Porsche Power : Auto Maker Returns to Indy Racing, but in Someone Else’s Body for Now
Better is half a loaf than no bread. --JOHN HEYWOOD
Better, too, is half a Porsche than no race car.
That apparently was the decision of Porsche officials after their new model chassis failed to measure up against Indy car competition, leading team manager Al Holbert to trot out a 1988 March chassis for Sunday’s opening race at Phoenix--powered by a turbocharged 750-horsepower V-8 Porsche engine.
Chances are that the Porsche entry this week in the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach will be a March, too. And it will probably happen again in the Indianapolis 500, the world’s premier auto race.
So what does that do to the Porsche image?
“The bottom line is that we want the Porsche name in the winner’s circle,” Holbert said. “We would prefer the total package, but we want a win, whatever.”
When the legendary German marque made its announcement that it would build a car to run in the Indianapolis 500, it brought a swelling of pride to Porsche owners and enthusiasts everywhere.
Then came the letdown when the all-Porsche did poorly in two races at the tail end of the 1987 season.
Sunday, in the opening race of the 1988 season in Phoenix, the March-Porsche managed finish seventh as Italian driver Teo Fabi drove a careful race in the Checker 200 for Indy cars.
“I don’t know how many of the things we need to do can happen in time for Long Beach, but I think we will be ready for Indianapolis,” Fabi said. “At some point down the road, we will be in front, but a lot of work has to be done on the engine and chassis.”
Perhaps too much was expected too soon.
Porsches have scored so many victories, over so many years, that its public tends to believe that it has always been that way. The familiar red, yellow and black Porsche emblem has led the way 12 times at the 24 Hours of LeMans, including the last 7 in a row; 16 Daytona 24 Hours, 12 straight Sebring 12 Hours and 10 world team manufacturers championship.
What is sometimes forgotten is that the checkered flags never came straight away with the first efforts.
Who can forget the boxy 4.5-liter Can-Am car in which Jo Siffert campaigned in 1971 that had no chance against the McLarens of Peter Revson and Denis Hulme? A year later, the powerful Porsche 917 driven by George Follmer and Mark Donohue so dominated the series that by 1974 the Can-Am was practically a non-issue.
A revolutionary turbocharged 5.4-liter engine that put out more than 1,000 horsepower helped Porsche sweep the first four positions in 1973 with Donohue, Follmer, Hurley Haywood and Charlie Kemp driving.
The 911, perhaps the most treasured of all Porsche models, finished only fifth in its first outing in the 1962 Monte Carlo Rally. A year later, Gunther Klass drove a 911 to the European GT championship, and similar models won four of the next eight championships.
Dr. Ferry Porsche took his first cars to LeMans to race around the clock in 1951, and the best he could manage was a 20th among 26 entries. By 1955, a Porsche RS Spyder 1500 had won the prestigious Index of Performance at LeMans, opening up a floodgate of future celebrations at the famed French racing center.
Now the thrust of Porsche’s efforts is directed at Indy cars.
To handle that effort, Porsche picked the quintessential team leader--Al Holbert.
Holbert, 41, is said to be the only man around who can design a race car, build it, race it and sell it. And if he did, it would be a Porsche.
Holbert and Porsche have been together since he was 8, hanging around his father’s garage in Warrington, Pa.
“I can’t remember back before I was around Porsche,” Holbert says. “I can remember going to the races with my father when I was barely old enough to get through the back gate at a race track.”
Bob Holbert was one of the first dealers in the United States to handle the sporty German car when it was first imported, and it has been a family business since 1954.
Today, Holbert Motor Cars in Warrington remains one of the country’s most successful Porsche dealerships.
The older Holbert also raced Porsches and drove for the factory team at LeMans in 1961 in a Carrera. With fellow American Masten Gregory, he finished fifth. Bob Holbert also won the 1963 United States Road Racing championship and was named sports car driver of the year by Sports Illustrated.
“I was thoroughly instilled with the spirit of racing while around my father, but I never drove in a race until 1971,” Holbert said. “I was already 25, which is rather old to be starting out.”
Holbert had been well trained, however, but not by his father.
“We had no pupil-coach relationship, which was just as well, because there surely would have been a conflict in personalities if we had. We worked together in the dealership, but as far as racing went, he let me go do it my way.”
It was while Al Holbert was a student at Lehigh University, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering in 1969, that his future as a race driver began to take shape.
During his sophomore year, Holbert worked as a race mechanic for Roger Penske, a longtime friend of his father’s. There he met and became close friends with Penske’s engineer-driver, Mark Donohue.
“Mark was great for me,” Holbert says. “He knew what I wanted and let me drive the cars from the track to the garage. He was very influential in my development, and in 1971 he encouraged me to begin racing.”
Donohue was one of the world’s great drivers, winning the 1972 Indianapolis 500, one Can-Am and three Trans-Am championships before he was killed while practicing for the Austrian Grand Prix Formula One race in 1975.
Holbert’s first competition was in May, 1971, when he drove a C Production Porsche 914/6 to victory in a club race at Summit Point, W.Va. In 1973 he finished second in the Sports Car Club of America’s Trans-Am series and the following year won his first professional race driving a Porsche Carrera with Elliott Forbes-Robinson in a 6-hour race at Road Atlanta.
It was the first of what was to become a record-breaking number of wins in International Motor Sports Assn. competition. When Holbert won the IMSA 3-hour race last September in a Porsche 962 at San Antonio, Tex., it was the 49th of his career. No other driver has won more than 41.
