History is made up of numbers. For the car, other factors also count: technology, form, performance, safety and quality. Not for all manufacturers: the few who have gone down in history have built models with a long life and great charm, often reinforced by sporting successes. Some brands, and Porsche is one of them, have added something more: imagination and the ability to dare, always looking ahead.
It was the year 1948, on the 8th of June of seventy years ago, the first Porsche was born. A name that has gone down in history and that can boast numbers in every sector. Which we do not want to report here: among chronologies and lists of models, dates and data, many have already committed themselves to listing them. Yet, there are also other elements involved in considering history: for example, geography. We have waited for the moment, on holiday in the heart of Europe, to pass from a small town to the northern borders of the Czech Republic: in Bohemia, in the province of Liberec, lies Vratislavice nad Nisou. Known to a few by its current name, at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was called Maffersdorf: so someone remembers it, perhaps, as the birthplace of Ferdinand Porsche, on September 3, 1875. From the landscape to the character of the inhabitants, there is a certain harshness: hardened by hard work, respectful of the rules, attached to the fundamental values of life and without losing sight of simplicity. A bit like the mountaineers of many other places on a continent who, with the passing of time, have changed borders, languages and ethnic preponderances; often forced, depending on the complex events of the last century. But capable of dreaming.
Writing about the anniversary of a car manufacturer, it's easy to confuse elements such as brand, symbol and products: it's better to point out some passages. Porsche was founded on 25 April 1931 as a consultancy and design studio, while the date of the first car with this name - known as Number 1 - was brought forward to the opening. Instead, the symbol that identifies the models, the shield with the symbols of the city of Stuttgart and Baden-Württemberg, arrived only in 1953 at the request of the American importer Max Hoffman: it is said that, at table with Ferry Porsche, he sketched it at the time on the napkin.
A little more geography: the car manufacturer is identified with Stuttgart, exactly in Zuffenhausen, but already during the war, the Porsche family moved to Gmünd, returning to their native Austria; Ferdinand had studied and worked in Vienna in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
We, coming back from Bohemia, always gladly go back from the locality among the mountains of Carinthia: not only for the pleasantness of the landscape, it is interesting to see the original buildings where the Number 1 was born and the next fifty-two examples of the Porsche 356 were built (135 km/h with only 35 horsepower, just to understand how far ahead it was), starting in July 1948 with the chassis number 356.001, while the following series were born in Zuffenhausen, reaching over 78 thousand cars until 1966. But it is not yet time to leave Gmünd: the visit to the Porsche Museum, created by the enthusiasm of Helmut Pfeifhofer (www.auto-museum.at), is an immersion in the charm and history of a brand that, at this point, it is essential to remember, always arouses passion.
This is where we find a focal point in the history of the brand: the passion that over time has transformed many owners, even occasional ones, into "porschisti". What are the elements that trigger the spring? Too easy to allude to the desirability of the various models: if it may have been true with the 356, beautiful and shapely, bold in performance and simple in maintenance (below, there was the concept Volkswagen Beetle, another great idea of Ferdinand Porsche). The same applies to the 911, a sports car that has been produced longer than any other: since 1963, a genealogy that has always evolved but has always been recognised as such, series after series until the next generation, expected at the end of the year. It is apparently more difficult to justify the passion for models that, over time, have not had the same charm, even today, become cars (almost) mass: think of Cayenne or Macan, Boxster or Panamera.
Read on in the second part. https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d6525c0ecfb8000ad17502b/seventy-years-of-porsche-part-2-5d9367a5e3062c00b016bad0
Thanks for your attention!
