Porsche 911 meets legendary 356

The modern Porsche 911 is not just an extraordinary car, unique, but an extraordinary series of cars.

You can have a regular, road-oriented 911 with rear-wheel drive and a roof, or an all-wheel drive alternative, or one without a roof, or one with a half-roof, plus versions that are track-oriented or dominated by straight-line acceleration line, ready for rough roads… A total of 26 different 911s are for sale today.

Things were very different when Porsche first wanted to put the family name on a sports car in 1948, when the son of Porsche founder Ferdinand, also called Ferdinand but known as Ferry, designed a two-seater mid-engine roadster in a sawmill. in Gmund, Austria.

The mid-engine 356 prototype had a complex spaceframe chassis. Porsche still owns it. But when it came to turning that into a production vehicle, the 356/2, Ferry adopted a layout more familiar to Porsche, as his old man had designed the Volkswagen Type 1 or Beetle: the production 356 had a Volkswagen 1100cc engine, gearbox and suspension, all in their original locations, with a monocoque chassis.

This was simpler and cheaper to make, but also meant it was more practical, with notable space behind the front seat. In a country short on money and resources, the Austrian government agreed that Porsche could make some 356s as long as it exported them.

Between 1948 and 1951, Porsche, with the help of a few suppliers because the factory was so small, then made 52 examples of the 356/2 – 44 coupes and eight roadsters – before the company returned to Stuttgart. With that, the template and line for the greatest sports car of all time was born.

Quick links: Meet the Porsche 911 GTS – Meet the Porsche 356/2 – Interior – Driving dynamics – Verdict – Specifications

Meet the Porsche 911 GTS

Today we have the model represented with a Carrera 4 GTS, an upper mid-range 911 with a 3.0-liter six-cylinder turbo engine that produces 474 hp. It goes from a standstill to 60 mph in 3.3 seconds and tops out at 192 mph, but ultimately it’s still considered a road-focused 911.

Modern 911s are certainly not all the same, but I like some of their common features. For example, there are examples as diverse as a Dakar or a GT3 RS, which would provide a very versatile garage for two cars. This GTS is different from both, but runs like a common thread through every modern 911.

There’s the relatively lightly loaded front end, which, given the absence of an engine up there, means the nose can be low and short and visibility is good. The ride is firm, perhaps too jittery on poorer British roads, in this GTS and Porsche letting more road noise into the cabin than rivals like BMW or Mercedes.

But it’s completely bearable and it’s so rewarding at any speed. The steering is particularly nice, partly because its lighter nose requires less assistance than front-engine alternatives, all of which are woollier and less responsive. The GTS is a £116,690 sports car that offers rare levels of reward, involvement and rigid body control.

Meet the Porsche 356/2

When I get out and into a 356/2, I wonder what, if anything, will feel familiar. This is the 32nd 356 made, partially assembled by Tatra in Salzburg, Austria, and then imported to Sweden along with 14 others by Swedish truck manufacturer and by then Volkswagen importer Scania-Vabis.

The history of the car is well documented. Completed on June 12, 1950, it was approved upon arrival in Gothenburg, Sweden, on November 9, 1950, and registered nine days later by Automobilfirma Per Nyqvist AB.

In total it has had 16 owners, including the latest, DK Engineering in Chorleywood, who revived the mechanicals and loaned it to us for the day before a buyer was found. It had a new coat of paint in the 1980s, but the rest, including the interior, is original.

It’s graceful and delicate to the touch, with panels that appear as wispy as those of a light aircraft. It’s no lower than a modern 911 – both are 1.3 meters high – but it looks like one. The bodywork rises well above the skinny wheels, but looks swoopy and space-aged – like someone’s vision of the future.

When The Autocar saw it at the 1949 Geneva Motor Show, we said this ‘elegant coupe’ from ‘the designer of the pre-war Auto Union Grand Prix cars’ showed ‘great technical interest’.

We recognized the Volkswagen mechanicals, and if you’ve been around an old Beetle, there’s no doubt about it. Open the little rear hatch to reveal the engine and there it is, the Volkswagen flat four, most likely repurposed from an existing car – a Type 1 or Kübelwagen, I wonder; more likely the latter? – but with twin carburettors instead of one, and tricked to produce 40bhp instead of the 25bhp of the original. Still comfortably less than 10% of the current GTS.

