KARL LUDVIGSEN
STARS AND HEROES
IN THE WORLD OF CARS
FOR MY DEAR WIFE
ANNETTE
WITH LOVE
INTRODUCTION
EXECUTIVES
Elliot Ludvigsen
Ferry Porsche
Louise Piëch
Werner Breitschwerdt
Robert Lutz
Agnelli brothers
Carlo Abarth
DESIGNERS
Giorgetto Giugiaro
Albrecht Goertz
Larry Shinoda
Peter Pfeiffer
Tony Lapine
Stefan Habsburg
ENGINEERS
Alexander von Falkenhausen
Rudolf Uhlenhaut
John DeLorean
RACERS
Juan Manuel Fangio
Phil Hill
Emerson Fittipaldi
Mario Andretti
CAR GUYS
Bernard Cahier
Rodolfo Mailander
Paul Frère
Even my 300SL was struggling at the high altitude at which this picture was taken – not in the Alps but in the Rocky Mountains. It was during an epic drive in the summer of 1959 with the Mercedes I bought in Germany and brought back to the USA.
I like to say that I’ve never had a job interview. I suppose there have been some exceptions. One might be when I was invited to meet Daimler-Benz export chief Heinz C. Hoppe in Manhattan when he was looking for a press manager for his American sales company. I was attracted but felt that my future still lay with General Motors.
Another might be my dinner with Bob Lutz in Detroit when he was chairman of Ford of Europe. We discussed a possible position there that eventuated as a vice presidency. But Bob and I had been friends for more than a decade so that doesn’t really count.
Otherwise I was invited – sometimes out of the blue – to take up various positions in the world of cars. That included my magazine editorships and my jobs at GM, Fiat and Ford. The only common denominator was my passionate interest in automobiles, which I spiced up with my proven writing and research skills plus training in mechanical engineering and industrial design.
I took a big step into the unknown when I left GM in 1967, turning down several internal job offers. Could I support my family as a freelance writer? The same was true when I left Ford in 1983. Could I make the grade as the head of my own management consultancy specialising in the motor industry? Happily the answer in both cases was ‘yes’.
The common factor for my employment choices was my deep curiosity about the whys and wherefores of automobiles, their users and their makers. High on my agenda was to gain knowledge of motor racing around the world, its history and its evolution. I tried to use my understanding of engineering and design to explain to an interested audience what was happening, why it was happening and who was making it happen. The latter turned out to be the most challenging to uncover!
I’ve had the pleasure and honour of meeting and working with many men and women in the course of my career, innovators to legends in their lifetime. As the biographer of such people as Juan Fangio, Giorgetto Giugiaro, John DeLorean, Mario Andretti and Louise Piëch, I’m sharing the stories of some of the all-time greats of our automotive world. And if some of my other selections are people less renowned, I’m sure you’ll find their stories equally intriguing.
Thank you for your interest in this perspective on the world of cars. These are some of the personalities who helped shape it and whose impact was truly transformative. Theirs is the automotive legacy we enjoy today.
Karl Ludvigsen
Hawkedon, Suffolk
June 2019
Fa – as I called him – was always a smoker, cigarettes at first and then pipes in later life. He was always busy but we got to know each other better after he retired.
In 1922 the Fuller Manufacturing Company completed a handsome new pair of four-story factory buildings at the junction of Pitcher and Prouty Streets on the northern periphery of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Located 142 miles from both Detroit and Chicago by road or rail, Kalamazoo was well placed to serve the growing motor industry.
Enjoying the backing of notable local figures, the Fuller family had been in business in this bucolic western-Michigan city since 1888. By 1903 the Fuller brothers were producing the Michigan automobile. They stopped making cars in 1908, concentrating instead on producing their respected transmissions for cars and trucks.
