After 20 years of uneventful retirement, in 2021 Porsche’s former engineering director found himself reluctantly in the spotlight of the 25th anniversary celebrations for the 986 and 996. Widely held as the models that anchored Porsche in the 21st century and secured its future, it was Horst Marchart who had advanced the then-audacious idea of the shared chassis. Although many Porsche fans now associate the water-cooled 911 and its mid-engine sister with Horst (and rightly so), there’s much more to this modest Austrian’s Porsche career.
The young Horst joined Steyr as an engineering apprentice, but tractors didn’t excite him as much as sports cars. His supervisor suggested he look at another Austrian company that happened to be in Stuttgart: Porsche. He arrived at Zuffenhausen in 1960 and became part of the engineering group developing the flat six. The director was Leopold Schmitt and his supervisor was a certain Helmuth Bott.
Horst remembers an engineering hot house, where it wasn’t always easy to assimilate everything he was supposed to know, as well as keeping up with his studies in the evening. He remembers that Ferry Porsche was present all the time and was very struck when the latter told him not to worry if he didn’t
