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An expert who kindly consented to check parts of this edition for accuracy made a remark that left me with mixed feelings. “I didn’t realize you were into Porsches so much,” he said. In one sense this was flattering, as I think it was meant to be. He had found a depth of information in the text that had surprised him. It suggested to him that I was personally “into” Porsches in an obsessive way, and that this involvement of mine had led to this book about Porsche cars. The truth is both less than that and more than that.

It is less in the sense that I am “into” all automobiles, not just Porsches. I can’t claim Porsche as a special franchise that is mine alone. But I would admit that I am more interested in the more interesting automobiles, and few among these are more interesting than Porsche. No one who follows the history of the automobile could overlook the contribution made by the cars from Zuffenhausen. And the truth is more than that in an important way: I grew up with Porsches. The cars and the company have been an integral part of my life.

My window on the world of automobiles was opened just after World War II by periodicals, True and Mechanix Illustrated among them, and by the nostalgic scrapbooks of Floyd Clymer. I wallowed joyfully in Clymerania. Through Clymer I ordered a subscription to The Motor of London in 1948, just as I was beginning high school. In the pages of that fine magazine I discovered the glory of the world of cars.

On my desk I have a page clipped from one of the first issues of The Motor that I received, that of July 21, 1948. It bears two photos of a squat-looking sports roadster and the headline, “The New Porsche Sports Car.” It was a report by former Porsche engineer Max Troesch on the Gmünd-built roadster originally intended as a prototype for VW, based on his impressions of the car in Switzerland. Troesch pointed out that “few names are more widely known in the automobile industry than that of Dr. Ing. Porsche,” and if the reasons why this was so were not completely clear to me them, they were soon explained by Laurence Pomeroy, Jr. in his writings in The Motor and in his magnificent book, The Grand Prix Car.

I first set eyes on a Porsche in September 1951, in Watkins Glen, that little upstate New York resort town that was then the most powerful magnet in the country for people who liked sports cars. The Porsche I saw there was a mouse-gray coupe with West Virginia license plates, and humble though it looked among the arrogant Allards and Jaguars it was quite obviously a beautifully made thoroughbred.

My first Porsche road test was conducted in Boston on a 1952 coupe for the MIT undergraduate engineering magazine, Tech Engineering News, through the courtesy of a local dealer. “It is only necessary to ‘wish’ the car in a certain direction,” I reported, “to have it respond quickly and accurately. The brakes were also impressive, the car seeming to crouch down and cling when they were applied.” I made it clear I liked the car, and concluded that “Dr. Porsche’s creation comes very close to being the ideal sports car for the American continent.”

A personal Porsche adventure began in 1955, when with my friend Don Typond I drove my Triumph TR2 from Brooklyn to Hartford, Connecticut, and traded it to dealer Russ Sceli for a 1951 Porsche 1300 coupe. It was a sinister-looking object, black and low to the ground—so low that its front bumper scooped the snows of a New York winter right up the nose and over the roof. I loved its saloon-car comfort and its quirkiness: its split windshield, walnut door cappings and the little cord you pulled out to wind the clock.

I was less happy with the Porsche’s press-and-hope braking system. I took some pride in the skillful way I was able to play tunes on its crash-type gearbox. But during a grim, snowy drive to Princeton this component failed with a hideous moan and a split casing. In Trenton I had it replaced with (argh!) a synchronized Volkswagen transaxle. Later I contracted Alfa Romeo Giulietta fever and sold the Porsche to a man as interesting as the car, writer and radio raconteur Jean Shepherd.

Of course I’d read about the 550 Spyders, but they didn’t roar over my personal horizon until the summer of 1956, when I saw them race at Harewood, Ontario and at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin. At the latter track Jack Manting offered my wife a ride in his Spyder if we would visit him at his Michigan dealership. Unfortunately, when we got there he had the car all apart! At Sebring in 1957 I had my first look at a space-framed 550A.

