Genetic Engineering
Wheels Magazine 
August, 2008
From where I sat, I watched the old engineer in perfect profile. Behind wire-rimmed glasses his eyes seemed impossibly bright, shifting routinely between scanning the road and marking off the gauges, flickering at subtle shifts in the wall of noise building behind us. The tacho stepped like a quartz watch to 7400rpm, his small feet deftly dabbing at the trio of pedals.
But it was the silent lips that said the most: slightly pursed, a Mona Lisa enigma of concentration and smug satisfaction.
The two greatest joys in this job, apart from one's own memorable moments of wheel-time, are to walk around a car with a designer, and to ride in one with an engineer. Designers and engineers can tell you a lot about the cars they make, even when they're not saying anything.
Herbert Linge is an engineer, albeit retired since 1992. His career, admittedly, was utterly untypical of an engineer at almost any car maker you could name. But it wasn't even unusual at the company where Linge worked.
He worked at Porsche. And his name is one of many constant threads in the fabric of this family-controlled company that celebrated its 60th anniversary on June 8 this year.
To mark the date, Dr Wolfgang Porsche, fourth and youngest (at 65) of Ferry Porsche's sons and Chairman of the company's Supervisory Board, hosted a small group of journalists in his native Austria. Behind the aggressive, multi-billion euro takeover of Volkswagen and the legal manoeuvring with the European Commission, there is still an approachable, light-humoured, personal face carrying the company name.
For two days we drove a small selection of early 356 models and a sole, 1988 911 Speedster from Salzburg to Zell am See and back, via Gmünd.
This trip usually involves one of two routes; we drove both. One scales the daunting, 2600-metre Grossglockner Pass, on the outskirts of Zell am See; the other covers the eight kilometres of the famous Gaisberg hillclimb.
Sixty years ago, Ferry Porsche commuted over one or the other almost every day. He liked to drive with his family. The roads were steep but fast, more open corners than switchbacks, punishing on brakes. Porsche cars are the way they are because of these roads. And because of the people.
Herbert Linge was born in Weissach. He was 15 when he joined Porsche in April, 1943. He was the company's first apprentice. At the time, Professor Ferdinand Porsche's major project at the Zuffenhausen design and engineering consultancy was the Type 205 ‘Maus' tank.
Aerial unpleasantness over Stuttgart soon prompted Porsche to move its offices the following year to Gmünd. The family itself moved to a hunting lodge in Zell am See, bought by Ferry Porsche a few years earlier.
It was in Gmünd, of course, that Ferry Porsche built his first car, a mid-engined roadster using Volkswagen components. It was granted type approval on June 8, 1948. Some 51 cars were built in the old sawmill at Gmünd.
Linge, meanwhile, had gone racing. "I had a Volkswagen with a Porsche engine in it, a Porsche gearbox and a locked differential," he says. "I did small races in Germany, national rallies... I was always put in with the sports cars - 1100 Porsches."
When Porsche started production in Stuttgart in 1949, Linge went back to work. As a mechanic, and soon as a works driver.
After another successful weekend outing in a Black Forest rally, Linge had been summoned by his boss, Professor [Albert] Prinzing.
"He said 'Hey, boy, this is not gonna go on. You can't beat our Porsche owners with your Volkswagen.' So I said, 'Professor Prinzing. If you give me a Porsche, I'm not gonna go on racing my Volkswagen'."
In 1952, the year of US importer Max Hoffman's seminal 356 America Roadster, Linge was sent to the US for four years to help build the service network there. He co-drove three times in the annual Carrera-Panamericana road race, and in a busy 1954 also partnered Hans Hermann to a class win in the Mille Miglia - the pair's 550 Spyder famously ducking under a level-crossing boom gate - and won the brutal Liège-Rome-Liège road race.
In 1954 Porsche had fewer than 500 employees, but the 5000th Stuttgart-built car rolled out in March that year. With the September launch of the US-bound 356 Speedster, and the 356A a year later, it took only two further years to reach 10,000.
Linge relocated to Stuttgart in 1956 as a race engineer in the testing and development department. Throughout the late 1950s and '60s, he also raced at Le Mans, the Targa Florio, the Mille Miglia, the Tour de France Automobile, the Nurburgring 1000km and the Sebring 12-Hours.
"Yeah, it was a big problem," he chuckles. "Sometimes I missed the first or second practice because I had to stay in the factory until Friday. After the race I had to go straight back to work. Even from Le Mans! Monday afternoon I was back in the factory."
