Classic PORSCHE
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THE MAGAZINE FOR ALL CLASSIC PORSCHE ENTHUSIASTS
FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF 911&PORSCHE WORLD No.9 January/February 2012
TOUCH OF CLASS
356 Continental coupé
PORSCHE’S SHORT-LIVED LEGEND!
thePERFECTmix! taking to the road with a 1973 911T
TECHNICAL
964/993 ENGINES: The last of the air-cooled classics
MOTORSPORT
RENNSPORT REUNION The greatest show on earth comes to town!
HISTORY FILE THE WRIGHT STUFF Where architecture meets car sales…
£4.75 US$11.99 Can$13.75 www.classicporschemag.com
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BLUE BY YOU Bored and disillusioned with modern sportscars, Simon Gardener decided it was time to own a classic Porsche. This is the story of his rather special 1973 911T – a T with a twist! Words: Keith Seume Photos: Michael Ward
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1973 911T RESTO
‘T
he journey began,’ says Simon Gardener, ‘early in 2009 when, after a few years of ownership, I’d become a bit bored with my Porsche 997.’ Then, by his own admission, he rather rashly decided to sell the Porsche and buy a brand new Aston Martin V8 Vantage. A car that I am sure many readers will agree, must rate as one of the most dramatic and, on paper at least, desirable of modern sports cars. On paper… ‘Unfortunately, it turned out to be one of the most disappointing cars I’ve ever owned! A few weeks later, thoroughly disillusioned, I sold the Aston and, for the first time in 17 years, found myself without a car…’ After this false start, Simon sat down and began to assess what he really wanted out of a car. Looking back, he realised he didn’t drive many miles a year – perhaps 6000 – and, aside form the odd work-related trip, tended only to use a car at the weekend. Because of this, he began to consider the idea of running a classic of some sort – a Porsche, preferably. He did briefly consider a Speedster, but decided they’re too impractical, and a little too expensive these days. He knew a replica wouldn’t cut it, so began looking at 356 coupés. He came close to buying a concours-quality 356B Super 90, but then thought again about just how practical that might be. So how about an older 911? Preferably an early long-wheelbase car? After doing a lot of research, and checking out several cars, he met Alan Drayson at Canford Classics who, as it turned out, happened to have a 1973 911T restoration under way in his Bournemouth workshop. Alan takes up the tale: ‘I bought this car in Fleet, Hampshire, from a chap who’d intended to restore it but, after owning it a number of years and nothing happening, decided to sell it. He’d bought it as he remembered actually being driven to school in the car as a young boy, some 25 years earlier! ‘It was clear this RHD 911 needed a full restoration. It was very original, but it did have, though, the usual rust issues. It still had its original 2.4 engine and gearbox, plus it had been fitted with Recaro sport seats, ‘S-spec’ trim package and electric windows. It was finished in its original
Gemini Blue metallic with black interior. ‘The most amazing thing about this car and something we probably won’t find elsewhere, especially on a UK car, is the service history: the service book’s fully stamped and shows the Porsche has done over 200,000 miles. What’s more incredible is the rate the car did these miles. All I can say is it must have been a sales rep’s daily driver! It’s had so many services Porsche even stapled additional pages in the service book.’ The car looked to be the perfect base for a full restoration, but as is so often the way, there were some horrors hidden away. Alan continues: ‘Firstly the car was stripped right down, every nut and bolt, to a bare shell before we sent it to be media blasted. On its return, it was obvious the shell was going to require many new panels.’ That’s something of an understatement on Alan’s part. We know – we’ve seen the photos! For example, the passenger side B-post (don’t forget, it’s an original righthand drive car) was all but missing – rot had attacked the panel so badly that the lock assembly had nothing to locate to, the bottom section where it meets the sill had disappeared… This was one seriously bad car in some areas but, by contrast, not in others. The floors, for example, were actually pretty good. The roof was OK, too! Most of the new body panels were sourced directly from Porsche, and the list was pretty extensive. It included, among others, new front and rear wings, bonnet, fuel tank floor and front slam panels, inner and outer sills, kidney bowls, battery boxes (being a ’73, it has twin batteries) and even the complete A- and B-posts. Alan continues: ‘Once the bodywork was completed and the gaps set correctly, the car was spray-sealed in the areas which were originally sealed by the factory, before receiving a full coat of the original colour, Porsche Gemini Blue metallic (code 8696).’ The result looked stunning. Gemini Blue is a relatively unusual colour and one of a few that was used not only on 911s, but also 914s and Volkswagen Beetles! It is a hue that really comes alive in sunlight, taking on an almost pearlescent appearance, yet looking quite rich in other
