The Little Car That Could

One of the more conspicuous facts of the automotive world in recent years has been the omnipresence of two very different, yet oddly similar, cars, both products of the same designing genius, both risen from the rubble of postwar Germany. One has long been lovingly known as the Bug. It is, of course, the Volkswagen. The other is sometimes called the Superbug, and it is to be seen on just about every racetrack in the world. At Daytona last month it accounted, for ;the first three places in the 24 Hours, and at Sebring this month it will be represented by four prototypes which, if they run to the form they have steadfastly displayed year after year on every type of course from those same Florida flats to Sicily's mountains, will finish well up front. By this time it will come as no surprise that the name of the marque is Porsche.

Brothers under the skin, the Bug and the Superbug represent the two ideals of the man who fathered them: Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, the Austrian-born pioneer whose very first car, which he designed and built at the age of 25, was the sensation of the Paris Automobile Salon of 1900. The VW realized his lifelong ambition to build a true "People's Car." The Porsche, which he barely lived to see, comes as close as any marque, past or present, to being the ideal sports car. Most Porsches, of course, are not meant to be raced—although they can be—but to provide sure, sporting transportation at speeds up to about 130 mph for the fastest model. There are two basic street varieties, the four-cylinder 912 and the six-cylinder 911, and prices advance in thousand-dollar stages from $5,000 for the 912 to $6,000 for the 911 to $7,000 for the 911 equipped with a new automatic transmission. The Daytona-winning Type 907 shown below is not for sale.

Far and away the largest number of Porsches to be found in any country are on American roads—some 35,000 of them—and they are driven by notoriously fussy men and women who raise holy hell with the factory on discovering any defect. Porsches are supposed to be perfect. Last year Porsche built 11,300 cars, of which 5,400 went to the U.S.

Mickey Rooney has one; so does swimmer Donna De Varona. But these are not typical U.S. owners. The typical owner, according to surveys, is a 36-year-old college graduate with a 34-year-old wife and one or two children, and an income of $17,300. Doctors are the most numerous owners, followed by electronics people. Porsche men have also discerned a fairly large group of "middle-aged swingers" among the owners.

The Porsche was developed from Dr. Porsche's original design by his son, Ferry Porsche, who runs the Porsche works today; and it was guided to racing fame largely by the hand of a talented and ebullient former racing driver whose name bespeaks his aristocratic heritage: Huschke von Hanstein.

Volkswagen and Porsche have long since gone their separate ways: the VW today is produced in its millions in a massive factory in Wolfsburg in the north of Germany; the Porsche in its hundreds in a jumbled collection of buildings huddled on a hillside above the south German city of Stuttgart. Here Porsches are hand-tooled, racing and retail versions alike, in circumstances so retiring that a visitor who recently went to see where the factory was walked right past it.

On any normal working day there is a torrent of clanging, pounding, rhythmic noise. But for one who calls during the factory's annual three-week shutdown, there is a bonus in being able to walk in quiet. When the machines die down, something else seems to come alive: history, perhaps, or tradition or the spirit that animated the place when, long ago, a purpose was first formed and the wheels of production began slowly to turn. It is not too difficult to imagine, as one passes the rows of empty-windowed bodies with their entrails of wiring coiled about the uncarpeted floors, how their prototypes and predecessors first took shape, hand-hammered and assembled in circumstances far more primitive, here and elsewhere, through a cavalcade of years. And it is not too difficult to conjure up as one looks at Ferry Porsche—small, compact, quiet but sharp-eyed, casual in his silk sport shirt but formal in his manner—a picture of the stubborn, independent character who started the tradition nearly 70 years ago. Dr. Ferdinand Porsche has been dead for 17 years, but it is his spirit that still very much animates the Porsche plant—the spirit of a man who in half a century pushed forward the frontiers of automotive development with such unremitting energy that already his name is legend.

The legend was so great when Dr. Porsche died in 1951, aged 75, that it has had a tendency to overshadow the very solid accomplishments of his son. Ferry Porsche, born in 1909 on a September day when his father was off at a race, is the same hard-working, self-effacing type of man, not as inspirational as his father was, perhaps, but no less a supporter of the dictum that "racing improves the breed."

By 1930, when he was 21 years old, Ferry was working as a full-time draftsman in his father's design office in Stuttgart and also occasionally testing the cars he helped design. In both capacities he worked on some notable products—the two-liter Wanderer GT car built for Germany's Auto-Union; the famous race car of the mid-1930s for the same firm; the very first true VW ancestor, a 1933 experiment of Dr. Porsche's for the NSU works, which already bore a strong resemblance to the VW of today. By 1939 he was his father's deputy in Zuffenhausen and, sooner than anyone realized, he would be even more than that—for now came the war. The war cut short one of the most ambitious of all Porsche projects—a streamlined, six-wheel racer of 3,000 hp, powered by an aircraft engine, with which Daimler-Benz wanted to crack Sir John Cobb's absolute speed record on the salt flats of Utah. The car never ran; the design jobs that now came along had to do with tanks and trucks and tractors, and by 1944 even that was finished: under the incessant bombing by the Allied air fleets, the Porsche works was finally evacuated to Gm�nd, a tiny town across the Bavarian border in Austria. It was there when the war ended, and for a time it seemed that the vital force of Porsche in the automotive world would end with it, for both Ferry and his father, after some brief preliminary examinations, were arrested and interned.

It is an irony of the war's aftermath that Dr. Porsche should have been imprisoned for nearly two years on political grounds. Probably his technical genius was more responsible than his politics, which were nonexistent: the French got him, after the Americans had examined and then released him, and the first thing they did was to bring him to the Renault works in Billancourt near Paris, where they showed him the early experimental versions of their own "People's Car," the Renault 4 CV. They asked him for his opinions, and he suggested some improvements. After that he was sent to prison in Dijon, where he stayed for nearly 20 months.