THE BIG INTERVIEW

He’s the Yorkshireman whose dream was simply to work for Porsche, yet as the designer of the last air-cooled 911, Tony Hatter’s legacy at the company is greater than he’d ever have imagined. Hatter chats to Total 911 about his early career at Porsche and his influence on the iconic 993 generation

Total 911: Tony, you worked for Porsche for 34 years, what does it mean to have worked at the company for such a long time?

Tony Hatter: First of all, it’s hard to believe I achieved a childhood goal of working for Porsche and lived out my dream. I was born in Newcastle but brought up in Yorkshire: I went to a school near Leeds and everyone there was a football freak, apart from me. I was always about cars. You never saw an exotic car out and about in those days. Because of my fascination with cars, my parents decided that my career would have to go in an engineering direction because back then, up in Yorkshire, no one had heard of industrial design or anything like that. I was channelled into a mechanical engineering course at school, then a diploma in technology, and then I went to Sheffield to study mechanical engineering, which I failed in the first year. During that year I found out there was an industrial design course at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry, and I got in. The tutors there were dead against car design – they thought it was ugly and that I could choose anything other than car design, which was ironic because the course had been set up by Rootes and there was even a room where you could do clay modelling on cars.

I spent four years with a great bunch of guys doing all sorts of other transport projects, but I still wanted to do car design and I managed to get into the Royal College of Art based on the stuff I had been doing. I spent two years there and that was the catalyst to getting me into this job. From there I applied to Porsche. Initially, I didn’t get in because there were no vacancies available but I also applied for Opel and before I knew it, I was working in Germany but for a company that were about 200km down the road from Porsche – it really was a step in the right direction.