December 1960: a gloomy silence descends on a test cell in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen. A still relatively small – approximately 1250 staff – but realistically effective car company renowned for competitive performance is ruing the underwhelming result of overreaching expense and complication: a meagre 120bhp. The joint Formula 2 world champions will not be storming Formula 1 anytime soon.
In fact, Dr Ing hc F Porsche AG over-delivered in that inaugural season of 1.5-litre F1. Its frumpy, fussy car finished third in the International Cup for Manufacturers, thanks in great measure to the efforts, both in and out of the cockpit, of Dan Gurney. Fleeing BRM unreliability, he revelled in the consistency of Porsche’s proven 718/2 four-cylinder – whereas the bespoke 787 underperformed – to score three second places and finish fourth in the drivers’ standings. He did so with a long-in-the-tooth flat-four and old-hat drum brakes. The new car he should have been driving would not make its debut until May 1962.
Dan Gurney, 1962 Solitude GP win
Hans Mezger and Hans Hönich eventually coaxed 180bhp at 9200rpm from that air-cooled boxer flat-eight: Type 753. Separate finned cylinder barrels sprouting from a cast magnesium-alloy crankcase carried twin-spark heads containing pairs of valves operated by twin-overhead camshafts driven by bevel gears from a nine-bearing, single-piece crankshaft. Very over-square dimensions – a 54.6mm stroke narrowing overall width – resulted in poor torque (113lb ft at 7200rpm) from a mixture breathing through four 38mm twin-choke downdraught Webers, and compressed at 10:1.
Power was fed to an in-house six-speed – “To keep things buzzing,” according to Gurney – synchromesh transaxle, and then parcelled out by a ZF limited-slip differential. A mechanically driven plastic fan – neatly repackaged horizontally above the engine – churned 1400 litres of cooling air at a theoretical 10,000rpm.
804 only raced in ’62
Helmut Bott’s extruded-steel tubular spaceframe wore aluminium bodywork styled by ‘Butzi’ Porsche, and carried unequal-length double wishbones controlled by longitudinal torsion bars twisted by the pivoting of upper wishbones extended to also operate inboard dampers. The latter were Koni twin-tube affairs, which proved harsher but faster than Bilstein’s monotube. Steering was by ZF rack-and-pinion: a Porsche first. And braking was by disc at last, albeit an annulus bolted at its periphery to the wheel carrier and clamped from within by a dual-piston caliper. Gurney was never convinced by this method.
Type 804 arrived at Zandvoort for the Dutch Grand Prix under strict instruction from Ferry Porsche: return home immediately if uncompetitive in qualifying. Despite “sticking out of it like a giraffe” – and its being made to look like a London bus by the monocoque Lotus 25 – Gurney qualified it 2.2sec from pole. Starting from the outside of a 3-2-3 grid’s third row, he was running third on lap 11 when the gearlever came adrift: “You can’t baby a shift!” Six laps were lost putting it back in its socket.
Aluminium body
Although unimpressed by the car’s eventual retirement – due to another gear-linkage snafu – Ferry was persuaded by Gurney to enter him for Monaco. There, he qualified fifth – 1sec slower than Jim Clark’s pole – only to be biffed into retirement at the opening hairpin by Richie Ginther’s BRM, its throttle stuck open. Ferry now got his way: Porsche skipped the Belgian GP in favour of development.
A much-revised car arrived at Rouen for July’s Grand Prix de l’ACF: upper front radius rods; rear anti-roll bar; revised gear linkage; and repositioned fuel tanks and a detachable steering wheel enabling a lower, more reclined seating position. Having started from the inside of the third row, Gurney benefited from others’ misfortunes to hold third place after 14 (of 54) laps. Albeit no match for Graham Hill’s BRM and Clark’s Lotus, he assumed the lead once both had struck trouble.
