PORSCHE’S MISUNDERSTOOD MANAGER

Total 911 looks at the rise and fall of the man hired to lead the Zuffenhausen manufacturer out of day-to-day running by the Porsche family

Written by Kieron Fennelly Pictures courtesy Porsche Archive

T he telephone rang. In the drawing room of his home in Teufenbach in southern Austria, Ernst Fuhrmann went over to answer it. The caller was Helmuth Bott. “Herr Fuhrmann, we have a proposition for you. Herr Piëch and I would like to come and see you to discuss it.”

In October 1970 the Porsche and Piëch families had decided to relinquish control of their company and turn it into a limited company with professional management. To lead the new Porsche AG, Ferry thought of his former colleague. He knew that Fuhrmann had recently left his current employment and to see how interested his fellow Austrian might be in returning to Porsche, he had deputed Bott and Piëch to find out. They made Fuhrmann an attractive offer: Ferry would stand back to become chairman of the supervisory board of the new limited company and Fuhrmann would be technical director. As he told Randy Leffingwell in 1991, “They showed me designs for new cars. I had nothing else to do: the position was simple, easy to handle. It was nothing complicated.” So, 15 years on began Ernst Fuhrmann’s second stint at Porsche which, like the first, would last exactly nine years.

A 28-year-old mechanical engineer from Vienna, he had joined Porsche at Gmünd in 1947. Described later by his assistant Tilman Brodbeck as a “total car nut”, Fuhrmann’s intelligence and commitment soon made themselves felt: he would work with Ferry on the dauntingly complex flat 12 Cisitalia and other major thirdparty engineering projects, and once Porsche was re-established at Zuffenhausen he masterminded the immensely powerful four-cam flat four: this had twin ignition and roller bearings for the crankshaft and the connecting rods and was dry sumped, the start of a long production engineering tradition at Porsche. The prototype produced a remarkable 112bhp at 6,400rpm and the four cam became the backbone of Porsche’s competition successes for a decade.