The Revs Institute, Part 2: Pantheon of Paranormal Porsches

1.

It first dawned on my childhood awareness that people could use Porsches for transportation when my family moved to LA in 1957; we already knew about Porsches for racing because of James Dean.  My dad's friend Isadore pronounced Porsche "pushy" in his Italian accent, and marveled that anyone would pay a Cadillac price for a tiny car with Fiat levels of power.  The standard Porsche you'd see in our neighborhood was the 1500 Normal with about 55 hp.; the 1500 Super was good for all of 70.  But the Stuttgart firm worked steadily at obtaining more power and better race performance from small-displacement engines, and by 1970, when they first won Le Mans, their reputation had attained mythic status. At the Revs Institute you'll find at least one example of each of the air-cooled sports racers that founded the Porsche myth, from the '51 356SL coupe built in Gmund, Austria (72 hp from a VW-based flat four) to the 917PA flat-twelve from '69 and a '71 917K Le Mans racer, each with over 570 hp, and on a display stand, the all-conquering 917-30 engine from the 1973 Canadian-American racing series, with a tire-shredding turbocharged 1,100 hp.  If the modest little 1500 Normal represented Porsche's ambitions in the 1950s, by the late 1960s, you could say the attitude and even the esthetic impact of the cars bordered on paranormal.  The endlessly fascinating Revs website describes Porsche engineering talent for weight reduction as "supernatural"...

2.

This 550A from 1956 makes 135 hp from the Ernst Fuhrmann-designed 4-cam four.  This Type 547 Carerra engine was the first purpose-built Porsche racing engine.  The "A" indicates that this car has a tubular chassis which offered greater rigidity and thus more predictable handling than the earlier 550 platform, the earliest examples of which also had the pushrod engine.  Of course, the Revs people have a couple of those as well… 

3.

Here a visitor inspects the interior of a 718 spyder, otherwise known as an RSK, with the 550A and a rare 550 coupe in the background.

4.

The RSK offered a lower profile with better aerodynamics along with a lighter and more rigid space frame chassis, and from 1957 through '62 it allowed Porsche to expand their competition record from class wins in the small-displacement categories to overall wins in the Sebring 12 Hours in 1960, and in the Targa Florio in 1959, '60 and '63.  This is a four-cylinder RS-60 from 1960.

5.

The RSK had a long enough life to serve as a development tool for the four-cam  4 cylinder Carrera engine as well as a new air-cooled flat 8.  As a result, the car was built with two different wheelbases, and the Institute has examples of both.

6.

Here's a '59 RSK with the weight-saving paint deletion showing off the workmanship on the alloy body, which, like the 550 bodies, was built by Wendler. 

7.

Despite the success of the versatile RSK, an overall win at Le Mans still eluded Porsche.  In order to satisfy FIA requirements for the GT class in 1964, Porsche would need to make at least 100 of their new contender, which featured a steel ladder frame bonded to a stressed fiberglass body to save production cost.  Most of the 106 Type 904s built (many bought by private customers) in '64 and '65 featured the proven but complex 4 cylinder Carrera power plant, while 20 were built with the new Type 901 sohc, dry sump flat six.  A few factory test cars were fitted with a flat eight engine, but engineers experienced exploding flywheels with these. Porsche renamed the car the Carrera GTS in response to the same legal issue which had caused them to rename the new 901 the 911*.  

8.

In 1966 for the 906 (also called the Carrera 6), Porsche reverted to a tubular frame, this time  with unstressed fiberglass body.  Some think this was due to problems with variable thickness and complex repairs on the stressed 904 body, and note that the more expensive tubular route was OK'd because only 50 copies of Type 906 were required under new FIA rules.  Regime change may also have played a part, as this was the first racer completed under the new Ferdinand Piech management. It marked a turn away from the four-cam, four-cylinder engine to the flat sohc dry-sump six then becoming common in the 911, and yet another step away from dual-purpose road / race chassis to designs focused strictly on racing... 

9.

When Porsche finally won its home endurance race at the Nurburgring in 1967,  it  was with this particular 910-6, with smoother contours than the somewhat graceless 906, and making 220 hp. with a fuel-injected version of that car's 2 liter flat six. 

10.

Still chasing a Le Mans win and a Championship, the Piech team hatched the 908.  The  3 liter flat eight took over from the 2.2 liter 907* flat eights after the latter cars narrowly lost the World Championship of Makes to the Ford GT40s campaigned by John Wyer in 1968.  The "LH" derives from the German langheck, or "long tail."  The photo conveys just how long.

11.

Despite the movable rear airfoil for downforce, the long-tailed cars could weave unexpectedly at high speeds.

12.

There was also a 908-02 Flunder ("flounder") from the same year, with short-tailed open spyder design aimed at producing rear downforce and weight saving, up to 220 lb. compared with the long-tailed coupes.

13.

When Porsche finally won the Manufacturer's Championship in 1969, it was with the help of cars like this 917 (this one's a '71), a 4.5 liter flat 12 which defied Porsche's reputation for doing a lot with a little, unless the sole judging criterion was chassis weight, and not the cubic yardage (or cubic meters in this case) of money expended. As the Institute's historians point out, while John Wyer won the 1968 Championship with a team of only 3 Ford GT40s, the 1969 Porsche effort involved no less than 52 new race cars, most of which were only raced once before being reconditioned and sold to privateers.  We will leave it to the reader to ponder which cars were more efficient, the 5 liter Fords, or the 3 liter and 4.5 liter Porsches…

*Footnotes:  For a discussion of the renaming of the Porsche 901, see our posting from July 10, 2016 entitled "Roads Not Taken, Porsche 911s We Missed".  For anyone wanting more information on the cars pictured, the Revs Institute website at revsinstitute.org is a fountain of technical details and entertaining stories.  In case you're wondering what happened to their Porsche 907, it was in the restoration shop, and off-limits to visitors, during our visit.

Photo credits:

1, 2, 4 & 7:  the author

3, 5, 8, 9, 10 & 11:  Ian Avery-DeWitt

6, 12 & 13:  Paul Anderson