Work was about to move closer to home. Porsche needed its own test track. It was Linge who suggested the relatively infertile land around his home town.
Weissach made the cars strong. "We didn't go to a race track first," Linge explains. "We went to Weissach and did a 1000km test over the road car route. When we took the 906 to Sebring [1966], we did that testing only one week before - and Dr Piech told us, if you don't do that test, you don't take that car."
Linge grabbed another gear, the smile curled across his lips. I was being chauffeured up the eight-kilometre Gaisberg climb in a 1962 356B Carrera GTL Abarth, a rare, lightweight-bodied coupe. The delicious Weber-carbed, earwax-sucking soundtrack came from the rear-mounted, 1.6-litre Type 547 dohc engine, making a still-respectable 99kW.
Between 1960 and '63, the 356B Carrera GTL Abarth virtually dominated its class in endurance and sports racing, often with Linge sitting where he was now. "The gear ratio was shorter when I drove this car years ago, but other than that, it is exactly as it was to drive."
With Porsche, the past blurs with the present, road cars blur with racers. It has always been so.
At Sebring in '63, where Linge's Abarth finished second in class to the sister works car, his co-driver was Edgar Barth, another early Porsche mainstay. Barth's son, Jürgen, followed him into the company and became another Porsche racing engineer who regularly swapped his neck-tie for Nomex: he raced 12 consecutive Le Mans, winning the 1977 event.
Jürgen Barth worked at Weissach alongside Linge, whose racing career had ended at the 1969 Le Mans 24-Hour.
"I was signed to be co-driver with John Woolfe, who bought the first 917 as a customer," Linge said. The memory of the crash, which hurled the un-belted English driver from the car, was still sharp.
Linge had been due to start the race, but Woolfe, his family viewing from the stands, had been insistent. "And he died, of course, in the first lap of the race," Linge remembers. "That was quite a shock for all of us.
"In this same year, we started to build the experimental department in Weissach. I was in charge of building all the workshops, the test benches, all this. And Mr Piech [head of the experimental department] said to me, 'You either have to be a race driver for the factory, or be the chief man in the workshop at the experimental department'. I was already 41. There was no question any more."
Linge had one notable call-back to the wheel. "In 1970, when we had our first win at Le Mans, I drove the camera car for Steve McQueen!" he smiles. Linge and English driver Jonathan Williams shared McQueen's own 908, kitted with three 35mm film cameras.
"Afterwards, I was there for six weeks," Linge goes on, "and I drove the 917, the white car number 25. I was always in that, because insurance wouldn't allow [McQueen] to drive. He was a good race driver, too. He could go along with us, no problem ... David Piper was there, [Mike] Parkes was there, Siffert was there. And [McQueen] could stay with us."
Peter Falk was chassis engineer for the Porsche 917 and Porsche's competitions director. And for several generations of road and racing cars either side of it.
The Targa Florio was his favourite challenge: "You set up for halfway between a racing car and a rally car". Falk worked at Porsche for 33 years.
His successor, Roland Kussmaul, drove a 924 in the 1979 Repco Round-Australia Trial. In the early-1980s he co-drove for Barth in several Monte Carlo rallies, twice finishing second outright, and in 1986 he drove a 959 to sixth outright in the Paris-Dakar. Kussmaul is in his fourth decade at Porsche.
Their engine equivalent was Hans Mezger, whose career at Porsche began in 1956, covered two generations of Formula One and the heroic Le Mans and CanAm models, and ended in his retirement almost 40 years later.
Helmuth Bott, who replaced Dr Ferdinand Piech in 1972 as head of R&D, had joined the company in 1952. He retired in 1988. Senior engineer Norbert Singer joined Porsche in 1970 - helping to seal the company's first outright Le Mans victory that year - and was the principal designer of every Le Mans-winning Porsche since. He retired last year, after 37 years at the company.
As we trundled across Austria in celebration of Porsche's 60th, our collection of 356 models was tended by Porsche Museum director, Klaus Bischof. He's well-known in Australia, having driven Museum cars several times in local classic events.
But a friend of mine has a poster of the 1971 Le Mans-winning 917K of Helmut Marko and Gijs van Lennep, during a pit stop. Leaning through the window is a young Porsche race mechanic: Klaus Bischof.