Stoked by this surprising but worthy victory – plus Gurney’s besting of weak opposition at the following weekend’s non-championship Solitude GP – an expectant 250,000 lined the Nürburgring in August. Gurney’s pole by 3sec had been guaranteed by a rain-hit final practice, but it was no fluke. He led the first two laps, only to lose 12sec to new leader Hill – and second place to Lola’s John Surtees – when the battery broke free on the fifth lap. Although he recovered this quite quickly, while steadying the battery with his clutch foot, he was unable to overtake mistake-free rivals with more low-speed traction in rain.
Plastic fan
The 804’s development continued apace: glassfibre nose and cockpit surround; wheel discs and shrouded wishbones for Monza; and an electronic clutch disengaging the fan for a 9bhp gain. Gurney’s fifth – no thanks to that newfangled fan – at the US GP lifted him to the corresponding position in the standings. There he stayed. Although there was no official pronouncement, Porsche’s absence from December’s South African finale foreshadowed withdrawal. It has yet to return as an F1 constructor.
At least those mechanics had got to shave their itching beards in celebration at Rouen. Though it would be an exaggeration to say that Type 804 over-delivered, it forever lifted that gloomy silence. Paul Fearnley
Engine 1.5 litres, eight-cylinder boxer
Chassis Tubular steel frame, aluminium body
Power 180bhp
Transmission Six-speed manual
Suspension (FRONT & REAR) Double wishbone suspension with torsion bar springs and inboard shock absorbers
Weight 461kg
I’m going to say it: no front-running Formula 1 car ever had a more unlikely backstory than the Porsche 718. This is a car that in 1961 came second three times in a championship of just eight races (including missing a win in France by 0.1sec), saw Dan Gurney tied on points with Stirling Moss in third place by the end of season, and took Porsche to third in the constructors’, behind only Ferrari and Lotus.
And yet not only was it based on a design by then already fully four years old, but it wasn’t even intended to be a single-seater, let alone a Formula 1 design. Instead it was developed from the 1957 RSK sports car and set on the path to F1 by Porsche realising its super-slippery bodywork and 1.5-litre engine were what was required to do well in Formula 2 of the time. So, shortly after Le Mans in 1958 it converted one of its RSKs to a central driving position, fared in the lights and sent Jean Behra to the F2 race at the super-fast Reims circuit to see what he could do. And despite opposition including works teams from Ferrari, Lotus and Cooper, the answer was pole position by over a second, followed by a comfortable win. At the end of that year the FIA announced that F1 would run to current F2 regulations from 1961 onwards. In the interim, and now designated the 718/2 with proper single-seat bodywork, it became a highly successful F2 car.
The hot seat
And you might think you can guess the rest from there. But actually the 718/2 was never intended to run in the new F1. For that was the job of the Porsche 787, a car derived from the 718/2, but elongated in wheelbase, with all-new front suspension and sufficient other changes to be considered a fresh car. A not very good one as it happened, and after decidedly lacklustre performances at Monaco and Zandvoort, the old soldier was brought out of retirement and asked to step up. Which, as we have seen, it duly did.
Yet despite this, I think the 718 is still a forgotten Porsche, because I guess if anyone thinks about the only two seasons in which Porsche competed as fully fledged F1 constructor, it is its 804 successor to which minds turn because it took Porsche’s first and, to date, only F1 win as a constructor, see below . No matter that Gurney’s “lucky” (his word) win at Rouen came about through attrition of faster cars or that Gurney and Porsche would finish further down their respective title orders than they had with the 718 the year before. It was a winner, and that was that.
Vic Elford was often found racing Porsches, here in the 718/2 in 1960
I’m push-started and the old quad-cam flat-four barks into life easily enough. It’s quite highly strung as you’d expect, so is noisy but lifeless at low revs. It takes off above 6000rpm and by 8000rpm is absolutely flying. But power is limited by both the design’s age and configuration, and it surprises me not at all that Porsche chose to go with a flat-eight for the 804.
