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Through 1984, 1985, and 1986, the Carrera provided buyers a 231-horsepower engine (at 5,900 rpm) for everyone but U.S. and Japanese buyers, whose nations had the strictest emissions limits. Those two got along with 207 horsepower. Five-speed gearboxes in the normally aspirated cars made good use of the power and torque available. The company offered Coupe, Targa, and Cabriolet bodies in standard narrow body configurations, and buyers could option the cars with the front spoiler and rear wing of the Turbos, or they could order the wide body Turbo Look for the coupes. Because of the longer suspension arms and the greater torsional loads on the Turbo Look bodies, those structures received extra reinforcement from Weissach, similar to the Cabriolets. For 1985, the Turbo Look spread to Targa and Cabriolet models. Side impact door beams of high-strength steel, new this year, obstructed the intrusion of vehicles into the passenger compartment in broadside accidents. The list of small changes year after year kept specifications writers and advertising copy creators busy counting words as they filled pages with what was “New New New.” The Turbo returned to U.S. markets for model year 1986. Weissach engineers had tamed its emissions using new ignition and fuel mixture controls, an oxygen sensor, secondary air injection, and a three-way catalytic converter. The engine delivered 282 horsepower for U.S. and Japanese buyers. Catalysts, standard on U.S. normally aspirated Carreras, were optional on German market cars, reducing output of those engines to the same U.S. specification of 207 horsepower.
For 1987, Gerhard Schröder’s electrically operated convertible top became an option on Carrera models and it was standard on the newly arrived Turbo Cabrio. The company introduced a Turbo Targa at the same time. Drivers noticed a change in shifting with Porsche’s new G50 transmission using Borg-Warner synchromesh. Reverse gear moved far to the left and forward, creating four planes of gears for the driver. A hydraulically activated clutch connected the new transmission to a new rear axle attached to the body with new rear torsion bars. “With the G model, every year we made new things on the car.” — Bernd Kahnau The 959 models began production. Engineering prototypes, 16 in all, emerged in 1985 and underwent extensive testing. Another 21 pilot production cars appeared in late 1986. A former bakery near Zuffenhausen assembly turned out the series 959 cars, delivering 113 in 1987. The price remained 420,000 DM; however with the exchange rate slipping from 2.2 to the dollar down to 1.8, the relative price in American currency rose to $240,000. Another 179 cars emerged during 1988. (Porsche assembled a final 8 in 1992, fabricated from extra parts.) This brought the total to 337 cars. In retrospect, calculating a price in U.S. dollars proved a pointless exercise. Bott and Schutz understood that meeting USDOT and EPA regulations meant additional delays and expenses. The production run had sold out without accounting for deliveries to the 50 U.S. buyers who had left deposits. Some 30 of those individuals had arranged for delivery and service through Pennsylvania Porsche racer and dealer Al Holbert. Holbert had contracted with the new Porsche A. G.–owned distribution organization called Porsche Cars North America (PCNA) to import these vehicles. Zuffenhausen began the process, stripping the cars of all interior appointments. PCNA identified these vehicles on shipping and customs documents as race cars not legal for road use. When the first eight reached the States and the EPA did its inspections, it noticed full vehicle identification numbers (VIN), not simple racing chassis tags, and it changed its mind. Subsequently, Porsche delivered something like 16 of the cars to U.S. buyers under strict qualification that the cars remained outside America. Over time, all these and a few more entered the States. EPA and DOT regulators did allow one example in, destined for a recognized automobile museum in southern California that belonged to Porsche 935 racer and car collector Otis Chandler.
NO 959 IN AMERICA In a postmortem on the cars within months of those final 1992 deliveries, Helmuth Bott admitted he was not unhappy about the U.S. restriction. “Your system in consumer protection goes 100 percent against the product and the company. And I really am glad to have all the years of so much strength and safety in our cars,” he said. “But we had stupid things, like a NASA engineer who was stopped at a red light. And a woman in a Cadillac drove into the 911. Afterwards he couldn’t use his legs anymore. We really had no responsibility for the accident. And what did we have to do? “We bought a Cadillac the same age. We found a 911 the same year. We took dummies the same weight like the man and his wife. We put them in the car and we made the accident at Weissach. And we could tell people that there is no possibility for any system to be safe if you get [hit by] a Cadillac from behind at 50 kilometers speed onto a car standing at a red light. “The whole thing cost us I think one and one half million because we had to do so many things to show there is really no fault from the car. At the end it was a compromise. The Cadillac driver didn’t have money so they said, ‘Well, there is Porsche who makes the seat. They have to pay.’ There were other incidents. A young girl with a turbo. Others. “And so if we were going to bring the 959 to the United States and anybody would drive at 320 top speed and have an accident. . . . That was the thinking behind the decision.”