No expense spared, no corners cut, nothing left to chance – the restoration of this 1973 911T is among the best we’ve seen. Gemini Blue paintwork really lights up when the sun shines CLASSIC PORSCHE
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California Dreaming
RENNSPORT REUNION IV
Rennsport Reunion and the Porsche Race Car Classic - the world’s largest gatherings of classic road and race Porsches left our man Mallett feeling weak at the knees... Words: Delwyn Mallett Photos: DM and PCNA
A
s I drove over the hills surrounding the Laguna Seca circuit, my heart began to sink. A heavy fog from the Pacific Ocean had rolled in and cut visibility down to no more than a few feet, and progress to walking pace. When I finally made it to the mist-enveloped track, practice, against all expectation, was under way. Well, it sounded as if it was under way – it was possible to hear the cars circulating, but see them you could not! Out of the murk a pair of headlamps appeared as a pace car became dimly visible, leading a convoy of Porsche’s finest historic race cars. It was a scene that conjured up images of the Nürburgring at its worst. Brit racer Andy Prill, piloting a Speedster, later commented that the experience was quite extraordinary as visibility was inconsistent, varying from ‘could just see the next corner’ to an immediate ‘can’t see the tip of the bonnet’. Suddenly, making the trip all the way to ‘sunny California’ to catch probably the greatest Porsche gathering on the planet didn’t look like such a good idea. However, within the hour the sun started to burn off the sea-mist, the temperature started to rise and once again it became apparent why Johnny von Neumann was so insistent that Porsche build the Speedster – California
reverted to type and was demonstrating why it is the land of the roadster. As the mist evaporated from the Laguna Seca paddock, 400 perfect Porsches began to gleam like jewels in a treasure chest. Over the weekend around 30,000 spectators came to wallow in the Porsche-fest and every one of them was grinning like a ten-year-old let loose in Toys’R’Us. And like that ten-year-old, the dilemma was which way to turn first. Do you watch the racing, comb the paddock, cruise the shopping mall, get your posters signed by the famous drivers, drink beer in the German beer garden (complete with buxom provocatively-attired frauleins) or trek to the Porsche Club car parks to wander through the thousand or more cars belonging to the fans? Of course, all of those have to be done, but in what order? The Rennsport Reunion has become the Olympics of the Porsche world and given that more Porsches have been sold in California than any other state, and indeed most other countries, it’s surprising that this was the first time the event had been held on this side of America. The first Rennsport meeting was held in 2001 at Connecticut’s Lime Rock race circuit and was the
Line-up for the official photo (left) was nothing short of breathtaking, with every model of classic Porsche racer you could imagine. Paddock lineup of 917s, 956s and 962s hinted at Le Mans successes CLASSIC PORSCHE
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LAST OF THE LINE
Sadly missed by more than a few… M64: the ultimate expression of the air-cooled concept for the road-going Porsche Words: Paul Davies Pictures: John Colley, Porsche AG, and the author
T
he 993-series 911 is an appreciating asset. Even the 964 model that came before is at last gathering a loyal band of friends after a period in the file marked ‘Do not touch under any circumstances’ – and the RS versions of both are now so sought after they’re being cloned. The explanation for this happy situation is simple. In the tail of each is the final version of the fully aircooled Porsche power unit that started life back in 1963. They’re the last men standing, the last of the line. All Porsches have a Type number, the entry in the book of orderly things not necessarily repeated in the showroom catalogue but implanted in our cerebral hard drives. The 911 should have been a 901 if it hadn’t been for Peugeot getting in a spat, 917 was the monster flat12 that won Le Mans in ’70, 930 the first of the Turbo road cars, and 959 the twin-turbo 4WD supercar that was before its time, etc. Engines have followed, taking on the same number as a prefix with a later suffix – for example the first Carrera 3.2 power unit of 1984 was 930/20. But things changed with the introduction of the 964-model Carrera. The engine designation became M64 (starting not unsurprisingly with M64/01) and continued in the same