This decision by the Fullers was in line with trends in the industry, which at the time saw many makers entering the fast-growing auto market by buying major components from suppliers to produce a vehicle which they assembled rather than manufactured themselves. Focusing on this through World War I, Fuller emerged with a strong reputation for its heavy-duty gearboxes. In 1923 Fuller phased out passenger-car units to concentrate on truck transmissions.
In 1928 a 25-year-old engineer at the Cleveland truck maker, White Motor Company, decided to stake his fortunes on Fuller, which had just been acquired by Chicago’s Unit Corporation. Elliot Leon ‘Lud’ Ludvigsen was born of Danish parents in Jackson, Minnesota, where he attended high school. After a year at Wisconsin’s Lawrence College, he ‘had some thoughts about going to business school. But – I have to give my mother credit for this – she said, “Why don’t you take up engineering? That’s what you’re mostly interested in anyway’.”
Here, young Ludvigsen had remarkable antecedents. At their workshop in Jackson, his father and uncles had a bustling business manufacturing self-sharpening toe calks for horseshoes, whose design and production methods they patented. Sold in every state in the union, their products were made by specialised machinery they designed. Theirs was an example not to be overlooked.
‘So when I went back in the autumn,’ said Ludvigsen, ‘I stopped off at the University of Minnesota and registered there in the engineering school.’ Lud graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1925. ‘A guy by the name of F. T. Jones came up from the White Motor Company,’ he recalled. ‘The more we talked with each other, the more interest I developed in signing on for the one-year apprentice course.’ That summer Lud joined White, which enrolled him in the firm’s technical apprentice programme.
At Cleveland he encountered ‘a great apprentice course – it was unbelievably good. We actually worked. I was in the heat-treating department for a month, and then engine machining and inspection, followed by axle inspection. I was in the sales engineering department for a while and then the order department. I got very much involved with the engine department where, for a period of time, I finally had charge of the dynamometer testing.’ It led to Lud writing a shop man’s textbook on metallurgy and heat treatment and to posts at White as quality inspector, engine test supervisor, and assistant to the chief inspector.
Lud’s career took a fateful turn in the summer of 1928. Close observer that he was, he could see that White’s ‘costs were pretty much out of line, pretty high. If the quality had really justified it, it might have been all right, but I had a feeling that the quality wasn’t quite there. I started looking around and one day I saw an ad in the SAE Journal for a sales engineer, mentioning truck design and components.’ The ad was in the June 1928 issue, to which Lud responded with a two-and-a-half page letter on 11 June, stressing his interest and credentials in the field of sales. He got an immediate reply from the Fuller Manufacturing Company in Kalamazoo – After looking over this Fuller thing and its competitors, Lud decided that – it looked like a pretty narrow field – it had a chance to grow – and threw in his lot with Fuller.
As sales engineer, Ludvigsen ‘covered the whole damn company. John Earle and I were the sales department, that’s what it amounted to. John handled several accounts and I was sent out principally to contact potential customers. By 1930, having sold – several thousand transmissions – he was named sales manager for Fuller. Among his tasks was to sell strictly to truck makers, not to third parties, and to provide first-class service, rolling up his sleeves if necessary and putting his engineering know-how to good use.
Ray Armington, then superintendent of Euclid Road Machinery, recalled Lud’s style when one of his off-highway vehicles struggled with a transmission and multiple-disc clutch produced by Fuller. ‘As the transmissions were returned from the field for rebuilding,’ said Armington, ‘Fuller’s sales manager, Elliot Ludvigsen, came out to our plant to help us out – and help us out he did. He was not just a salesman. He had the uncanny ability to get to the root of a problem. We soon had clutches that didn’t lose their linings and transmissions that could be shifted without a crash.
‘Lud’s warm personality became influential with our customers,’ Armington added, ‘and indirectly he became a most effective salesman for Euclid hauling equipment. As Euclid’s product line developed, Fuller transmissions were used exclusively – a direct result of Lud’s painstaking care and follow-through ability.’