By the time production of the Porsche’s 959 ended, enthusiasts and journalists recognized that this vehicle had defined a new type of automobile: the supercar. Mastering the various technologies that appeared in it and functioned on it brought Weissach engineering consulting clients for another decade. The cars appeared on the cover of every automobile magazine and hundreds of other publications that seldom paid attention to cars. But that weighed against the world economy as it shifted gears and continued to take the German currency down against the U.S. dollar. The exchange-rate balloon—and other business dreams—popped on October 19, 1987. The Dow Jones Industrial average lost nearly 23 percent of its value in a day, dropping 508 points. Porsche production had floated along in 1987, slipping to 48,520 cars with U.S. sales dropping below half, at 23,632, for the first time anyone cared to remember. For 1998, the American sales numbers dropped a third again, to 15,737. Peter Schutz cut production acutely. For 1989, Porsche introduced long-planned models created in happier, more confident days. With these launches, it still hoped to boost sales. A small run of Club Sport Carreras appeared, from which Weissach engineers had removed 110 pounds of air conditioning, insulation and undercoating, and power seat and window mechanisms. Raising the redline to 6,850 rpm brought horsepower up to 255 for rest-of-world markets and 234 for U.S. buyers. The company manufactured 381 of the coupes in 1987 and just 97 in 1989, of which fewer than a dozen reached American customers. Schutz slowed production further, furloughing employees for a week each month to keep them on payroll and the company alive.
Nearly a decade after Bott had shown Schutz his Speedster, Porsche offered a production version of that to buyers. Inspired by the original 356 from 35 years earlier, the new car incorporated a double-humped fiberglass tonneau cover over the rear package area that also hid a tricky manual top. The factory assembled 2,065. However, Schutz and Bott left Zuffenhausen before the first Speedsters drove off the assembly line. Historian Karl Ludvigsen learned that each 959 had cost Porsche 1.3 million DM, almost $720,000 at the time and nearly three times the selling price. But the convulsing economy made every miscalculation more apparent. The legacy of Ernst Fuhrmann’s expansion was three car lines that shared virtually no parts in common. For Bott, the previous eight years had been spent resurrecting and reenergizing the company’s most profitable car line and he paid rather less attention to the water-cooled products. He acknowledged that fact and he accepted the responsibility for the 959’s failure to make money even though an enthusiastic board had supported his proposals. He retired early, at age 63. Still looking for someone to blame, the supervisory board eyed Schutz. Until the world economy undercut businesses and investments of all kinds, Schutz had exceeded Ferry’s job requirements: He had made the company money and he had reunited the staff. However, his wife Sheila never had felt comfortable or welcome in the Porsche/Piëch world. She had opened a business in Florida at the beginning of 1988 and was spending more and more time there. Schutz read the handwriting on the wall. The board willingly let him out of his employment contract a year early. It was ready for change.
THE THIRD GENERATION: 964 “When we went ahead to design the 964,” Hans-Peter Bäuerle explained, “we took all that we had learned from the G model and we applied it. You could say that the G model was the test object for the 964. The new rear axle, the G50 that came in 1986? That axle was divided. And that was with the idea of the four-wheel drive of the 964. That was because Bott already had decided that we would take ideas from the 959. “That rear axle with the torsion bar was a patent of our old father Ferdinand. And nobody was allowed to put that out! The only argument that could change that—or discard it—was the fourwheel drive because we had to go to the front with a driveshaft.” The driveshaft and front differential helped the engineers with body stiffness as well. The driveshaft necessitated a higher tunnel, which provided a greater cross section. “So we said, ‘Great! If you need a driveshaft, we give you a good space for it!’” Bäuerle said. “This was the first car for which we made the endurance run on the test bench. The convertible, the G model, and the 928 ran 8,000 kilometers on the Weissach endurance road; that was the criterion for releasing them. “And for 964 we made hydro pulse tests. We worked together with the University of Darmstadt because they had done it already for airplanes. They had a 16-channel rig, eight hydraulic cylinders in front, eight in the rear. This configuration allowed the lab to exert every force, every moment that occurs during driving,” Bäuerle explained. The challenge is operating the bench so the correct forces are applied. “If you have the wrong forces, you make the whole body into powdered sugar. Everything is shattered.” It required years of track time to measure the forces that occurred and then to calculate the pressure applied by the hydraulic cylinders to get an accurate, meaningful test.
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