Herbert Linge retired in 1989. But the company wasn't quite finished with him. He was brought back a year later to put together a little one-make race series called the Porsche Carrera Cup. Linge built and ran the now-international series for its first three years.
Then, of course, there's Dr Wolfgang Porsche himself. He was seven years old when his grandfather died. Today, Dr Porsche's grandfather, grandmother, and both his parents rest in the family crypt not 20 metres from his front door at Zell am See.
He was especially close to his father. "On the 27th of March 1998, my father died," he says, suddenly and quietly over dinner. "And on the very same day, the 27th of March 1998, we built the last air-cooled engines. Coincidence. It was a Friday."
And he fondly remembers the sprints over the Grossglockner with his father - "I was not always a very good co-pilot!" - and is a keen driver himself. He shuns flights from the airport only a few kilometres away, preferring to make the four-hour, usually fortnightly, drive to Stuttgart in either his pearl-white 959, green 993 Turbo S or green Cayenne Turbo.
No doubt, especially these days, wearing that certain kind of smile.
THE FUTURE
Porsche, which builds just 100,000 cars per year, is in the midst of taking over Europe's largest car maker, Volkswagen. Porsche's holding company currently holds a 31 percent stake in VW, and is determined to reach 50 percent by year's end.
In the midst of several lawsuits - Porsche and the EC versus Germany; the VW workers' union versus Porsche - Dr Porsche would comment only on why Porsche so badly wants VW.
"We build 100,000 units a year," he said, "and no matter how successful you may be, [that] is not enough to develop all the technologies you need.
"So we were looking for a partner and VW is the most logical one we could find ... Remember that VW at the time was financially weak, their stock price was 30 euros back then ... it's now over 180. It's a good step to take.
"We will now continue in this process, bringing the companies together, ensuring success ... but we will always remain as two companies."
More than two, in fact. Dr Porsche acknowledges that Audi "builds very good cars, premium cars," but quells any concern of inter-brand rivalry by saying, "the real competition is from [outside] of the group."
1940s
Work on the "Porsche Type 356 VW sports car" began in July, 1947. It was Ferry Porsche's baby but the mid-engined roadster's shape was derived from his father's Type 64 Berlin-Rome-Berlin coupe of 1938. Ferry Porsche died the same day air-cooled engine production ceased in March 1998.
1950s
Production of the 356 was in full swing in Stuttgart, and the intertwining of road and racing produced giant-killing variants in racing and rallying. The Type 547 four-cam engine, developed in 1954 by Dr Ernst Fuhrmann (who later became Porsche's CEO), was a technical highlight in the 550 Spyder; James Dean was its least happy customer. Our car of the decade was the 356 Speedster.
1960s
A larger, more modern and - importantly - six-cylinder replacement for the 356 was on the drawing boards by late-1961. The prototype '901' appeared at the Frankfurt motor show in September 1963, alongside the revised 356C; the production 2.0-litre 911 (renamed after Peugeot objected) appeared at Paris 1964. The 356C eventually bowed out in 1965.
1970s
An explosive decade for Porsche in motor sport, with 917s in Le Mans and CanAm, the outrageous 935 Group 5 cars, and countless circuit and rally successes with 911s. In the 911 road range, the Turbo and Targa debuted. But the decade's stunner, often sadly overlooked, was the innovative, front-engined 928 (Al Pacino's car in Scarface). It was a failure in one sense only: it tried to replace the 911.
1980s
More boom times for Porsche at the top levels of motor sport. The 956/962 won six Le Mans on the trot; the Porsche-built TAG-McLaren engine took three F1 drivers' and two constructors' titles; and the 4WD 953 and 959 won the Paris-Dakar. Car of the decade: the 959 supercar, a technological tour-de-force with variable 4WD and ride height, four-piston brakes and 335kW from a twin-turbo engine.
1990s
Some may sneer, but the most important Porsche of the 1990s was the Boxster. Developed during two years of red ink, in the yuppie-killing aftermath of the '87 stock-market crash, the mid-engined 986 roadster contributed a vast number of parts to the all-new 911 (996) and created two models on a budget considered tight for one. It was a happy, mid-engined farewell for Ferry Porsche.
2000s
Sure, the Speedster and the Boxster get our nod for building and saving the company. No such sentiment for the Cayenne, although this clever 'insurance policy' has helped make the former sports-car specialist the world's most profitable car maker (per car, at least). Nope, we're happier that it created money to pour back into the 911 and for Porsche's first true four-door sedan, the upcoming Panamera.
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