Supported by strong service-parts sales, Fuller weathered the depression years but other parts of the company went under, leading to receivership and new management in 1934. With fresh designs, Lud achieved a sale to International Harvester, ‘the biggest thing that ever happened to us.’ But he had to sharpen his pencil and then some.
‘I battled the price situation with Harvester and we finally took the job for our manufacturing costs, which was what it amounted to. And materials, labour and manufacturing overheads. We did it for that because we figured if we could get this by them, this would bring our overheads down. It was a good concept, a really good concept. Normally you don’t talk about your costings, but I did. I figured that was the only way I was going to be able to establish credibility for the future with them. So we got the job.’
Promoted to vice president and general manager by 1937, Lud had to deal with Harvester, as it accounted for 40 to 50 per cent of Fuller’s sales. ‘This worried the directors,’ he related: ‘“We’ve got too many eggs in one basket,” they said. But when you’ve got that many eggs in one basket you just live with it. You just make good deliveries and good quality and that’s going to hold true in the truck business. That gave us our real comeback.’
In World War II Fuller was making transfer gearboxes and heavy transmissions for tank transporters under Government control, with Lud a member of a transmission committee in Washington that allocated output. Coming out of the war, Lud was testing heavy truck transmissions on the tough Ridge Route between Los Angeles and San Francisco when he had a brain wave. To get ten forward speeds, drivers had to operate both a five-speed transmission and a two-speed auxiliary ‘splitter’ that gave ratios between the five principal speeds. This required drivers to manipulate two shift levers to go back and forth between both boxes as they progressed.
Lud realised that it might be possible to have a two-speed auxiliary gearbox whose ratio step was so great that it covered the full range of the five-speed transmission. The driver would shift up through five gears, then activate the auxiliary when shifting back to first gear, and finally go through the five gears again. ‘I had my secretary witness it when I got back,’ said Lud about his notes on the idea, ‘and I got Tom Backus down and I said, “Let’s go to work on this thing, see how we can do it”.’
Lud shared a patent on the concept with chief engineer Tom Backus, which when proven was marketed as the RoadRanger; a Ludvigsen idea. It required some gizmos of the kind distrusted by truck operators. The shift in the auxiliary box was made by a microswitch triggering a solenoid valve, which controlled a cylinder – either vacuum or compressed air – that made the shift. Both auxiliary ratios were synchronised by multiple-disc clutches. Fuller experimented with Porsche’s ring-type synchromesh for this job but it didn’t have the blocking function that this application needed.
‘The drivers loved it,’ Lud said, ‘once they knew what they had.’ This helped them over some teething troubles, after which RoadRangers were marketed in several torque capacities. Others who wanted to build something similar, like Leyland in the UK, paid Fuller a four per cent royalty on the idea.
By 1948 Lud Ludvigsen had climbed the ranks within the Fuller Manufacturing Company to become president. This was the man whose son – namely me – went down to the plant with him on Saturdays when Lud wanted some quiet time to catch up in his office. I looked through the SAE Journal, Commercial Car Journal and Automotive Industries, auto-making bibles. These and my experiences at Fuller had a lot to do with my growing passion for automobiles.
We would tour the quiet plant, which in my earliest visits still had huge overhead shafts and pulleys driving the machine tools through long belts. It was an exciting place with its own drop-forging presses, heat treatment and foundry. Digging through bins of scrap I found interesting pieces to take home.
Between my third and fourth years of high school I worked at Fuller during the summer. Under the patient tutelage of Gil Hulme, I was given a board in the drafting office, its big windows facing north from the main building. My main activity was inking drawings. The engineers would complete their component and assembly drawings in pencil, but for a permanent record, Fuller needed ink drawings on vellum. I was good enough at this to make myself useful.
Gil welcomed me back in the summer of 1952, in the hiatus between my high-school graduation and starting at MIT in the autumn. This was an exciting time at Fuller. It was offering new-fangled torque converters for some applications. When I came back to Fuller in the summer of 1954 we were working on a new smaller version of the RoadRanger. Having learned about machine-tool operation at MIT, I spent the summer in the experimental workshop, making parts for the new RoadRanger.