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style through the life of the 993. Confusingly, engine part numbers continued in the old style, with new items – such as the crankcase – being prefixed ‘964’. So, this is the M64 engine. Introduced in model year 1989 and running right through until ’98 when the water-cooled M96 engine appeared. Fortunately I don’t have to tell you about that one. M64 was born out of necessity, a need for Porsche to continue to up the game against the opposition and to keep pace with a changing world. For the first part read ‘increase power’, for the second read ‘meet emission requirements’. The change to the power unit went hand in hand with a comprehensive make-over of the model; power steering, anti-lock braking, and air conditioning becoming standard equipment, along with the biggest styling changes since ‘Butzi’ Porsche penned the original shape. Four-wheeldrive (first seen on the Paris-Dakar cars of 1984) became the norm on the 964 Carrera 4, its physical requirements forcing the other big technical shift for the model – coil spring suspension instead of torsion bars. The evolution of Porsche’s sports car would continue with the 993, with a more radical re-styling, more power,
Late-model Porsche 993 power unit showing dual outlet exhaust and Varioram induction system
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964/993 ENGINE PROFILE
All M64 engines have a ‘964’ number crankcase. The casing is a development of the previous ‘930’ item with holes machined to take the 100mm cylinder barrels. It’s also stiffer and modified to resist ‘shuffle’ of the halves
and a significant revision of the rear suspension. Most importantly the bugs in the ‘new’ M64 unit were ironed out. We’ll first describe the engine as fitted to the Carrera 964, then refer to the developments that became the Carrera 993 power unit. As the Carrera 3.2 headed towards the end of its life, Porsche looked for more performance, in the knowledge that future engines would become even more restricted by proposed and future emission regulations. A catalytic converter in the exhaust system was a must, and more complex electronic engine management control had to be part of the package. Whereas previous engines had been adapted to deal with environmental regulations, this one was designed for the purpose, at its time the biggest production aircooled engine around. Various capacities were considered before the engineers homed in on 3600cc as the necessary size, obtained by the marrying of a 100mm bore with 76.4mm stroke. The result was an engine that, although it retained the essential features of the original 911 unit, was very much different. Having said that (and stripping away the various ancillaries), we are left with a familiar sight: two-piece crankcase, eight-bearing crankshaft, two banks of three separate cylinder barrels, horizontally-opposed but slightly staggered to allow a separate crank journal for each connecting rod, with a cooling fan driven off the
crankshaft. There are six separate cylinder heads and single overhead camshafts to each bank of heads driven by duplex chains from an intermediate shaft below the crank. The dry-sump lubrication relies on an oil tank in the rear right-hand fender, supplied by a pump mounted in the crankcase. In Porsche’s world, some things never change. The re-designed and strengthened crankcase of the M64 engine – in the same aluminium-silicone alloy (AluSil) introduced in 1976 – is in two halves, split vertically, and held by 11 through-bolts which also clamp the main bearing saddles together. The casings are stronger than used on previous engines, eliminating ‘shuffle’ movement against each other, and also modified to accept larger cylinders. The forged crankshaft (lighter than previous engines but with a vibration damper that also drives the air conditioning pump) has eight (59.9mm diameter) main journals, running in plain bearings, contained in the saddles in the crankcase halves, and (54.99mm diameter) connecting rod journals. The aluminium pistons have a raised crown, with cut-outs to avoid valve contact. Each piston moves in a separate, Nikasil-coated, cylinder barrel, which locates in a machined bore in the crankcase and is held by four studs – these also clamp the individual cylinder heads in place. Each cylinder is sealed to the casing by an ‘O’ ring set in a groove at the base of the barrel. On pre-1991 engines there is no gasket between the top of the barrel and the cylinder head. Whereas previous engines had pressed steel air deflectors around the exhaust side of the heads to assist air cooling, the M64 utilised magnesium castings. Although four valves per combustion chamber is generally considered the most efficient, both as a power producer and also to achieve as complete combustion as possible, so making for ‘cleaner’ exhaust gases, Porsche believed their air-cooling would not allow sufficient cooling of the head. As a compromise, the six individual aluminium cylinder heads retained two valves each (49mm diameter inlet, 42.5mm diameter exhaust on all non-turbo 3.6-litre engines) but – for the first time on a production Porsche – each combustion chamber contained two spark plugs. The plugs (which fire together, unlike some twin-plug engines) are inclined in opposite directions to achieve the best possible flame spread within the pent-roof chamber. The twin-spark configuration also allowed the use of a high (11.3:1) compression ratio whilst still allowing the use of 95 octane fuel.
