Museum Porsches for Phillip Island Classic

Words - Michael Browning

Historic racing enthusiasts attending next year’s Shannons Phillip Island Classic are in for a special treat.

After testing the water at this year’s Island Classic, the Porsche Museum is sending up to seven special racing cars from its seemingly inexhaustible collection in Stuttgart to the meeting. And they’re not just any racing Porsches.

The factory’s only all-Porsche Formula 1 car, two Targa Florio road race winners and two Le Mans 24-Hour race victors are among the cars, with a famous early 1950s 550 Spyder thrown in for good measure.

Porsche has made a successful business over the past 58 years building and selling road cars off the back of its factory and customer racing successes. To maintain this historic connection, the company adds the first and last of each model series, prototypes and special factory racing cars to its inventory each year, with the current Museum collection approaching 400 vehicles – nearly two thirds of them in working order.

Visitors to Porsche in early 2008 will get to see more than 80 of the most interesting on display in the brand new Porsche Museum that is currently being built.

Australians, however, have been fortune in previewing around 30 cars in the collection at different times over the past decade in Targa Tasmania, Classic Adelaide and during Porsche’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 1998. The gathering at next year’s Phillip Island Classic will be the most significant seen on an Australian racetrack to date

Heading the list is the Porsche’s first and only wholly-produced F1 car – the Type 804 that raced in only one season, 1962.

When F1 moved to its new 1.5-litre naturally-aspirated engine limit in 1961, Porsche decided to play with the big boys. While it made do with its existing F2 car for the first year, for 1962 the factory unveiled its first purpose-built F1 car.

Featuring a 1.5-litre eight-cylinder air-cooled engine producing 132kW, the Type 804 weighed just 452kg and had a top speed of 270km/h.

American racer Dan Gurney gave Porsche its first F1 Grand Prix win in the French Grand Prix at Rouen and a week later beat Jim Clark’s Lotus to win again in front of 300,000 spectators at the Solitude circuit near Stuttgart.

After its brief F1 foray, Porsche concentrated on sportscar racing, developing a series of legendary 908 eight-cylinder sportscars in the late 1960s.

Two of the most famous of these racing 908s are also heading to the Shannons Phillip Island Classic: the 1969 Targa Florio-winning 908/02 Spyder that contributed to Porsche winning is first World Championship for Makes the same year; and the famous 908/03 Spyder that won the Nurburgring 1000km and Targa Florio in 1970, delivering Porsche its second successive title.

Both are powered by naturally-aspirated 3.0-litre eight-cylinder air-cooled engines developing around 270kW.

Joining this trio in Australia will be two equally famous Le Mans 24-Hour race winners.

When the Porsche 936 won the French endurance classic in 1976, it marked the first Le Mans victory by a turbocharged Porsche. However, it was the 936/77’s victory the following year that is regarded as perhaps the most memorable of all Porsche’s Le Mans successes.

Heroic drives by Belgian Jacky Ickx, German Juergen Barth and American Hurley Heywood saw the 936/77 Spyder claw its way back from a seemingly hopeless 41st place to take a stunning victory in the 1977 race, with Barth driving the two final laps with the car’s 400kW, 2.1-litre twin-turbo engine running on only five cylinders.

Also coming Down Under is the car that gave Porsche victory in its last factory assault on Le Mans in 1998 – the all conquering 911 GT1, based on the 911 road car. The lightweight, hi-tech carbon fibre-bodied GT1 was powered by a 400kW turbocharged 3.2-litre engine and blitzed the field to score an emphatic 1-2 for Porsche in its 50th year.

For classic Porsche enthusiasts though, perhaps the most stirring of the Museum cars visiting Phillip Island is the 550 Spyder that was a member of the factory’s team that took a 1-2 class win in the 1954 Carrera Panamericana in Mexico.

Rounding off the rare collection is the 356 B Carrera GT of 1960 – a famous car that won the then-new Classic Category in Targa Tasmania in 1998, driven by Australian racer, Peter Fitzgerald.

At Phillip Island, Australia’s former Le Mans winner for Porsche, Vern Schuppan will join Museum director Klaus Bischof, Alex Davison and perhaps Jim Richards in demonstrating these fabulous cars as part of the meeting’s Tribute to Porsche.

Up to 100 other special Porsche road and racing cars spanning more than 50 years will also be on the track or on display.

The 2007 Shannons Phillip Island Classic will be held on from Friday, March 9 to Sunday, March 11.