While milling the slots in the main gears of the auxiliary gearbox that took the synchromesh discs, I didn’t index them properly. Checking with my boss, we decided that we could salvage the pieces by cutting fresh slots in the remaining metal, leaving the earlier ones in place. Wouldn’t you know it? My father showed up at the workshop to check the jobs in progress. He spotted the slotted gears.
‘How come these parts have these extra slots?’ he asked my chief.
‘You’d better ask your son about that,’ he replied.
In 1958 Fuller, which in the meantime had acquired some subsidiaries of its own, was bought by Cleveland’s Eaton Corporation, a major global supplier to the motor industry. By 1963 my father had been promoted to Eaton’s presidency and became chairman in 1967. He retired from that position in 1969 and remained a director until 1975. Lud died in 1978.
While a dyed-in-the wool member of the Gear Gashers Guild – and he had the tie clasp to prove it – Lud Ludvigsen was far more than a narrow technocrat. He was a trustee of Angola, Indiana’s Tri-State University for 18 years, receiving an Honorary Doctorate from Tri-State, and chaired its Board of Trustees for five years. He was a director of the Simpson Paper Company of Seattle, Washington, and a former director of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association and the National City Bank of Cleveland.
As a youth, when his nickname was ‘Spike’, Lud was athletic and a strong swimmer. He became a passionate duck hunter, teaming up with like-minded friends to set up suitable blinds near Michigan’s many waterways. Starting out with a Ford Model T he became interested in cars, owning two Auburns and a Lincoln Zephyr. Before and during the war he was a Buick man, later switching to Oldsmobiles and finally Lincolns.
Living not far from Lake Michigan, Lud Ludvigsen was drawn to yachting. Trading up from a 26 7-foot Chris-Craft to a 40-foot twin-screw cabin cruiser, he navigated Lakes Michigan, Superior and Huron in summer cruises with his family and friends. Finding inadequate local information on seamanship, he founded a Kalamazoo chapter of the Power Squadron, which taught the essentials of sound piloting and navigation.
Lud, whom my brother Eric and I always knew as ‘Fa’ in Scandinavian style, gave me good advice along the way. He encouraged my plan to study engineering at MIT, pointing out that engineering was a good basis for any career. He also urged me to study German in high school as it was ‘the language of engineering’. This became hugely beneficial to my research into German auto marques. Lud had no objection when I veered away from engineering after two years to study industrial design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
In the late 1960s Lud backed me when I headed a company importing auto parts and accessories. He was always supportive of my writing career, although he was frequently critical of the small type sizes used by Automobile Quarterly. When my first serious book was published in 1971, Mercedes-Benz Sports and Racing Cars, I dedicated it ‘To Fa’. I owed him a lot.
As Ferry and I chatted at a motor show, behind him was Porsche press and sports chief Manfred Jantke and behind me Horst Borghs, PR man at Ford and then Opel.
Ferdinand Porsche’s son was born in 1909. Nicknamed Ferry, he was immersed in automotive lore from his earliest days. ‘I have, so to speak, come into the world with the automobile,’ he once said. At the age of ten he was able to drive and at 16 he was behind the wheel of an experimental Mercedes.
Trained and apprenticed in every important discipline of the industry, Ferry Porsche became an employee of the Stuttgart office in 1931. There he was further tutored by Porsche stalwart Walter Boxan while he completed his first drawing – a Wanderer connecting rod. With a Wanderer, a car he test-drove as well as helped design, Ferry competed twice in 2,000-kilometre races over the open roads of Germany. In 1939 he took over the management of Porsche’s Zuffenhausen office after his father was, made one of the directors of the new Volkswagen factory. After the war, Ferry was instrumental in the creation and production of the Porsche Type 356 sports car.
