By Design: Three of Our All-Time Favorite Porsches
08-29-2018, 04:49 PM
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By Design: Three of Our All-Time Favorite Porsches
https://www.automobilemag.com/news/p...A6E180F11A9AE9
The 928, though, is my choice for Porsche’s best front-engine car design. Some called it Porsche’s Corvette, and in fact that’s not so far from reality. In 1956, two young men worked together in a temporary space at the General Motors Tech Center, charged with devising the next Corvette, the C2. I was one, as stylist for the form, and Anatole Lapine was the other, responsible for its architecture. Consulting with Zora Arkus-Duntov and Ed Cole, we came up with a shorter wheelbase than the C1, with the V-8 moved rearward and the gearbox out back. Chevrolet would not use that layout for several more decades, on the C5, but Porsche introduced the conceptually identical 928 at the 1977 Geneva Motor Show and produced it until 1995. Lapine took a lot of ribbing (not least from me) for getting Porsche to make “his” Corvette, but Porsche really did it because it feared the U.S. would ban rear-engine cars like the 911. The 928 is much better looking than any ’50s GM design in the Harley Earl era could have been, and of course Porsche’s engineering then was far more refined than Chevrolet’s. To me, the 928 S4 model remains the best high-performance daily driver GT of all time, easy to enter, easy to drive, comfortable, and dead dependable. Notably, if the 928 was influenced heavily by American ideas, it was also an American, Peter Schutz—Berlin-born but Chicago-raised—who reversed the decision to cancel the 911 just three weeks after taking over as Porsche CEO, something for which all Porsche people should be eternally grateful.
Article from Automobile magazine. Robert Cumberford worked with Tony Lapine at GM on the C2 Corvette program.
The 928, though, is my choice for Porsche’s best front-engine car design. Some called it Porsche’s Corvette, and in fact that’s not so far from reality. In 1956, two young men worked together in a temporary space at the General Motors Tech Center, charged with devising the next Corvette, the C2. I was one, as stylist for the form, and Anatole Lapine was the other, responsible for its architecture. Consulting with Zora Arkus-Duntov and Ed Cole, we came up with a shorter wheelbase than the C1, with the V-8 moved rearward and the gearbox out back. Chevrolet would not use that layout for several more decades, on the C5, but Porsche introduced the conceptually identical 928 at the 1977 Geneva Motor Show and produced it until 1995. Lapine took a lot of ribbing (not least from me) for getting Porsche to make “his” Corvette, but Porsche really did it because it feared the U.S. would ban rear-engine cars like the 911. The 928 is much better looking than any ’50s GM design in the Harley Earl era could have been, and of course Porsche’s engineering then was far more refined than Chevrolet’s. To me, the 928 S4 model remains the best high-performance daily driver GT of all time, easy to enter, easy to drive, comfortable, and dead dependable. Notably, if the 928 was influenced heavily by American ideas, it was also an American, Peter Schutz—Berlin-born but Chicago-raised—who reversed the decision to cancel the 911 just three weeks after taking over as Porsche CEO, something for which all Porsche people should be eternally grateful.
Article from Automobile magazine. Robert Cumberford worked with Tony Lapine at GM on the C2 Corvette program.