The six-speed gearbox is a treat, even though Stirling Moss (who raced it with great success in F2) and Gurney’s regular team-mate didn’t much like it, but the big surprise were those drum brakes, which felt both powerful and progressive, so perhaps Porsche knew what it was doing after all…
Air-Cooled
I never got to grips with the chassis in the short time I had on only part of Porsche’s Weissach test track but it seems stable to me, perhaps overly so, though Stirling thought it was beautifully balanced so I’d be inclined to take his word over mine!
Five-Speed
It is interesting to imagine what Ferrari and the British garagistas must have thought at the end of that 1961 season: “Here’s Porsche, right up with the best of us, with an ancient car never designed to do this job, and they’re doing a brand new one for next year. We could be in a spot of bother here…”
Little did they know that, most of a lifetime later, it would remain the most successful Porsche ever to race at the very top level. Andrew Frankel
Engine 1.5 litres air-cooled flat-four boxer
Chassis Steel spaceframe
Power 165bhp
Transmission Six-speed manual
Suspension (FRONT) Independent with a transverse torsion bar spring system
Suspension (REAR) Independent with coil springs over telescopic shock absorbers; Watt’s linkage
Weight 456kg
Sales were booming in North America and at the helm of the company was a German-born American by the name of Peter Schutz, while the Le Mans box had just been ticked for the fifth year in succession. The stars aligned at the end of 1985 for Porsche to decide to take on the challenge of the CART IndyCar World Series and the Indy 500.
Porsche engine guru Hans Mezger was handed technical responsibility for the power unit, Norbert Singer the chassis. The results were the 9M0 2.65-litre turbocharged V8 and the 2708 chassis, coded after the engine’s capacity and number of cylinders. The target: win the Indy 500.
Disappointment in 1987 with Al Holbert failing to qualify the Porsche 2708 at Florida’s Tamiami Park
LAT Images
The chassis didn’t reach the hallowed asphalt of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the engine never gave Porsche a coveted victory. Both were the result of politics.
Porsche’s 2708 chassis, designed like the 956/962 by Horst Reitter under Norbert Singer’s leadership, never made it beyond two test races at the end of 1987. In fact, it only completed seven racing laps. The downfall of a car that had run for the first time little more than a month before its debut at Laguna Seca in October was being plotted from the off.
Porsche developed its own chassis and engine for its CART assault
Chassis and engine were developed in Weissach, but the running of the car was entrusted to Holbert Racing. It was Porsche’s de facto factory team in the IMSA GT Championship and its boss, Al Holbert, head of Porsche Motorsport North America. Despite the long-standing links with Porsche, he was lobbying for its chassis to be ditched in favour of a March.
Singer remembers talks in the motorhome in Laguna after Al Unser Sr’s retirement with a water pump failure: “The engine was still warm and Holbert was talking about putting our engine in a March chassis. I couldn’t believe it because we’d only just started development.”
‘Indy’ written large on cam covers signalled where its aspiration lay
Unser had qualified in California 4sec off the pace. The team boss then decided to take the wheel for the series finale at Tamiami Park but failed to qualify. The pressure was mounting to switch to the March. Porsche racing director Peter Falk gave Singer the clearance to continue development of the 2708 over the winter, though with a warning. If the car didn’t prove faster than the March in testing, then the 9M0 would race in the back of an off-the-peg March 88C in 1988.
A test was arranged at the Firebird Raceway down the road from the Phoenix short oval, which at the end of the week would host the CART season-opener. Teo Fabi, who had been brought back to Indycars to drive the solo Porsche entry, would try both cars and then a decision would be made on which to race.
But it failed to perform
Singer recalls the events: “Fabi was quicker in the March on day one and then Holbert took the car away, but on day two he went quicker still in our car after we had done some set-up work. We phoned Holbert to tell him, and he said, ‘Sorry, but the March has already been scrutineered and we shall be racing it this weekend and for the rest of the season.’ That night we received confirmation from Porsche that the chassis project was stopped; Holbert had gone to the financial board and told them that it would be cheaper to use the March.”
