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Porsche By Design

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PORSCHE BY DESIGN: SEDUCING SPEED

PORSCHE BY DESIGN: SEDUCING SPEED

DE NI S E Mc CLUG G AGE

63

I N THE D R I V E R ’ S S E AT

I

t’ll all come back to you. Regular H pattern shift. Enjoy.” Bob Snodgrass is handing over to me the Brumos now-vintage Porsche 550 RS60. It’s 1989 at Laguna Seca Raceway, and this

is practice time for an exhibition run in celebration of Porsche’s fiftieth anniversary. The car is as shining black as a licorice whip and twice as smart. For all its vintage status, it is a year newer than any of the 550s I had raced in prime time, mostly for Briggs Cunningham. I go out on the Laguna course. H-shaped shift,

the Maserati brothers’ lovely OSCAs were. So

huh—so why am I grinding these gears like

why not stick with OSCA? Simple. Porsche was

a dental college dropout? Then midway into

whipping OSCA’s snick-snick like a fairy-tale

the first inept lap I remember: Ah, a script H.

stepmother. Porsche was tellingly faster, And

Script! And I extend the gear lever far up to the

fast, as Phil Hill once spelled out for a journal-

right, and it did indeed all come back: the ex-

ist, is the whole intention of the thing.

tremely wide throws on the Porsche gearboxes

It came to me during the rest of my

of the era. Not a proud feature. And I recalled

now-delightful ride in the licorice 550 RS60,

how much more snick-snick the lovely gears in

Porsche’s entire plan of development that

Porsche Type 718 RS60, 1960, Bowman Motors, Photograph © 2013 Michael Furman


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