The intermediate shaft (bottom) is driven from the crankshaft by gear (steel or cast iron on 964, alloy on 993) and in turn drives the cams, by duplex chain, and the enlarged-capacity (from 930) oil pump at its other end CLASSIC PORSCHE
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ANOTHER L
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Mick Pacey’s Export 56 company carries out quality restorations, but he’s also a man with ideas that could change the classic Porsche scene for ever Words: Paul Davies Photos: Michael Ward
‘L
ook upon it as Porsche restoration meets Ace Café’, says Mick Pacey as he pores over a set of plans. It’s been a long time in the making, with the sort of dramas that would not be out of place in one of those TV programmes where a hopeful couple set out to build their dream home against the odds, but soon it could be reality. Woad Corner is coming, first to the English town of Newport Pagnell and then – quite possibly – even to your country. Think of a Porsche restoration workshop, a shop and a showroom, alongside a meeting place for enthusiasts, echoing the famous ‘Ace Café’ on London’s North Circular road: nut and bolt engineering, panel crafting and painting, classic car sales, clothing, memorabilia, all combined with a base for rallies, or a venue for shows. And all wrapped up in a 1960s-style Shell filling station on the edge of a town that was one of the birthplaces of the British motor industry.
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We’ve already seen a preview of Woad Corner, at the Goodwood Revival meeting in 2008. There, with help from Porsche GB, Mick Pacey built in plywood and plastic his ‘AFN-inspired’ garage as part of the 60 Years of Porsche celebrations. Now he’s well down the line with the real thing, combining his Export 56 restoration business and Magic of Motoring, which holds worldwide rights to the classic Shell brand. Let’s concentrate on Export 56. Now with ten years behind it, the company’s attentions are focussed on the restoration of Porsches up to 1974 – pre-impact bumper 911, if you like. Export 56 is about full-on restoration; it’s not merely a sales outlet and doesn’t get involved in everyday fixing, fettling and servicing. About the smallest job Mick and his men will tackle is a re-spray – and even then they’ll be keeping a close eye on the metal underneath the paint. Our man Pacey always loved cars. Like many in this
‘Continental’ 356 was a luxury spec Cabriolet for the USA. Around 60 were made, then Ford (Lincoln) sued. There was also to be a ‘European’ version
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EXPORT 56
The VW Transporter accompanies the Export 56 racing 356 to circuits and it’s also used as a general runabout
business, as a young boy he spent his pocket money on Dinky Toy models, and ogled the sports cars in the local showroom, in his case – in the late sixties – a Jensen dealer in Luton. Mick played football professionally for Luton Town, but he admits his performance dropped as the winter season got cold. and he never achieved the success of his father, Dave, who scored for his team in the 1959 Cup Final (although, sadly, Luton lost 2-1 to Nottingham Forest on that occasion). Mick says that as a youngster he could only ever draw pictures or kick a football around, but he had a passion for cars. So, it was a move in the right direction when he used the money he received when his Luton Town contract was terminated to buy a Porsche 914. He went to art college, and then into marketing, re-branding Gulf Oil and working with Shell, as well as handling Volkswagen advertising. All the time he was buying, restoring, collecting, and selling Porsches. ‘I left advertising and ended up working from home. I’d
been restoring cars for around 10 years, just for myself really but people would ask me to find cars for them and do some work’, says Mick. ‘Export 56 came into being about 12 years ago. I’d got a 1956 Speedster, was on holiday in France with a group of friends, had just bought a few crates of Export 33 beer, and the name came out of that. One suspects it wasn’t quite as lager-fuelled as Mick suggests. A marketing man of obvious talent, he didn’t want to be ‘another restoration company’ and – doubtless – saw a wider role for the business. As he says, ‘I didn’t want to be just Mick Pacey Restoration’. At present Export 56 is fragmented. Mick has an office in Newport Pagnell, rubbing shoulders with that motor industry heritage we mentioned before. The Aston Martin service department is next door, and over the road are the brick buildings that once housed the Salmon Carriage Works, which produced bodies under the Tickford name for MG sports cars. Behind the Tickford works is the original
2.7 Carrera RS engine has been rebuilt in the Export 56 workshop and is destined for Hong Kong once the restoration project is complete Mick Pacey bought this unrestored right hand drive 356 1600 Super as a 50th birthday present to himself. The only attention has been a paint job some 28 years back. He says he’ll never sell it, but... CLASSIC PORSCHE