The engine programme continued through its three-season lifespan and claimed a single win with Fabi at Mid-Ohio in ’89. In 1990, Porsche got its special car, only not as envisaged. March built a radical all-carbon monocoque. A late rule change on chassis construction meant March had to reskin the lower half of the tub in aluminium. Weight was added. At the end of the year, the story ended. There were no more wins and the project closed after the planned three years at a time when car sales were tanking in the US. Gary Watkins
Engine Porsche 9M0 2.65 litres, V8, turbocharged
Chassis Aluminium monocoque with composite core
Power 750bhp
Transmission Six-speed manual
Suspension (FRONT & REAR) Double wishbones, inboard springs and dampers
Weight 703kg
Summer 1981 was momentous in McLaren’s history, and not just because John Watson triumphed at Silverstone. The win ended a victory drought dating back to 1977 and was the first since the Marlboro-brokered merger at the end of 1980 between the floundering team and Ron Dennis’s Project 4 operation. More significant were the conversations that led it to the door of Porsche for a supply of engines. Three drivers’ and two constructors’ titles followed as McLaren re-established itself as a powerhouse of F1 with a V6 wearing TAG Turbo badges.
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McLaren technical director John Barnard understood that Watson’s British Grand Prix win with the Cosworth-engined MP4/1 was “more luck than judgement” given that he led only the final eight laps after passing René Arnoux’s ailing turbocharged Renault. “Around that time, I turned to Ron and said, ‘We’re going to need a turbo if we are to challenge these guys,’” recalls Barnard.
Teddy Mayer, joint MD with Dennis, reckoned he could source a supply of Renault V6s. “I didn’t think it was very good’,” says Barnard. If there wasn’t an engine out there that would meet his standards, who could build one? “Then someone, probably Ron, said, ‘What about Porsche?’ My thought was that Porsche wasn’t going to mess around with us, but Ron picked up the phone and we were over there a day or two later to talk about what we wanted.”
Good job Ron Dennis made that call to Porsche
What Barnard wanted was an engine that could be mounted as a stressed member, as narrow a vee as possible and the ancillaries on the front. “I didn’t want anything down the sides because at that time we were working on ground-effect underfloors,” he explains.
The late engineer Hans Mezger remembered in 2016 the question Dennis put to him on their first meeting in August ’81: “He asked, ‘Does Porsche have an F1 engine that can win races and, if not, can it develop one?’” Answers were ‘no’ and ‘yes’. The new 1.5-litre twin-turbo V6, codenamed Typ 2623 by its maker but known to the world as the TAG Turbo Engine or TTE P01, would be designed and built by Porsche on ‘an external development basis’.
That meant funding was down to McLaren, and Barnard remembers the team having the finances for the first six months of development only. Enter Mansour Ojjeh and his family’s Techniques d’Avant Garde, already a Williams sponsor.
The MP4/2C fitted Alain Prost’s smooth driving style
McLaren pushed Porsche hard in development. Mezger arrived at an 80-degree vee angle, concluding that it “would allow all of McLaren’s packaging requirements”. At almost the same time that the engine fired up for the first time in late ’82, FISA boss Jean-Marie Balestre dropped his bombshell. Flat bottoms would be mandated between the axles for ’83, doing away with venturi underwings that Mezger’s masterpiece was designed to optimise.