I first met Ferry Porsche when he and Huschke von Hanstein came to New York in 1957. Ferry was in the USA to accept a Franklin Institute award that recognised the role of his father in the creation of the VW Beetle. Porsche organised a reception for Ferry and Huschke in New York to which I, as technical editor of Sports Cars Illustrated, was asked along. Huschke gave me my first Porsche lapel pin, which I managed hold on to for many years.
I reflected on this first meeting in 1996 while I was serving as an honorary judge at the 50th-anniversary Porsche Parade at Hershey, Pennsylvania. On the same panel was actor and comedian Jerry Seinfeld. My colleagues at Bentley Publishing arranged for me to have some one-on-one time with Jerry, who is an enthusiastic owner, driver and admirer of Porsches. During our chat he said to me, in his no-nonsense way, ‘You knew Ferry Porsche, didn’t you? What was he like?’
Yes, I did know Ferry Porsche. He was of medium height with light-brown hair and a clear gaze. He spoke in a gentle tenor with a lilt that betrayed his Austrian origins. He preserved an Austrian awareness of the ridiculous, an appreciation that although things had at times been bad, they could always have been a lot worse. It was fascinating to discuss Porsche’s affairs with a man who had driven the Auto Unions and shaken hands with Hitler.
Disappointments loomed large in the Ferry story. Like his colleagues, Ferry suffered from his demanding father’s abruptness and unwillingness to praise. If it was meant as a way of hardening the young engineer, it failed. Ferry remained a man who got results by knowledgeable persuasion, not by command. He brought all of his unequalled experience and close observation to every decision, an attribute that could be frustrating to his colleagues but yielded great results in the long run.
Perhaps Ferry’s deepest disappointment was his father’s decision on the distribution of the Porsche patrimony at his death in 1951. The semi-feudal central-European custom was that the eldest son received the main inheritance, the house and the business, while token gifts were made to others. Ferry Porsche had every reason to expect that he would be similarly blessed. Instead, to his astonishment and dismay, Ferdinand Porsche divided ownership of his holdings equally between Ferry and his sister Louise without, said grandson Ferdinand Piëch, ‘giving the slightest inkling as to whom he’d prefer to entrust the leading role in the clan.
‘Apart from the fact that the daughter was five years older,’ Piëch continued, ‘she always seemed rather more mature, grown-up, stronger than her brother. At least in my view, she never lost a certain advantage and there is much evidence that my grandfather saw it the same way. My father absolutely wanted to bring my sister into the company’s management,’ Ferry acknowledged. ‘It would have been more correct if my father had gone the way of the Rothschilds and said: “One bears the responsibility, the other one does it.”’
Brother and sister found a Solomonic solution. They took joint ownership in their respective enterprises, while remaining separate in their management. Ferry ran the car and engineering company in Stuttgart while in Salzburg Louise headed the Austrian import company for VW and Porsche. ‘Each sibling was ready to help the other,’ said eldest grandson Ernst Piëch, ‘but they remained separate.’
Little changed over the years in the high-tension relationship between brother and sister. Yet when Ferry was released from French detention in 1946, it was to his sister that he turned for long walks in the countryside to share his pent-up emotions, rather than his wife. ‘One could sense that the relationship between the siblings Louise and Ferry was exceptional,’ said Ferdinand Piëch. ‘They loved and hated each other in the intense, violent manner that’s customary between brother and sister. And naturally it fitted the picture that in high old age, in spite of all that separated them, they were again and again together.’
Forthright to a fault, Prof. Ferdinand Porsche had been constitutionally incapable of appreciating the subtle attributes that Ferry brought to business management. Ferry was conservative, to be sure. That very conservatism contributed to the remarkably subtle and at times glacial evolution of Porsche’s cars from the 356 through to the 911 until 1972, when Ferry and his relations stepped back from the company’s management. Without mentioning the controversial – to him – 924 and 928, Ferry said later that he wished he had stayed longer at the company’s controls.
