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"Karl, you have to tell us what happened!” Those were the anything-but-vague marching orders I was given in 1998 by the Porsche Club of America’s Betty Jo Turner when we met at Porsche’s Fiftieth-Anniversary celebrations in Stuttgart. I’d already initiated the due diligence needed to confirm that this book’s original publishers had left it out of print long enough for the rights to revert to me. I was beginning the talks with Robert Bentley that would lead to our signing a contract In February 1999 for the creation of a new edition that would bring the Porsche story up to date. So in my conversation with Betty Jo Turner I was trying to ascertain whether it would be a good idea to embrace this immense task.

Betty Jo left me in no doubt that she, at least, thought I should get my skates on and get cracking on the Porsche story. Through the subsequent years I’ve kept her admonition in mind. I knew just what she meant. We all knew “what happened” on a superficial level. New cars came out and were phased out; races were won or lost; personnel came and went and Porsche’s business flourished or diminished. But often we didn’t know why the company and its cars evolved as they did. Nor did we know how Porsche’s business and engineering leaders made the decisions that determined Porsche’s fate. To this writer, the why and how of car-company decision-making are the most interesting topics this business has to offer. So I’ve tried to answer those questions in my portrayal of the evolution of Porsche and its cars.

Like the original book, this one tackles the Porsche story model by model in each Chapter. There are several reasons for this. One is that a Porsche owner will be specifically interested in what I have to say about the car he or she drives. This organization of the book tells the story of their car. Another reason is that this suits my discussion of the various Porsche racing models, each of which has a distinct story of its own. In this new edition Bentley and I have tried hard to find ways to give you quick access to the information you want in each Chapter.

One drawback of this organization, of course, is that readers will find themselves moving forward and backward in time as they progress through the book. Another is that the flow of some Chapters will be interrupted by exposition of events affecting the company more than its cars; the Turbo chapters have been especially vulnerable. Also, some duplication and even triplication of information among Chapters is unavoidable. Overall, however, I hope that this approach will continue to give readers a rich and rewarding sense of the way in which Porsche has evolved through and beyond its first fifty years.

I certainly haven’t lacked incident in limning the story of Porsche over the 25 years from 1977 through 2002 covered by the updated material. This edition picks up where the first left off, taking the front-engined cars from birth to demise—with intense drama for the four-cylinder models—and explains how Porsche replaced its crippling burden of three parallel volume models with the component-sharing New Generation 911 and Boxster. The New Generation was a stunning conceptual breakthrough by Horst Marchart that secured the company’s future and allowed it to invest in such new projects as the Cayenne and Carrera GT.

An important part of this story is the survival of the 911. At several crucial junctions in its career this model, unusual in so many ways, was expected—like the old soldier—to fade gracefully from the scene. The 928 was billed as its replacement, a false step which dimmed the 928’s prospects and, if anything, stiffened the backbones of the 911’s supporters. Then enhanced versions of the four-cylinder cars were expected to steal its crown. This tactic also failed, as did the PFP, a far-reaching program to make all Porsches front-engined. Many at Porsche thought Helmuth Bott’s Type 964 model the end of the 911 line, not reckoning on the flat-six’s sensational rebirth as the Type 993 in the hands of Ulrich Bez and Harm Lagaay. In the crucial year of 1996, when the 993 was all that Porsche had to sell, it responded magnificently. And water cooling proved no bar to the success of the 911’s Type 996 incarnation.

In these pages the controversial yet fabulous 959 lives and dies and the equally controversial four-door 989 is aborted. We find Porsche enjoying great racing success with its 956/962 and its turbocharged V-6 for TAG, then striking the buffers with its CART program—just on the brink of success—and misfiring ignominiously with its V-12 for Footwork Arrows. Overarching these events are the company’s dollar-driven boom of the mid-1980s, its virtual collapse at the beginning of the 1990s and its spectacular resurgence as the Twenty-first Century began. All this occurred against the backdrop of conflict between the Porsches and Piëchs that one business journal called “Crash Test of the Clans.” I’ve never for a moment doubted that it was a story worth the telling.