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THEALL AMERICAN HERO Thanks to its moniker unique to the US market, many consider the short-lived Continental as the ‘most American’ of all 356s – it has therefore become a highly-collectable model. But locating one remains a true challenge, as Jason Reich will confirm... Words & Photos: Stephan Szantai
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CONTINENTAL COUPÉ
T
he name Max Hoffman, as you will read elsewhere in this issue, will be forever associated with Porsche’s early success in the United States. As the American importer of the marque, he was instrumental in convincing the German factory to launch the production of the Speedster. He also dreamed up the ‘Continental’ name, employed during the 1955 model year, his feeling being that the American market preferred cars with a name, rather than a simple model number. Rather unexpectedly, one of the ‘big three’ US car
With Ford threatening to sue over the name, Porsche was left to abandon the Continental tag, leading to the introduction of the 1956 356A in the autumn of 1955. Collectors have consequently come to appreciate the 356 Continentals, due to their one-year-only scripts and the fact that they represent the last of the ‘Pre-A’ breed. However, trying to buy the right car can turn into a frustrating exercise. Ask Jason Reich. The San Diego, California, resident has had a long history of vintage automobiles, especially Volkswagens. Over the years,
trying to buy the right car can turn into a “However, frustrating exercise. Ask Jason Reich… ”
manufacturers soon voiced its dissatisfaction with this moniker: Ford. Its newly created division, Continental, was getting ready to launch a luxury model, the Mark II. Sold via the Lincoln dealerships in 1956–57, the virtually handbuilt – and thereby expensive – automobile later turned into a classic in its own right. The Continental became part of the Lincoln line-up in the years that followed, and was even the White House’s vehicle of choice. In fact, President John F Kennedy was riding aboard a stretched ‘clap-door’ version when he was assassinated in 1963...
he has owned desirable pieces such as a matchingnumbers 1950 Beetle and a 1955 ‘standard’ Bus. His current stable still includes a few rare VWs, along with a customised 1950 Ford with a chopped roof – and this gorgeous 356 Continental coupé. ‘My dad and I have always dreamed of owning an early 356’, he told Classic Porsche. ‘Over the years, we would pass stories back and forth about the perfect 356 and we always came down to the same basics – it had to be a Pre-A and a sunroof model. The truth of the matter is that these
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THE BEAST How else do you describe Ian Cox’s 100bhp per litre, 917kg homage to the late, great 911ST? No corners were cut, no prisoners will be taken – cross swords with this hot-rod at your peril… Words: Keith Seume Photos: Chris Horton
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911ST HOMAGE
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DOLPHIN 3 Question: What do you call a Dolphin with a Porsche engine? Answer: A Porphin. Or should that be Dolshe? Delwyn Mallett recounts the history behind this factory-beating hybrid Words and photos: Delwyn Mallett
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t might sound like a really bad playground joke but it could have been worse: it could have been called a ‘Dolshe’! The Porsche factory didn’t see the joke however, they saw it as a threat to their track supremacy and before it could show up their cars, they had it banished. The Porphin featured here was correctly known as the ‘Dolphin America’ but it acquired the nickname that stuck from an article in Sports Car Graphic. Curiously the proffered alternative in the article’s headline, ‘Dolshe’, lacked that important ‘c’ between the ‘s’ and ‘h’ – surely a typographic error! Since 1954, in the up to 1500cc class, the Porsche Spyders had usually been the cars to catch, but the competition had been steadily nibbling away at their advantage. The enemy of small cars is excessive weight and while the competition had been progressively losing weight, the Porsches had been putting it on. Admittedly horsepower had been rising too, but by the early 1960s the RSK Spyder was a heavy car compared to its rivals. In the smaller-capacity racing classes, every ounce of weight saved provided a bonus in acceleration and deceleration. The Porsche mind-set of the day was very much dictated by the type of road-racing at which its cars excelled. Long distance events such as the Mille Miglia,