On 15 October 1973, when Ferry’s departure from direct management was still fresh, I sat with him in his office in a villa on Stuttgart’s Robert Bosch Strasse to discuss the company and its evolution. This was the first time that I, or anyone else, had heard of the 1.5-litre sports car that was designed before the war with the aim of creating the first Porsche-branded production model. They prepared it, he said, ‘so we would have something to do after the war.
‘It had a five-cylinder engine,’ he told me with a smile. ‘It’s a very smooth, well-balanced engine,’ he said, ‘with nice firing intervals.’ Such fives were in the news at the time, including a Mercedes-Benz diesel, so Ferry was proud of this much earlier application. Only when I went to the files to check on this hitherto-unknown design did I discover that Ferry had recalled the concept but not the actuality: in fact the Type 114 ‘F-Wagen’ had a V-10 engine. Fully designed in every detail, it could have been their post-war ‘Porsche’ but the design was far too elaborate for the straitened economic circumstances that prevailed.
Harking back to the creation of Porsche’s Type 60, the Volkswagen, Ferry said that he was involved ‘from the first pencil mark. But I was one of the youngest workers then – most of the others are no longer alive. Of course the Volkswagen was my father’s achievement through and through, the culmination of his life’s work, so to speak. I learned a great deal from him in those days. Through my position as liaison between design and the experimental side, I had a good deal of insight and influence, even in basic matters.
‘Many of its features were undoubtedly new and ingenious for those days,’ Ferry added, ‘but my father had already built a forerunner, the air-cooled, rear-engined car for NSU. The test results we obtained from it had great influence on the later VW design. For instance we already understood the ways of a boxer engine and the difficulties it could present in mixture distribution. Items like cooling or the oil cooler were pre-tested. This all happened in 1932 when NSU’s motorcycle business was not too good and they wanted to build an automobile.’
During the war, said Ferry Porsche, ‘it was vital that the Volkswagen be constantly reviewed, improved and kept up to date to meet changing conditions. So, since we weren’t allowed to design a synchromesh transmission or a hydraulic brake system for private use, we designed them for “military use” instead – as “improvements” to the Kübelwagen and the people’s car.’ In fact they used this ruse to try out a number of novelties for the VW including supercharging, turbocharging and several automatic transmissions.
In April of 1944, when the first bombs fell on the KdF-Wagen plant at Fallersleben, Ferdinand Porsche became highly agitated. The company’s archives, he complained to his son after returning from Berlin, were stored in the attic of Werk I, where they were vulnerable to air attack. He insisted that they should be moved at once to the cellar, where they would be better protected.
The precaution of triplicating the original drawings had already been taken. One of the additional sets was stored in the Porsche villa and the other was at the Stuttgart residence of Ghislaine Kaes, Porsche’s nephew and personal secretary. All were packed in special locked containers of sheet steel.
Dutifully, Ferry shifted the Zuffenhausen archive to the building’s cellar. ‘Eight days after we moved it,’ Ferry recalled, ‘during an attack a bomb came in diagonally from the west. It missed everything else but demolished the archive in the cellar.’ It was becoming evident that at least some of the Porsche team would have to move.
The idea of a move from Stuttgart had already been discussed as early as May 1943. By the spring of 1944 it was becoming essential to the engineers’ survival. Ferry Porsche took on the task of reconnoitring possible sites. Applying first to the authorities in Stuttgart, he was offered a property in Czechoslovakia. ‘When I heard that,’ said Ferry, ‘I did my best to prevent it.’ Though the senior Porsche was born in what was now Czech territory and both men had been Czech citizens after World War I, the idea was deeply unattractive. They didn’t relish being abandoned there after the war among a populace who were less than thrilled about engineers who had helped the German war effort.
In wartime, the home base of the Porsche team remained at Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen – even though many other firms with important wartime missions had already been dispersed, either underground or to strategically less important regions. In fact Porsche had dispersed its machine tools, Ferry said: ‘One third remained in Stuttgart, one third went to the flying school at Zell am See that we were allocated and a third went to Gmünd in Austria where we settled our engineers. My plan was that as long as we had one-third we could start again.’