The full potential of the McLaren-TAG combination might have never been seen, but there was no doubting it when it debuted in an MP4/1 at the end of 1983. When the bespoke MP4/2 arrived for ’84, it swept all before it, Lauda taking the title. Prost made amends the next season with five wins with the MP4/2B, followed in ’86 with a second crown with the C spec. GW
Engine TAG-Porsche TTE PO1 1.5 litres, V6 turbocharged
Chassis Carbon-fibre honeycomb monocoque
Power 800bhp
Transmission McLaren/Hewland six-speed manual
Suspension (FRONT & REAR) Double wishbones, pushrods
Weight 540kg
Pre-season testing prior to the introduction of the Gen3 Formula E car for the 2023 campaign was going badly – not only for Porsche but for Formula E. The generally undercooked design of the Gen3 machine had multiple critical issues, the most serious of which was that drivers couldn’t brake in the event of a powertrain shutdown. This caused sizeable accidents, including Théo Pourchaire ending a very wild ride in private testing atop a sandbank at the Calafat test circuit in Spain!
When Pascal Wehrlein had a similarly scary moment in an early version of the Porsche 99X Electric at the pre-season Valencia test in December 2022, concerns had to be addressed.
An emergency braking system was implemented but, overall, it had been a scatty start for the Gen3 era. Even so, it was one that all the manufacturers eventually overcame. And Porsche did more than that – it quickly established itself as the pacesetter in the third epoch of Formula E. This was down to a combination of an efficient and robust technical package (led by designer Olivier Champenois), managerial ruthlessness (Florian Modlinger) and an explosive talent at the wheel (Wehrlein).
Remarkably, Porsche’s works team did not take a title in that first season of Gen3 – drivers’ or teams’. It was Jake Dennis who lifted the drivers’ silverware with Porsche customer team Andretti. The manufacturer put a brave face on it, but it stung a fair bit. Redemption came the following season, when Wehrlein swept the board after a brilliant campaign that included three wins, at Mexico City, Misano and London.
Porsche’s Gen3 racing car could reach 60mph in 2sec
Amid Wehrlein’s success, it was immense internal drama off the track that was really hitting the headlines in 2024. Wehrlein’s campaign had been helped to an extent by team-mate António Félix da Costa taking four wins, but a poor opening to the campaign ruled the Portuguese out of contention to challenge his team-mate. With a feeling of spiky rivalry, the two fell out at the start of the third Gen3 season in 2024-25. That was the swansong at Porsche for da Costa, who departed for Jaguar and was replaced by Nico Müller, whom Porsche perceived to be a more neutral operator entirely in keeping with his Swiss nationality!
Throughout four seasons of Gen3, the Porsche was the most successful, with 23 wins. More than that, it has easily become Porsche’s finest single-seater of all time, with two drivers’ titles for Wehrlein (2024 and ’26), two manufacturers’ crowns (’25 and ’26) and one teams’ trophy (’25).
The Porsche 99X Electric was also two cars in one. The original Gen3 spec was followed by the Gen3 Evo, which featured the use of all-wheel drive in the qualifying duel, grid launch and Attack Mode phases of the ePrix weekends. At these moments the car unleashed 350kW of power via its Porsche powertrain cluster design, which featured inverters, gearbox and motors.
A nod to the Rothmans livery at the 2026 London ePrix
Wehrlein’s 2025-26 title in London came with a retro flourish, he and Müller channelling their inner Stefan Bellof and Jacky Ickx. To celebrate Porsche’s 75th anniversary in motor sport, the team had liveried the cars with a nod to the classic 956 and 962 Rothmans colours of the 1980s. This followed other revivals of colour schemes, including a comeback for the ‘Pink Pig’ – a tribute to the 917/20 at the 1971 Le Mans 24 Hours. While that car was unsuccessful, 55 years later Müller brought home the bacon in Porsche’s home Berlin ePrix.
Wehrlein’s victory with the ‘Rothmans’ livery in the first race in London elevated him from third in the championship to first. Even a finish the following day in 14th after a battle with da Costa could not prevent the Porsche star becoming Formula E’s second double champion. Sam Smith
Engine Porsche E-Performance powertrain
Chassis Carbon-fibre monocoque chassis built by Spark Racing Technology
Power 350kW/470bhp
Transmission Single-speed
Generator Brake/energy Recovery Up to 600kW; 50% of drive energy in the race from recuperation
Weight 862kg (inc driver)