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Targa Florio or the Le Mans 24 Hours required cars that could sustain many hours of punishment over poor quality roads. However, in Britain and the USA much of the racing was taking place on short and relatively smooth tracks. British sports cars in particular, with the likes of Cooper and Lotus, were becoming ever lighter and lower and giving the Porsche Spyders a hard time. ‘Adding lightness’, as Colin Chapman put it, started being applied to Porsche cars almost from the day they first took to the track. In the USA, John von Neumann, Vienna-born proprietor of North Hollywood’s Competition Motors, applied some drastic weight-saving measures to his Porsche when, in 1952, he cut the roof off one of the first aluminium ‘Gmünd’ coupes to make a racewinning proto-speedster! A more drastic measure was to dispense with the entire Porsche body and put the engine in something smaller and much lighter. That’s what Pete Lovely, a Washington-state VW dealer (and future Lotus GP driver), did in 1955. The second built of two diminutive Cooper streamliner record cars somehow ended up in Lovely’s workshop and, after attacking the tubular frame with a hacksaw, a 1500cc Porsche pushrod engine was shoehorned in and the ‘Pooper’ was born. The Pooper was
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DOLPHIN-PORSCHE soon embarrassing the 550 Spyders, including that of expat Englishman and ace Porsche-pilot Ken Miles, then racing for von Neumann. By the middle of the 1956 season Miles was so impressed by the performance of Cooper’s new ‘Bobtail’, finding it difficult to outrun the 1100cc car, that he convinced von Neumann’s outfit to drop a 1500cc Carrera four-cam into one. This combination, Pooper number two, proved to be so potent that the Porsche factory said “Stop that. Porsche only please”. The Pooper went. Not long after Ken Miles went too, moving on to the Beverly Hills Porsche dealership of another Vienna-born Austrian, Otto Zipper. We published the full story on the Pooper in issue #8 of Classic Porsche. As a journeyman driver, Ken Miles agreed, in 1960, to also drive a Formula Junior car for a new arrival on the racing scene, The Dolphin Engineering Company, based a few miles down the coast in San Diego. Dolphin Engineering emerged in 1958 as a partnership between aerospace engineer and Porsche Speedster racer, Bud Hall and English ex-pat, ex-Cooper, ex-Lotus mechanic John Crosthwaite. Their ambition was to build a Formula 1 car but they started more modestly. Formula Junior had just reached America and their first car was a purposeful space-framed, glassfibre-bodied single-seater powered by a Fiat 1100cc engine. Glassfibre, although heavier than the then customary aluminium, was chosen to keep the price down, and was produced for Dolphin by a local boat builder, Livesay Manufacturing. Dolphin did eventually produce a single Formula 1 car but Crosthwaite left Dolphin in 1962, taking his singleseater expertise to Indy cars and Mickey Thompson (and eventually back to England for a successful career that
included a spell at BRM, followed by designing the Reliant Scimitar). Crosthwaite was replaced by engineer and Lotus racer Don Maslin who adapted the single-seater frame into Dolphin’s new venture, a sports racer. Named the ‘America’ the new car was offered as a rolling chassis, leaving the engine and transmission to be specified by the customer. Maslin widened the Formula Junior frame by four inches and created the body by taking a mould off the rear of his own modified Lotus 11 and, at the front end, adding extravagantly bulbous wings to the nose of the widened single-seater body. The result was not the most harmonious of shapes but it did have a purposeful demeanor with just a hint of Ferrari Testarossa. The extremely stiff space frame was constructed of 3/ -inch round tubes, with square section tubing for the 4 bottom rails carrying the riveted-on aluminium floor. Front suspension was by unequal upper and lower A-arms fabricated from tubing and fully ball-jointed with specially forged stub-axles. The rear suspension used the same magnesium hub carrier as the Formula Junior cars, located by a bottom wishbone, a single control arm at the top and parallel trailing links, again all fully ball-jointed. Shock absorbers were of the coil-over variety and there was a choice of three thicknesses of anti-roll bars, front and rear. The brakes were 11inch Triumph TR discs with Girling alloy calipers and a brake bias adjustment device built in. Wheels were magnesium castings to Dolphin’s own design, 15-inch diameter by 5.5J front and 6.75J rear, running Dunlop 5.00/5.20 and 6.00/6.40 tyres. (Later, the Porphin used 5.50 front and 6.50 rears.) The first customer car completed used a 750cc Coventry-Climax engine, the second was a category up,
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THEWRIGHT
STUFF
Rarely in history have two greater visionaries been drawn together than US Porsche importer Max Hoffman and Frank Lloyd Wright, arguably the greatest architect of his generation. Classic Porsche tells the tale behind the world’s most famous Porsche showroom Words: Keith Seume Photos: Frank Lloyd Wright Archives/Taliesin West and Porsche Archives
