Porsche 356/2: first among sequels

By Matt Prior

| 24 Sep 2024

Classic & Sports Car – Porsche 356/2: first among sequels

I wonder, if you own a Ford GT40, an AC Cobra or a Porsche 356, whether you get tired of telling people it’s the real thing.

“That’s a very nice car. Did you make it yourself?” asks a walker as she approaches this 356 in the car park where we’re photographing it.

We didn’t, of course: this 356 is no plastic Speedster evocation, but the oldest Porsche sports car in the UK and just the 32nd 356 ever made, produced while they were still being built in Gmünd, Austria, rather than at Porsche’s contemporary home in Stuttgart.

A rare chance to experience Porsche in its purest form, with a 356/2 Gmünd

That makes it an exceptionally special car, and it is one that would be “a bookend” for even the most serious of Porsche collections, says James Cottingham of DK Engineering, which owns this very early 356 and is looking it over ahead of finding it a new keeper.

This example is so original that previous owners have used it as a reference for other 356s.

About 40 years ago it was repainted, but the cabin hasn’t been touched.

The car’s rarity, its place in history, its known background and exceptional originality mean its value is something like £2.7m.

The Porsche 356/2 has a split windscreen

That in itself is unusual for a car which – and our walker is unwittingly correct in this respect – has constituent parts borrowed from a random Volkswagen.

The 356 and the Porsche family’s engineering story is heavily mixed with that of Volkswagen and, therefore, with the 20th century’s darkest times.

Ferdinand Porsche was a brilliant engineer, and an influential one: there are photos from 1902 of him driving Archduke Franz Ferdinand around.

‘The Porsche 356/2 appears light and delicate. Classic cars typically look smaller than new ones, but this is no lower than a modern 911’

By 1910 he was competing in cars he had created; by 1914 the German military was using the Hunderter, a 100hp artillery tractor he had designed.

Under his technical directorship in the 1920s, Daimler-Benz created the SS and SSK sports cars.

Later, as an independent consultant, he patented laminated torsion-bar springing and swing-axles with radius arms.

Then Dr Ing Fritz Neumeyer, the head of Zündapp motorcycles, sponsored Porsche’s first attempts to design a mass-market people’s car, but after three prototypes were made, with water-cooled, five-cylinder radial engines at the rear, the idea was shelved.

The Porsche 356/2’s big steering wheel limits kneeroom

Yet Porsche’s dedication to rear engines had taken hold.

In 1931, NSU also showed an interest in making a popular small car to supplement its motorcycle range, and it’s here that the real forerunners to the Volkswagen were built.

The costs were also too high for NSU, and in 1933 the idea was again abandoned.

But Porsche soon convinced Adolf Hitler of his suitable people’s car design: a four/five-seater capable of 60mph and 40mpg, he said, with air cooling stipulated because most buyers wouldn’t have a garage to keep the cold at bay.

The indent on the Porsche’s front bench gives the gearlever room to move around the gate

By 1936, yet another three prototypes had been produced, this time constructed by Mercedes-Benz.

With slight variations in the design, they were crude in appearance and had no rear windows, but the idea was finally a going concern.

Ferdinand’s son, also named Ferdinand but known as Ferry, was by then working on the project.

Under his direction, 60 prototypes were tested across more than 1.5 million miles.

The Porsche 356/2’s simple interior includes a smattering of central switches on the dashboard

Ferdinand Snr travelled to Detroit to study American production methods, and plans were drawn up to make one million cars a year, with a labour force of 30,000.

But when production did eventually start in Wolfsburg, the world had changed and the factory wasn’t producing Type 1s.

By 1945, Wolfsburg had barely turned out a single Type 1, but it had made 55,000 Kübelwagens, the Axis version of the Jeep, plus a further 15,000 amphibious variants of it.

Porsche continued to engineer military machines during the war, but in 1943 the family company relocated to a former sawmill in Gmünd, Austria, to avoid the bombing.

‘It feels a bit nervous – or at least I do. Even in top the Porsche 356 gathers speed in a way you don’t expect from just 40bhp’

Soon after hostilities ended, both Ferdinands were imprisoned by the French: Porsche Snr had been a member of both the Nazi party and the SS.

Ferry was released after six months, and he went on to design the incredibly pretty Cisitalia Type 360 Grand Prix car, for which he got paid even though it never raced.