Racing, meanwhile, put me in touch with Huschke von Hanstein, who was as attentive to newcomers among journalists as he was to fresh driving talent. And in New York in 1958 I met Ferry Porsche, who was in America to represent his late father at the presentation of the Elmer A. Sperry Award for great advances in transportation. It was given then—and rightly—to the creators of the Volkswagen. It was obvious that Ferry Porsche was a modest and fitting heir to the traditions of a great house.

Through the courtesy of the U.S. Army I was able to pay my first visit to Porsche in Stuttgart in 1958. In fact I was billeted at the same Kaserne where the fabled 200-ton Maus had shown it was as maneuverable as the smallest tank in the Nazi arsenal. My introduction to the Porsche works was through one of its leading designers, Leopold Schmid. He had worked in Michigan (at a firm where my father was a top executive) on an adaptation of his Porsche synchromesh design to truck transmissions. The synchromesh couldn’t handle the heavy truck gears, but this contact gave me a chance to talk to Schmid about his work in Gmünd and Zuffenhausen and to see the assembly hall where Porsches were put together.

Between my Army obligations in Germany I put in many Porsche miles in the company of Jesse Alexander who, like Denis Jenkinson and Pete Coltrin, was an addict of the marque. We did some Porsche tests in Europe for Sports Cars Illustrated. Then I went home to turn that magazine into Car and Driver and to test more Porsches, such as the new 356B in 1960.

In 1961 I went back to Europe to have some fun and cause some trouble. The fun was the testing, with Jesse on poplar-lined French roads, of the prototype two-liter Carrera. The trouble came after my Zuffenhausen visit, when Huschke let me see the still-secret components inside the eight-cylinder Grand Prix engine. After that I wrote a story in which I described which shaft turned which way and why. This breach of security landed von Hanstein in hot water, and in his subtle way he persuaded me to write a letter that absolved him of direct responsibility for the indiscretion.

A less troublesome visit to Zuffenhausen followed at the end of 1967 when I talked with Helmuth Bott about his new 907. I saw Bott again the following February, when his white coupes staged their one-two-three finish at Daytona. I met Helmuth Bott’s boss, Ferdinand Piëch, when I interviewed them both at the Frankfurt Show in 1969 about the just-introduced 914. And I crossed paths with racing-car designer Hans Mezger in 1970 when we were in New York for a Society of Automotive Engineers panel about sports-car racing. Another member of the panel was Mark Donohue; that was Mark’s first encounter with the man who played a major role in designing the turbocharged racer that Donohue drove to the Can-Am Championship in 1973.

Hans Mezger and I spoke again in the fall of 1973 when I visited Weissach on my first trip specifically to do research for this book’s first edition. There, at the Can-Am Track, I had an unexpected reunion with a friend from Brazil, Emerson Fittipaldi. He was in the middle of a private test session in a 917/10 Turbo and the prototype of the Carreras to be used in that autumn’s first International Race of Champions.

Emerson relished his laps in the potent Turbo-Porsche. But although Fittipaldi may have felt the session at Weissach was for his benefit, not Porsche’s, Ernst Fuhrmann revealed to me during a later conversation that Emerson was the one being studied. “We have worked with many famous drivers,” Fuhrmann said, “and we find that they are very different. Also, they react differently to different cars, like riders to horses. For example, Fittipaldi was only so-so in the Carrera, but in the Turbo he was outstanding.”

Over the first thirty years of the company’s existence that were covered by this book’s first edition I saw no slackening of the strong, distinctive Porsche spirit. Porsche showed no signs of a comfortable, complacent middle age. Some car companies seem cheerfully blind to the faults of their products. Porsche, in contrast, usually spotted shortcomings long before the press and public and moved to erase them as quickly as prudence and budgets allowed. That’s one reason why this book is so big. The people at Porsche have simply never left the cars alone. I’m confident that they never will.