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n November 1952, automobile entrepreneur Max Hoffman wrote to the world-renowned architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. His letter was to enquire about a commission to design a private house for Hoffman and his family. The design process was beset with delays but along the way Hoffman also invited Wright to help on another project: a car showroom. Before we proceed further with this tale, let’s take a look in a little detail at the two parties involved – first, the architect. Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867, in Wisconsin, having been baptised Frank Lincoln Wright. The name change came about when Wright was 18 following the divorce of his parents – he chose to adopt ‘Lloyd’ as his middle name out of respect for his mother’s family, the Lloyd Joneses. At the age of 20, Wright arrived in Chicago in search of work. A terrible fire had devastated the city in 1871, so there were plenty of opportunities in the architectural and building trades. Wright soon found work as a draughtsman, eventually working in the offices of the influential architect, Louis Sullivan, later to become known as the ‘father of skyscrapers’. The relationship ended after five years when Sullivan
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discovered that Wright had been ‘moonlighting’ by taking on a number of private commissions without Sullivan’s knowledge. It would be a dozen years before the two would speak again. Wright set up his own office in Chicago (ironically on the top floor of an office building designed by Sullivan) and by 1901 had completed no fewer than 50 commissions for wealthy clientele. His trademark ‘Prairie house’ style, with its sweeping roof structures, was intended to give the impression that his buildings had grown out of the landscape. Wright had a pretty turbulent private life but his work continued to attract the attention of some influential clients. In purely architectural terms, perhaps his greatest triumph was the house designed for Edgar J Kaufmann Sr – better known as ‘Falling Water’. This dramatic building, cantilevered out over a waterfall is, in the author’s mind, the most beautiful house ever built. He also established architectural schools, most notably Taliesin West, at Scottsdale in Arizona. But what of Max Hoffman? As Delwyn Mallett recounted in his fascinating story ‘The Austrian Connection’ (Classic Porsche issue #8), Maximillian Edwin
By taking on two of his projects, Frank Lloyd Wright (left) saw Hoffman (right) as a useful contact to help him make a mark on New York’s architectural scene
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SELLING WITH STYLE
Wright’s plan of the showroom shows signs of several detail alterations – whether these were made at his or Hoffman’s request remains unclear
Hoffmann (as was noted, he later dropped the second ‘n’) was born in 1904 in Vienna and spent his early life as a racing motorcyclist, prior to opening a car showroom in his home city. In the late 1930s, under the threat of anti-Semitism, he fled first to Holland and then, in 1942, to the United States. There, he started a jewellery business before founding the Hoffman (one ‘n’) Motor Company in 1947, initially importing such marques as Delahaye, along with several other European makes on a smaller scale. He first hit the big time in 1948, though, when he negotiated the rights to import Jaguars into the eastern states of North America: the cars were an instant hit. In 1949, he was instrumental in seeing the Volkswagen enter the United States – so successful was he in his endeavours that Volkswagen eventually decided to take over the North American market of its own accord. Hoffman was happy to let things go at the time, but later rued the day he gave in to VW’s advances. By this time a wealthy man, in November 1952 he wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright on the recommendation of Philip Johnson, the well-known architect behind many of the greatest buildings of the era. Hoffman had originally
considered commissioning Johnson to design the house, but decided his designs were too austere. Instead, the latter felt that Wright would be a better choice for the project. Hoffman’s initial letter to Wright suggests that he was unfamiliar with the architect’s work as he asked for photographs of previous commissions. Two years later, Hoffman bought a 2.2-acre plot of land on Long Island Sound, near New York. Wright paid several visits to the site with Hoffman, driven there, so the story goes, at speed in one of Hoffman’s Porsches. A few months later, Wright submitted the first of his designs, which included a huge swimming pool and vast roof structure. Hoffman protested that it was too big for him and his family, so Wright literally went back to the drawing board and came up with a marginally less ostentatious concept, which was also rejected. Finally, Hoffman approved Wright’s third design, a much smaller house based on a simple grid-like form. Although the architect specified brick as the principal material, the client had other ideas, choosing instead materials of the finest quality, such as imported mahogany and granite. The final bill for the Hoffman house was in the region of $500,000 – some five times the original estimate… CLASSIC PORSCHE
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