Missing the Point of the 'first Porsche'

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It's always worrying when the mainstream media pick up on a story involving historic motor cars. Real enthusiasts will either be reading, aghast, through half-covered eyes or else checking off the incorrect ‘facts’ that have been reported with a sense of smug satisfaction.

The subject most likely to catch the eyes of our Fleet Street colleagues (or their online equivalents) and push our sort of cars into the headlines is a whopping price tag, real or estimated, for a historic car offered at auction. Add some wartime intrigue and a monumental saleroom gaffe and you’re guaranteed to see a glut of sensationalist articles doing the rounds. This is precisely what happened after RM Sotheby’s failed to sell the Volkswagen Type 64 Berlin-Rome Rekordwagen which had been expected to fetch $20m at its Pebble Beach auction on 17th August.

The post-sale headlines didn’t exactly scream ‘journalistic integrity’ to us. Injudicious and frequent use of the phrase ‘Nazi Porsche’ set alarm bells ringing from the off, but it was the holier-than-thou tone of the so-called experts and collectors who had been consulted which was most disheartening. “My father could have bought that car for $5 million years ago,” one ‘collector’ was quoted by Bloomberg as saying. “It has been passed around for years and no one wants it.” We’re not sure about that – everyone in The Automobile editorial office and the staff at PreWarCar.com, not to mention several thousand Porsche and VW fanatics worldwide, would be more than happy to own this piece of history.

Sadly, as is so often the case when this much money is at stake, the loudest voices are not those of the true enthusiasts, but of the speculators and investors who only know how to measure a car’s value in cold, hard cash. This, we feel, is to miss the point not just of the VW Type 64, but of historic motor cars entirely. “The Type 64 is not technically a Porsche,” another dour commentator noted. “Its engine and most of its parts were supplied by Volkswagen.” Well, quite, as was the case with the first Porsche production models. But then the Type 64 was designed as a banner-waving sports car companion to the utilitarian KdF-Wagen, and Porsche’s design office was responsible for both projects simultaneously.

Other sources pointed out the car’s chequered history and the number of non-original features. That it began life in left-hand drive configuration, was converted to rhd and then back to lhd again was picked up on as a signifier of the car somehow being less legitimate than it was claimed to be. Of course, the reporters failed to mention the initial conversion was carried out at the behest of heroic Austrian driver Otto Mathé, who had been left unable to use his right arm after a motorcycle accident. Mathé, of course, was the car’s long-term owner, buying it directly from his friend Ferdinand Porsche and keeping it until 1995.

Whether or not the car is a ‘true Porsche’, or a Volkswagen, or an original car or a bitsa or anything else is irrelevant. What this car is is a unique piece of motoring and social history, just like any historic racing car. The delicate, streamlined body and tuned (yes, VW-based) engine were at the avant-garde of European racing car design in the 1930s and set the template for every car bearing the Porsche name which followed. The fact that it has had a well-documented and immensely successful postwar racing career, long after it should have ceased to be competitive, just adds to the allure. That it proudly displays the battle-scars and modifications of any serious racer gives it more credibility than many restored cars.

To anyone who is really serious about why old cars matter, the Type 64 is so achingly desirable, so beautiful, so honest and important and so inherently valuable that to even put a price tag on it seems nothing less than crass. There is no Hagerty price index for a VW Type 64, and so a large proportion of those with the means to purchase would simply never consider it.

It is not, and should not be, an ‘investment’: its true value is not easily quantifiable – you either get it, or you don’t. And that’s the point the mainstream media have missed entirely.

Words by Scott Barrett, The Automobile. Photograph courtesy RM Sotheby's.

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