Ferry described to me the way he moved a small engineering detachment from Gmünd back to Stuttgart in late 1949. They set up shop in the Porsche villa on Feuerbacherweg that his father had built when he became Daimler-Benz engineering chief in 1923. They used the spacious garage as a workshop – as it had been when the first VW prototypes were built – and the room usually occupied by the family cook, as their ‘three-metre office’.
Although Porsche had built a small series of sports cars in Austria, it was not taken for granted that they would make cars in Germany, Ferry explained: ‘In 1951 there were many discussions within the family about whether we should continue what we had started in Gmünd with the 356. I was always for it. After I pressed ahead there were no more arguments. In fact, arguments indeed continued about which part pays for what. If we pay for 50 per cent of engineering work on cars with car sales, for example, who is to say how the other 50 per cent was earned with consulting? You can divide up the amounts any way you want!’
When Porsche started producing cars in Germany, it rented the necessary space from coachbuilder Reutter because the US Army still needed their nearby Werk I as a motor pool. ‘That was our greatest good fortune,’ Ferry told me with a knowing smile. ‘Other firms had buildings, tools and so forth but they didn’t know what to do, which cars to make. They had overheads but no cash flow. We started with cash flow but no overheads!’
With his father still detained by the French, it was up to Ferry to seek a new engineering relationship with Volkswagen, where Heinz Nordhoff was in charge. ‘I had known Nordhoff from meetings during wartime tests,’ Ferry related. ‘He was responsible for Opel Blitz trucks built in Brandenburg. We got together, drew a line under the past and agreed on a new license for the VW, a consulting contract, the import agency for Austria, favoured status on delivery of VW parts for building our own sports cars and joint use of the worldwide VW sales organisation. That was the basis for our fresh start.’
Earnings and royalties from that source soon built up a war chest. ‘Since then the contract has been changed and extended at least four times,’ Ferry said. ‘But as I like to say, we have been married since 1934!’
A marriage of a different nature was proposed in 1954, Porsche told me: ‘I was asked if I would go to Wolfsburg and take over VW’s development there. I would have to give up the car business. I felt that they thought it would be easier and cheaper to tie me up that way than to take over the whole Porsche organisation.’ Needless to say this did not happen. In fact Ferry devoted all his future efforts to warding off a closer and potentially stifling relationship with Volkswagen.
‘When we started in Stuttgart with the 356,’ Ferry recalled, ‘we planned to make only 500 cars. All our plans and tools were made for that purpose. But the numbers kept growing so we built Werk II. It was ready in 1956. Then that same year, exactly on the 25th anniversary of our company, the Americans gave back our Werk I. If we’d known that would happen we might never have needed Werk II!’ Of course both workshops were soon needed to meet demand.
This was typical Ferry, bemused by such coincidences and second-guessing past decisions. But he was fated to revisit the past because his philosophy was that: ‘the decision is always a momentary thing according to the prevailing conditions. One must always remember that one makes decisions under the conditions that exist at the time. No man can see into the future.’
Speaking of decisions, Ferry Porsche explained to me the background of the relationship with Reutter. ‘When we returned to Stuttgart, Reutter was making trolley car repairs there and general repairing in its other plants. Afterward they were 80 per cent occupied with work for Porsche. Father Reutter was killed by bombing here in Stuttgart and his son was killed in the war. There were eight heirs but none of them had any knowledge of the business so they hired a manager. When they had to invest more, as our production increased, the heirs didn’t want to, so the manager advised them to sell the body plant.
‘In a very difficult decision,’ Ferry continued. ‘we at Porsche bought the factory in 1963. It was very hard to get the necessary capital together when we had to give two-thirds of our profits to the Government. We had to make an investment which brought in nothing new. We laid millions on the table and nothing changed.’ The only advantage was that the previous four per cent transfer tax on sales by Reutter to Porsche no longer applied.
