Keep your eyes open on the city streets and highways and you will see an unorthodox, small bodied car darting through traffic with unassuming ease. Listen and you will hear a soft, deep-throated purr. The sight and sound combine to form the Porsche.
Now visit a sports-car race. There is the same car, this time with muffler removed, roaring lustily as it passes car after car with the same unassuming ease. Then sit in the grandstand at Sebring, where America's Grand Prix of Endurance is run each spring, and watch the Porsches. Notice how they easily outrun many larger cars; how they chase the Ferraris even though they have an engine almost one-third smaller. Then, if you have a chance, sit in one and discover the luxurious interior and the surprising amount of room for a small sports car.
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These wonderful little machines are made within many performance ranges. There is a wide choice of engines and several bodies. But every one, from the production 1600 Porsche to the racing RSK, exhibits fine workmanship, speed and an amazing agility.
In many ways the Porsche resembles the beetle-shaped Volkswagen. It should, since it is a direct descendant; but its heritage goes back almost to the beginnings of the automobile age. The Porsche is the distilled essence of almost fifty years of success, failure, and experimentation. One might say that the modern Porsche really began in 1902 when Dr. Ferdinand Porsche built his first car. That car was the Lohner electric. It was quite remarkable because of its method of power transmission. A gasoline engine drove a generator which supplied power to electric motors mounted right on the wheel hubs! What is important about this type of drive is that it showed Porsche's early preoccupation with power transmission. He always wanted the power as close to the driving wheels as possible, a system which does away with long drive shafts. This thinking is reflected in both the Volkswagen and Porsche cars which have the engines mounted adjacent to the driving rear axle.
After building the Lohner, Dr. Porsche moved ahead rapidly. He has had a hand in the design of more cars and components than possibly any other engineer. Following the Lohner he designed or improved cars for Panhard, Austro-Daimler, Mercedes-Benz, Auto-Union, Volkswagen, Renault, and Cisitalia. Many of his innovations are used throughout the entire industry. Torsion-bar suspension, swing axles, the opposed cylinder engine, and the entire rear-engine concept were either developed or improved on the drawing board of Ferdinand Porsche. Yet it was not until 1947 that a car bore his name.
