paradox has been achieved by adding only two new developments to the normal, stick-shift type of Porsche transmission: a torque converter and an electrically operated clutch, which goes into action as soon as the driver's hand touches the gearshift lever. The left foot, of course, is out of work: the clutch pedal is gone. The right hand cannot rest on the shift lever in moments of boredom; if it does, the clutch goes into action and the engine lets out a protesting howl. Other than that, a Porsche equipped with the new Sportomatic transmission performs like any other, in some respects even perhaps a little better, since the longer range made possible in first gear by the torque converter (up to 55 mph) is about what might be expected from the two lower gears of the five-speed racing models. As for top speed, it is around 3 mph less than in a conventional model.

To see a Porsche perform in a demanding race is to understand exactly what Ferry Porsche means when he argues the necessity of having an absolutely responsive and reliable car. Last July at the German National Hill Climb Championships in Freiburg in the Black Forest, Gerhard Mitter, one of the top German drivers in this event, demonstrated Ferry's argument in impressive fashion. The year before he had set a new record of 6:02.95. This time, in his first practice run, he improved that by three seconds, breaking the six-minute barrier with a time of 5:59.8. In four following practice runs, he shaved that time by fractions in each successive run, and in his first official try he raced his Porsche to an alltime record of 5:49.33, an average speed of 115.5 kilometers per hour up the 10-kilometer course. Each run meant shifting gears between 180 and 200 times while twisting the car around every type of curve from fast bends to hairpins. As Mitter himself put it: "Every action can only be an instantaneous reflex reaction to the situation at hand, and for this the car has to be a complete extension of the driver—of his eyes and ears, his fingers and toes. If it hesitates at any instant, he may well be lost."

Over the years, few Porsche drivers have been lost because of any hesitation in their cars. Many years ago old Dr. Porsche formulated what he considered the real challenge of racing and sports car design: to build vehicles in which the limits of technical development could be continually demonstrated. He probably would be quite satisfied today to see how this challenge has been met in the cars that bear his name.