Still in captivity, Ferdinand Snr was asked to cast his eye over the design of the Renault 4CV.

The family eventually met his bail and he, too, returned to Gmünd in Austria, where Ferry had been busy designing the Porsche 356.

The Volkswagen flat-four sports twin carburettors and is tuned to give 40bhp

The original prototype, which the Porsche company still owns today, used plenty of Volkswagen components, but was exotically mid-engined and had a complex spaceframe chassis.

When turning that into a production vehicle – the 356/2, this very model – the Porsches adopted a layout more consistent with their design heritage: the flat-four Volkswagen engine, gearbox and some suspension, all in their original locations, with a monocoque chassis.

It was simpler and cheaper to make, but it was also more practical, with notable luggage space behind the front bench.

The Porsche 356/2’s engine idles quietly, but lets out a sporty rasp when the revs rise

The Austrian government, short of money and resources, agreed that Porsche could produce the 356/2, provided every one built was exported.

Between 1948 and 1951, Porsche, with the assistance of various local suppliers because the factory was so small, would turn out 52 of them – 44 coupés and eight roadsters – before the company returned to Zuffenhausen in Stuttgart, where it could make 60 a month.

This particular coupé was part-assembled by Tatra, in Salzburg, and imported to Sweden along with 14 others by Swedish truck maker and then Volkswagen importer Scania Vabis.

Big overhangs enhance the Porsche 356/2’s swooping, quasi-futuristic lines

Its well-documented history reveals that it was completed on 12 June 1950, approved in Gothenburg after its arrival on 9 November, and then registered by Automobilfirma Per Nyqvist AB nine days after that.

In all, it has had 16 owners, including DK.

Our friendly walker has now moved on, impressed by the Porsche 356’s age.

In the metal, the 356/2 appears light and delicate, with slender panels that feel as wispy as a light aircraft’s.

An early Porsche 356/2 undergoes rudimentary aerodynamic testing

Classic cars typically look much smaller than new ones, but this is no lower than a modern Porsche 911, at 1.3m tall.

The body overhangs the skinny wheels by a huge margin, but it’s swoopy and space-aged – like somebody’s past vision of the future.

It was later found to have a drag coefficient of less than 0.30Cd.

When The Autocar saw the 356/2 at the 1949 Geneva show, it said this ‘elegant coupé’ from ‘the designer of the pre-war Auto Union Grand Prix cars’ contained ‘great technical interest’.

The old sawmill in Gmünd, Austria, to which Porsche relocated during WW2

In 1951, when the magazine finally drove a 356 – albeit then a Stuttgart-made one – it found it gave ‘the characteristic impression of a really well streamlined car’ and that ‘the acceleration above 50mph is quite beyond what would normally be expected from the engine size’.

And if you’ve ever spent time around an old Beetle, there is no mistaking this engine.

Open the 356’s diddy rear hatch and there it is, the Volkswagen flat-four, repurposed for the 356/2 from an existing vehicle.

Was it a Type 1 or a Kübelwagen, I wonder? More likely the latter.

Chrome details on the Porsche 356/2

It does, though, wear twin carburettors rather than a single one, and when fitted it was fettled to make 40hp instead of the original 25hp.

The interior is delightful.

Fall ungracefully on to the soft bench seat – quite cramped for kneeroom behind the big steering wheel – and it takes a bigger slam than I’d first dared to swing the door closed.

The Porsche 356/2’s tall tyre sidewalls aid ride quality

Only one external door lock was fitted to 356s, on the kerb side of the car.

This one is on the left, previously thought to be an error until the DK team remembered that Sweden drove on the left in 1950.

There is only one instrument, a central speedometer.

To its right, a tidy rubber grommet covers the space for the oil-pressure gauge while the original is away for repair.

Chassis flex adds to the steering’s vagueness, but the Porsche 356/2 is enjoyable on the road

A smattering of central switches finishes off the dashboard.

The rest of the interior consists of exposed cream paint, timeworn leather, a really attractive tweedy carpet and three pedals, floor-mounted and poking from the footwell.

Behind the seats there’s a charming-looking, carpeted and quilted storage area.

A twist of the key and a prod of throttle brings the Volkswagen engine to life, and it idles quietly.

Porsche’s mid-engined prototype gave way to the rear-engined 356/2, which got a decent amount of luggage space behind the front bench

A spindly gearlever topped by a plastic ball the size of a skateboard wheel emerges just ahead of the front bench, which is indented to give the lever the space it needs to move.