Holbert has also won three times at LeMans, including last year, when he, Derek Bell of Britain and Hans Stuck of West Germany drove the Rothmans Porsche 962C to win by a margin of 168 miles over the second-place car. The victory also enabled Holbert to accomplish the rare Daytona-LeMans double the past two years.
In 1985, Holbert was named director of Porsche Motorsport North America, so it was no surprise when the company sought him out to oversee its Indy car program.
Except that wasn’t the way it actually happened.
Holbert sought them out, helping convince the hierarchy at Weissach that it was time for Porsche to make its move into America’s premier open-wheel racing circuit.
“It was something that had been discussed a number of times, by a number of people,” Holbert said. “I was a catalyst. I spent most of 1984 driving in the CART series with the anticipation of becoming familiar enough with it to entice Porsche to do it.”
In 14 Indy-car starts, Holbert’s best finish was a fourth at Indianapolis, one of the highest ever for a rookie driver in the 500.
“I talked directly with Mr. Bott (Helmuth Bott, head of Porsche’s research and development center) to make him conscious of my program. Toward the end of 1984 the discussions became more serious, and the next year they made the decision to design and build an engine.”
The formal go-ahead came Nov. 5, 1985, when Porsche engineers gave the car its official project number: 2708.
Unfortunately, perhaps, all design decisions were made at the factory in West Germany. The result was that the car, when it was delivered to Holbert for testing last October, looked more like a 1984 or 1985 Indy car than the more aerodynamically sophisticated March and Lola models of 1987.
“Indy cars have become so refined, especially in their aerodynamic lines, that the margins for error can be very minimal,” Holbert says. “The engineers designed the Porsche quite differently from the Lolas and Marches. They literally made an envelope for the chassis instead of using the outer skin of the monocoque to create its body shape.
“Right away we started to realize that maybe we didn’t place enough emphasis on certain things, such as a narrower frontal area, smaller gearbox and lower upper-body skin surface. We may have to admit that it may not do what is was supposed to do. We have to decide if it has design shortcomings, and if it does, how to overcome them.”
The aluminum honeycomb monocoque chassis was built by the Messerschmitt factory in Munich, West Germany. The chassis is 15 feet 3 1/2 inches long, 6 feet 6 1/2 inches wide and stands 3 feet high.
To obtain a benchmark for comparison, Holbert purchased a 1987 Lola and two 1988 Marches to test with the Porsche both in the wind tunnel and on the track.
Holbert did the testing himself on the new road course at Sebring, Fla., on the mile oval at Nazareth, Pa., and on the big 2 1/2-mile super-speedway tri-oval at Pocono, Pa., but Teo Fabi took over the testing chores last month on the Paul Ricard circuit in southern France.
“I consider Teo one of the dozen or so best test drivers in the world,” Holbert said. “That was one of the major factors in our decision to select him to drive the Porsche.”
When Porsche changed top management last December and Peter Schutz was replaced as president by Heinz Branitzki, rumors swept through the racing fraternity that it might be bad news for the Indy car program.
Not so, says Holbert.
“The commitment is the same,” he says. “We have a 3-year agreement with Quaker State and we intend to fulfill it. Our goals remain the same--to have a Porsche in the winner’s circle.
If the Porsche starts at Indy on May 29, it will be the first German-built car in the race since 1948 when Chet Miller drove a Mercedes. It finished 20th after dropping out on lap 108 with no oil pressure.
That was the race that Mauri Rose stole from Blue Crown Special teammate Bill Holland after car owner Lou Moore signaled the EZ sign to both drivers and only Holland took it EZ.
That was also the year that a young Andy Granatelli made it to the Speedway and wound up crashing during practice in his only attempt to make the 500 as a driver.
This will be the second time that Porsche has planned to race at Indianapolis. The first attempt, in 1980, was aborted a month before the race when a change in rules for turbocharged engines made the Porsche P6B noncompetitive.
Ted Field’s Costa Mesa-based team, with Danny Ongais as the driver, had been charged with preparing three cars for the 500 and had done extensive testing at Ontario Motor Speedway.
Field and Ongais were developing a turbocharged version of the 6-cylinder 911 that had won at LeMans.
At the time, however, the United States Auto Club was feuding with the new CART organization, and there was much wrangling over rules. When USAC belatedly established them for Indy, there were rules for 4- and 8-cylinder engines--but none for 6 cylinders.
USAC, at the last minute, informed Porsche that its 6-cylinder car must race with the same manifold boost as the V-8 Cosworth.
Manfred Jantke, Porsche’s director of racing at the time, immediately withdrew the cars.
Why is Porsche so interested now in becoming part of the Indy car scene when it already occupies the highest level of success in sports car racing?
First, and perhaps foremost, is as a marketing tool. It is a modern version of the old stock car slogan: “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.”
It is no different from any other racing sponsor. The car is a marketing billboard, even at 200 m.p.h.
Porsche needs a shot in the arm, especially for the lucrative American luxury car market, which fell off more dramatically after the stock market collapse last October. The day has passed, John A. Cook, president and chief executive of Reno-based Porsche Cars North America, noted recently when customers buy Porsches “so they can throw their keys on the counters of bars in Marina del Rey.”
The cost comes high. The price of a 1988 Porsche ranges from $25,910 for the manual-shift 924B to $81,785 for the turbo Cabriolet.
Secondly, there is an engineering spinoff that occurs during the development of race cars that ultimately finds its way into passenger car design and technology.
And thirdly, the race car becomes a motivational catalyst for employees involved with building and selling Porsches.
There is no catalyst like winning, however, and no one knows it better than Holbert as he and the Porsche 2708 continue on the path toward Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
He would even settle for half a loaf.
