The Porsche Effect at the Petersen Museum

The Porsche Effect, an extensive (and expensive) exhibit currently on show at LA's Petersen Museum, is a sort of automotive Wayback Machine, to borrow a phrase from a cartoon series that gained popularity at around the same time as these cars. The introductory display recalls a time and a car that most visitors will not remember...

…and revisits the 1938-39 period, when prototypes of Ferdinand Porsche's design for a "people's car", then called KdF, were being tested and shown to the public.  As part of the publicity and fund-raising effort* designed to finance production of what became the Volkswagen, Porsche also planned a lightweight road racer on the Beetle's underpinnings.

Three examples of the resulting Type 64 (it wasn't yet called a Porsche) were built, each with thin alloy all-enveloping bodywork featuring a narrow cockpit with teardrop roof flowing smoothly into the tapered tail, and spats over all four wheels. The overall form recalled Auto Union speed record streamliners (also Porsche designs), the stillborn Type 114 road version of the Auto Union GP car, and (deliberately, it seems) the humble Beetle in the profile of its roof.

The car was often called the Berlin-Rome VW because it was intended to compete in a road race between those two cities. The air-cooled 985cc flat four was tweaked to make about 50 horsepower.  And while the design is now claimed by Porsche to have been "the shape of things to come", it both was and was not.  The lines are slimmer, more elongated and more fluid than the first Porsche road cars, partly because of the fully enclosed fenders, but also due to this coupe's retention of the Beetle's 94 inch wheelbase, a full foot longer than the later Porsche 356. The graceful taper of the rear fenders helps, too...

The other part of the future that the Berlin-Rome prototype failed to anticipate was that there would be no Berlin-Rome road race because Germany launched a war instead; in that regard, Rome went right along with Berlin...

The Type 64 cockpit would have been a perhaps excessively cozy place for pilot and co-pilot.  It was so narrow that the navigator's seat was staggered in order to allow a bit of shoulder room, and the steering wheel was close to the center.  This is the only Type 64 known to survive; it was raced in the postwar period, and later restored by the Pininfarina coach building house, no less.  After the war, and after Ferdinand Porsche was released from prison in France*, the idea of the Berlin-Rome car was resurrected in a series of cars built at first in Gmund, Austria.  Among the things carried over were the VW-based engine and transmission, and while the Porsche team shortened the wheelbase, they also simplified the bodywork to involve a tub shape rather than a series of teardrops.

    

Signs that this is one of the roughly 50 cars made in Gmund include the Porsche lettering  above the hood opening rather than below it, and the 4 chrome strips around the license plate frame. Engine size had been increased about 10%, too.

The side view shows other telltale signs, with the non-opening "vent" windows in the leading edge of the door curved in plan, and a correspondingly narrower windshield than later cars like the one below.  This windshield was in two flat pieces. In addition to the Gmund coupes, there were 8 cabriolets, half a dozen of which were bodied by Beutler in Switzerland.  Any of  these would be a holy grail for Porschephiles today.

This restored convertible is not one of those cars; instead it's an example of a production model cabriolet from 1955, bodied by Reutter.

It's an example of the kind of car that Max Hoffman* sold at his Frank Lloyd Wright-designed showroom in New York, and despite its simple mechanicals and modest power, the solid craftsmanship and fine level of finish impressed Americans in the first flush of postwar sports car fever.  That name, "Continental" was, like the stripped-down Speedster sold alongside it, Hoffman's idea.  He wanted model names instead of numbers...

But Ford Motor Company, a few months away from launching its expensive new Continental Mark II, protested, and this name came off the Porsche in 1956. Somehow Studebaker never minded "Speedster" (perhaps because Porsche had gotten there first), and so that name stayed on the entry-level ragtop Porsche. 

Spyder is a name that has appeared on other cars, but none so famous as the original Porsche Spyder, Type 550.  Originally appearing in 1953 with the pushrod, VW-derived engine, it soon was released in racing trim with a 4-cam, roller-bearing crankshaft racing engine that would win its class in road races in Europe and the USA. 

Around ninety of the Type 550 would be made before production ended in 1957.  The car gained notoriety with the American public when James Dean died on the way to the races in central California driving a Spyder*.  That was in 1955, the year of the blue-striped car in the above photos.

This 1956 example of the Spyder is claimed to be the most original specimen in existence...

The California license plate refers to Porsche's biggest individual market (more were sold there by 1960 than in Germany) as well as to two other landmark personalities of that era, an era which marked a turning point with the introduction of the Type 901, a six-cylinder car with dry-sump, single overhead cam engine offering the fruits of Porsche's years of racing experience to suburban commuters...

Soon after release, Peugeot would complain that it had a monopoly on triple digit designations with center zeroes, and Porsche complied by calling the car 911; soon those numbers would soon be associated with the most successful dual-purpose GT car ever. But that epic is quite another story, one which has been told by more obsessive and probably better historians, in other places...

*Footnotes:  The VW Beetle design saga is summarized, along with a related lawsuit concerning intellectual property theft, in "Cars & Ethics: A Word or Two on VW" in these posts for 11/27/15, while the Revs Institute's Collier Collection of classic Porsche racing cars is surveyed in "Pantheon of Paranormal Porsches" from 3/19/17 and "Porsches by Another Name" from 3/25/17.  The Cisitalia PorscheType 360 racing car project which got Dr. Porsche out of jail is reviewed in "The Etceterini Files, Part Eleven—Cisitalia" in these posts for 4/22/17.  And for the tale of Max Hoffman and his launching of Porsche in the USA, see "Max Hoffman: An Eye for Cars, and the Studebaker Porsche" from 5/1/16.  The James Dean story is revisited in "On a Lonesome Highway in California" in the archives for 1/18/16. The Wayback Machine is, of course, from the "Rocky and Bullwinkle Show", and is also spelled "WABAC", which stood for Wavelength Acceleration Bidirectional Asynchronous Controller. It was allegedly even more complex than the notorious Porsche roller-bearing crankshaft...

Photo Credits:  All photos were taken by Porsche enthusiast Dr. Marcus Nashelsky on his long-awaited first visit to the Petersen, which is at 6060 Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.  The Porsche Effect will be on show until January 2019.  You may want to tell your own doctor about experiencing classic symptoms of Porsche obsession, and ask him (or her) if heading down life's highways and byways in a dry sump, air-cooled, turbocharged projectile is right for you...