Interior

The interior is beautiful. Fall mercilessly onto the soft bench seat, quite cramped behind the large steering wheel, and it takes a bigger blow than you might first dare to swing the door shut.

There is only one instrument: the central speedometer, which is located where a tachometer would be today. On the right side, a neat rubber grommet covers the oil pressure gauge hole, while DK handles the repair of the original. A few switches in the middle complete the look.

The rest of the interior features exposed cream paint, worn leather, attractive tweedy carpeting and three pedals protruding from the footwell and mounted on the floor. Behind the seats is a charming-looking carpeted and padded storage area.

A turn of the diddy key and a push gradually bring the VW engine to life. It stands quietly still. Appearing just in front of the front seat is a spindly gear lever topped by a plastic ball the size of a skateboard wheel, notched in the center to give it the room it needs to move.

There is no plane to which the gear lever returns: it just floats between the gates. People say the shift quality of the VW Beetle is poor, as The Autocar did during a 1951 test drive of a later Stuttgart-built 356, whose gearbox was “by no means quiet, nor very easy to change gears”.

This car has no synchronization on first and second gear, so the gears require careful selection and double declutching, but otherwise it seems fine to me – certainly more accurate than on my 1973 Beetle. The accelerator pedal weighting is positive, the pedal travel wide and the brake pedal long but ultimately effective.

Driving dynamics

Luckily I don’t stall or misshift a gear, and the engine, which makes peak power at just 4000 rpm, has a wide spread of what could loosely be described as power. As in, it doesn’t matter much, but it’s consistent around the rev band. Fourth gear is actually quite long, which really helps the engine settle down during a cruise.

Top speed was said to be 85mph, although heaven knows it would take a long time to get there, and with its slow worm gear steering you’d be brave to try.

Certainly, our patch of Berkshire would not have been large enough for the task, and for reasons of its value, which I will return to shortly, I had no difficulty in determining whether this area retained the qualities that constituted “a combination of a rear engine and swing axle on a car with a short wheelbase” produces: “pronounced oversteer”.

But I can tell you that it rides well, agile and soft, because on generous tires and with a weight of about 700 kg (it is difficult to get the precise figure from historical data) it does not have to be overtly stiff. Moreover, no one thought about making cars robust at the time.

It then takes a while before the steering – given the flexibility in the chassis, the slow, unassisted gears and the vagaries of time – absorbs weight and causes the car to veer from straight ahead. It feels a bit nervous – or at least I do – the way a car with a short wheelbase and a track that’s so inboard into the body might work well. But even in top gear, the 356 gathers speed in a way I didn’t expect from just 40 horsepower.

The drag coefficient was later measured below 0.30, so it is slippery and has a small frontal area. It’s no wonder that at Le Mans in 1951 a modified Gmünd-built coupe could reach 100 mph and finish first in the 751-1100cc class, despite producing only 46 horsepower.

And yes, there are some things that still feel like a 911 today, like the view through a narrow screen, over a low front, with pronounced wings; the slight bump of the front, which is loaded so differently from the rear; and the fact that the sound comes from so far back, to the extent that it is almost inaudible at cruising speed.

Pronunciation

The 356/2 feels incredibly special. However, it never feels exotic, and perhaps it doesn’t look it either. “Did you build it yourself,” a walker asks the manager as he passes it in a car park, before being pleasantly surprised to hear that, no, this is the oldest Porsche in Britain.

There is, I think, no escape from the everyday mechanics. This is no race-winning V12 Ferrari. Its estimated value of approximately £2.7 million is highly dependent on its rarity, status and originality.

“It’s one of the most original 356s,” says James Cottingham of DK Engineering, so much so that “one owner had it as a reference for his other cars.” It’s the kind of car that, perhaps inevitably because of its value, will be included in an existing Porsche collection. And you may already have done that by the time you read this.

“Like all great cars, there’s a rarefied atmosphere,” says Cottingham. “There probably aren’t dozens of buyers, but the term ‘bookend’ comes from somewhere.”

Ultimately, that’s what this 356 is all about: it’s a beautiful, usable example of an original car, the one that started the greatest sports car line of them all. I could love it for the way it looks and the way it feels. But that’s nothing compared to what it represents.

Specifications

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