There’s no plane that the gearlever reverts to; it just wafts between gates.

People say the gearshift quality is poor, including The Autocar after its 1951 test drive, when it was reported that the gearbox was ‘not by any means quiet, nor is it a very easy one to change gear’.

This car has no synchromesh on first and second, so the gears demand careful selection and double-declutching, but otherwise it feels fine to me; it’s certainly more precise than the ’box in my 1973 Beetle.

This Porsche 356/2’s cabin is highly original

The throttle weighting is positive, the pedal spacing broad and the brake pedal long but, eventually, effective.

Gratifyingly, I don’t stall it, nor mis-select a gear, and the flat-four, which makes its peak power at only 4000rpm, has a broad spread of what could loosely be termed as power.

As in, the car doesn’t make a lot of it, but it’s consistent around the rev band.

Fourth gear is long, so the engine settles easily and flexibly into a cruise.

Just 52 Porsche 356/2 Gmünds were built before production moved to Stuttgart in Germany

If the ratios of this car are the same as those of the Stuttgart-built example that followed, the numbers are 3.54, 5.54, 9.17 and then 15.95 to one.

Top speed was said to be 85mph, although Lord knows it would take a long time to get there, and with its slow, worm-geared steering you’d be a brave soul to try it.

Certainly, our Berkshire test route isn’t big enough for the task and, largely for reasons of value, neither do I have a crack at establishing whether this Porsche 356 retains the infamous traits that a combination of a rear engine, swing-axles and a short wheelbase give – ie, pronounced oversteer.

VW-embossed light lens on the Porsche 356/2

But I can tell you it rides well, deftly and softly, because on tall, skinny tyres and weighing around 700kg (it’s difficult to discern the precise figure from historical records), it doesn’t need to be overly stiff.

Besides, nobody thought to make hard-riding cars at the time.

The steering, given some flex in the chassis, its slow, unassisted gearing and the vagaries of time, takes a moment to pick up weight and start deflecting the car from the straight-ahead.

It feels a bit nervous – or at least I do – as a car with a short wheelbase and a track so inward of the body might well do.

The Porsche 356/2’s bathtub-like shape was later found to have a drag coefficient of less than 0.30Cd

But, even in top, the Porsche 356 gathers momentum in a way you don’t expect from just 40bhp.

It’s no wonder that, at Le Mans in 1951, a modified Gmünd-built coupé hit 100mph and finished first in the 751-1100cc class, despite putting out only 46bhp.

It feels special, and I know that it’s precious. Never, though, does the 356 feel very exotic.

Later Porsche 356s ditched the split windscreen

There is, I suppose, no getting away from its humdrum mechanicals.

This isn’t a race-winning, V12-powered Ferrari; the Porsche’s estimated value is very much a subject of its rarity, its status and its originality.

“It’s one of the most original 356s,” James tells me.

It’s the sort of car that will, perhaps inevitably as a result of its price-tag, go into an existing, significant Porsche collection.

Its history makes this Porsche 356/2, the 32nd built, very special

“Like all great cars, it’s a rarefied atmosphere,” he adds. “There probably aren’t tens of buyers, but the term ‘bookend’ comes from somewhere.”

Ultimately, that’s what this Porsche 356 represents: it’s a lovely, usable example of an original car, the one that kick-started the greatest sports car lineage of all.

I could love it for the way it looks and the way it feels. But that’s nothing compared to what it represents.

Images: Jack Harrison

Thanks to: DK Engineering

Factfile

Porsche 356/2

Sold/number built 1948-’51/52
Construction pressed and welded steel frame, aluminium panels
Engine all-alloy, ohv 1086cc flat-four, twin Solex 26 VDI downdraught carburettors
Max power 40bhp @ 4000rpm
Max torque 52lb ft @ 2800rpm
Transmission four-speed manual, RWD
Suspension independent, at front by trailing arms rear swing axles; transverse torsion bars, telescopic dampers f/r
Steering worm and sector
Brakes drums
Length 12ft 8¼in (3870mm)
Width 5ft 5¾in (1669mm)
Height 4ft 3¼in (1300mm)
Wheelbase 6ft 10½in (2100mm)
Weight 1543lb (700kg)
Mpg 37
0-60mph 23.5 secs
Top speed 85mph
Price new £850 (1949)
Price now £2.5m+*