I hope as well that my experience since writing the original book has equipped me better to understand and explain “what happened.” The 1978 publication of Excellence Was Expected coincided with my return to the auto industry after eleven years as a free-lance writer. I joined Fiat Motors of North America as an executive vice president for two action-packed years during which we imported Fiats and Lancias and added Ferrari to our responsibilities. Then in 1980 I went to England as a vice president of Ford of Europe, with responsibilities for motorsports and governmental affairs. In 1982 this positioned my Ford C100 on the track as the direct rival of Porsche’s new 956. It was no contest!

Parting from Ford in 1983, I set up a motor-industry consulting company in London to work with blue-chip clients in all parts of the world. I stayed in Britain because I’d discovered that I quite enjoyed living there—to the astonishment of the natives. The consulting company’s still going strong, but during the 1990s I started to scratch that itch to write. I was now able to do so with the benefit of having worked for three of the major auto companies (including GM in the 1960s) and subsequently having carried out major research and analysis projects for many more. This gave me a renewed appreciation of the challenges that face executives and engineers at all levels of the industry.

We never did work for Porsche, though it wasn’t for want of trying. In fact in the early 1990s I had several surreal meetings with Arno Bohn and his finance chief Walter Gnauert, triggered by the fact that one of our consultancy’s publications forecast that Porsche was likely to be the subject of a takeover during that decade. In this we were not alone! Bohn and Gnauert aimed to convince me that Porsche had enough money in the bank to weather its lean years and make a comeback as an independent company. Indeed it did, but it had little margin for error. Behind the scenes, Bohn’s manufacturing director Wendelin Wiedeking was beginning the manufacturing revolution that would see him heading the company in 1992 and setting Porsche on course not only to recovery but also to league-leading profitability.

Porsche has changed significantly during a decade of the Wiedeking regime. Hitherto driven by vehicle technology above all, it has since become a more rounded auto producer in which such important disciplines as manufacturing and marketing also have a say. To some of us who have followed the company since its first car-building years, it may even seem to be overcompensating. Porsche’s emphasis on emotion in its communications has left those of us inter ested in its technology increasingly frustrated.

With the help of people both inside and outside the company, I’ve done my best to dig behind the scenes to bring the product story to my readers. Sometimes I had to endure the “help” of company minders, who protested that my questions went far beyond bounds they thought appropriate. Only bland generalities, it seemed, were fit for discussion at Porsche’s press launches. Fortunately the products spoke for themselves, testifying to the engineering dedication and integrity that still underpin the Porsche legend.

My work on this updating was abetted by several other considerations. One was that our consulting company regularly received a blizzard of information on all aspects of the industry from publications throughout the world. I was able to draw on these many sources in compiling this account of Porsche’s history. Another important aspect was that while I wrote the first edition near New York, this time I was based in Europe. Stuttgart was only an hour and a half by air from London. I could and did make a number of visits to research recent history and speak to many of the people—regrettably not all—who had made that history.

A final comment is needed on our computer age. Only through the miracle of e-mail has it been possible for me, sitting now in the wilds of Suffolk, to work on a book of this magnitude with a publisher in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. I live only 23 miles from Cambridge, but it’s the wrong Cambridge! Yet between e-mail, the telephone and several highly productive face-to-face meetings we’ve been able to complete this task, I hope to your satisfaction. And as for the use of word processing to manage, edit and adumbrate text—well, I don’t know how I did it the first time!

Not long before writing these words I received news from the Society of Automotive Historians that their select committee had named me a “Friend of Automotive History” for services to the Society and to automotive history in general. I was deeply moved by this honor, all the more unexpected in view of the two-dozen-odd years I spent away from this discipline. In response, I have to say that automotive history has been a friend to me. In no instance has this been more profoundly the case than the history of Porsche, the car company with which I grew up. I found its history fascinating, and I hope you will as well.

Karl Ludvigsen
November 2002
Hawkedon, Suffolk