60 YEARS OF 911 911 ORIGINS
In the late 1950s, while senior engineers at Porsche struggled through studies for a successor to the 356, a new generation of Porsche family members was entering the business. Ferry Porsche's eldest son, Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, joined the family firm in 1957. Butzi (as he was known) spent his first nine months at Zuffenhasuen working with veteran engineer, Franz Reimspiess, learning the details of the four-cam Carrera engine. From there, Porsche the Younger moved over to the factory department run by stylist, Erwin Komenda, to gather knowledge about the design of car bodies.
Ferry's idea of having his son learn many aspects of the business was sound, but putting Komenda and Butzi in the same room was like mixing matter and anti-matter. Komenda was of the old school. He was an engineer with decades of hands-on experience in sketching, designing and building car bodies and related components. Butzi, on the other hand, saw himself as a Bauhaus-educated stylist whose inherited skills descended from decades of experience earned by his forebears.
Butzi had strong opinions regarding the next Porsche sports car. He felt it should not be a fastback, a style he considered outdated, heavy-looking and unfashionable, certainly when compared to a notchback. “I always maintained a Porsche was not necessarily a fastback,” he said later. “Also, I was of the opinion the requirements of a four-seater and a fastback body were mutually exclusive.” He also had great distaste for the bumpers used on the later 356, which he called “bulbous projections”. Nevertheless, he was certain the next Porsche sports car must maintain the company's design language, particularly with regard to the front end and the 2+2 seating arrangement.
Several of Butzi's beliefs put him in conflict with