While its sports-car production boomed, Porsche’s contract with Volkswagen gave little satisfaction apart from project fees and royalties. ‘After the war,’ said Ferry, ‘our first work for VW was to design a new car, keeping the existing engine. It had a completely integral structure and MacPherson-strut front suspension. But then the Beetle was selling so well they decided not to build it.
‘We designed six or seven new cars for Volkswagen that were never produced. That’s why I always thought that we should keep building cars,’ Ferry told me. ‘At least in one area we can show that we are always up to date, even if the others for whom we work don’t produce what we have designed. If we weren’t building cars, nobody would speak about us anymore.
‘For the larger Type 3 they asked for styles from Porsche, Ghia and their own studio,’ Ferry added. ‘The board viewed all three and chose the Porsche design. But not to displease anyone and to avoid anyone crediting Porsche with the design, they mixed them all together! Ours had a lower belt line, lower lights – it was a lot prettier!
‘Because the business went so well,’ Ferry said, ‘we could afford to go racing. But at first we approached it in the cheapest way!’ This was a reference to the Gmünd-built coupes with their aluminium bodies and narrower lowdrag greenhouses that they used for their first Le Mans effort in 1951.
‘We found that with racing development we could improve the normal car,’ Ferry added. ‘For example the first 1,5-litre engines had Hirth roller- bearing crankshafts, mainly because that gave cleaner connecting-rod big ends that cleared the camshaft. One day Rabe came to me and said, “I have a connecting rod with a diagonal cut that will clear the camshaft.” That allowed a change to plain bearings for the 1,5-litre four.’
When I spoke with Ferry, the issue of the Wankel rotary engine was still on the minds of all motor companies. Did this represent an investment that they had to make? In fact, on 2 March 1965, Porsche had taken a license to work with the Wankel on ‘internal combustion engines from 50 to 1,000 hp for passenger cars (racing and rally vehicles).’
‘I calculated that 65,000 engines were produced daily in the world for all purposes,’ Porsche said. ‘This represented an investment of many billions to make them. What advantages must an engine have, to replace those already being made?’ The unspoken answer was that the newcomer’s advantages would have to be far greater than the Wankel was able to provide. In fact Porsche did not progress the Wankel while its own Leopold Schmid developed a rotary engine that showed considerable potential.
Having successfully achieved the goal of combining car production with consulting engineering, Ferry Porsche could reflect on his company’s success: ‘The happiest thing for me when I go to Americais is to see what a good image we have on that great continent. That’s a validation of what we have done. It shows that we’ve done things right.
‘Others are making sports cars,’ Porsche added, ‘but no one makes a car like we do, made specially for the purpose, down to every last screw and bolt. Others in Italy do it but their cars cost twice as much as ours.’ This summary of what makes Porsche Porsche was sustained well into the 21st century.
Each a titan in their own profession, Ferdinand Porsche’s two children succeeded magnificently. Louise was the more dynamic and decisive, much like her father.
Louise Piëch, nee Porsche, was a towering personality in Austria. Though one of the biggest fish in that small pond, she sought little recognition beyond its borders. Unlike her brother Ferry Porsche, Louise never became a global icon. But the distribution organisation she ran outpaced the Porsche car company in sales and often in profitability. In its first 50 years it turned over some $25 billion, while selling and servicing two million cars. ‘It was an oil well,’ joked former VW chief Carl Hahn, adding that ‘it produced not oil but gold.’
‘At Porsche Salzburg’, added Hahn, ‘Louise was in every respect the commander in chief.’ Indeed, added the VW veteran, ‘She was a Maria Theresa for the 20th Century’ – a reference to the only woman ever to rule the empire of the Habsburgs. While Maria Theresa was a formidable female in the 18th Century, Louise Piëch carved a phenomenal reputation in the second half of the 20th