A look inside Porsche's incredible museum

"There’s a big difference between hoarding and archiving," Dieter Landenberger tells me. "My job is information management. I’m not a collector, and you won’t find anything Porsche-related in my home. This is about factual research."

Dieter is the Porsche Museum’s principal archivist. I’ve known him a fair few years now, and visited the museum – a stunning modernist building designed by Viennese architects Delugan Meissi – maybe half a dozen times since it opened in January 2009. I’m not lying when I say it’s probably my favourite place on the planet.

But until now we’ve not been allowed into the actual archive itself. It’s home to more than 50,000 items, which taken together provide a staggering overview of Porsche’s work and history. Company founder Ferdinand Porsche was quite the pioneer, a man with exceptionally far-sighted engineering skills and ideas, whose genius took him from an electric vehicle conceived and built in the late 1890s, to the epic and all-conquering Auto Union racing cars of the 1930s, not to mention some funny looking thing called the VW Beetle, commissioned by history’s most notorious madman and despot. And all that before he’d even built his first sports car. Apparently that turned out pretty well.

We had a day to rummage through the priceless, meticulously ordered, carefully temperature-controlled Porsche archive. It helped bring some of the characters and cars in this incredible story back to life. Enjoy.

This is the ‘experiment report’ on the 917K ‘Kurzheck’, a much more aerodynamically stable reworking of the original 917. The K would go on to take Porsche’s first overall Le Mans victory in the wet and foggy 1970 race with Richard Attwood and Hans Herrmann at the wheel. Some numbers to conjure with: the 4.5-litre engine produced 580bhp at 8400rpm, and the car only weighed 800kg. In testing, it would hit up to 240mph, although the K in race trim was pegged back to just 211mph.

An early driver briefing document. Porsche first entered Le Mans in 1951, and since then 778 Porsches have competed in the 24 Hour race, 17 of them winning overall. That’s a record.

The entry list for 1970 Le Mans 24 Hours race, which ran to 17 Porsches in all, of which only two finished. In the absence of a full factory works entry, various privateers and Porsche outposts were tasked with running the cars instead – Porsche’s Salzburg dealer fielded the winning car.

Porsche geeks rejoice: everything you could possibly want to know, and a tonne of a stuff you didn’t know you needed to know but absolutely need to know the moment you know it’s all there.

An original copy of the very first Porsche brochure, for the aluminium-bodied 1948 356/2 Coupe. Only 52 of these cars were manufactured, in the Austrian town of Gmünd, a gentle start for what would become a sporting and brand behemoth.

Workshop manuals for the 356. Needless to say, there are far fewer of these left than there are actual cars.

The original manual for the RS 60 Spyder, 1960’s lightweight racer, which won that year’s Targa Florio and Sebring 12 Hours endurance event, and almost took the Manufacturer’s Championship overall. If this document ever turned up at an auction, you could pretty much name your price.

The original manual for the 904 Carrera GTS, 1964’s highly successful racing car and the first Porsche to have a plastic body. The 904 was created by Ferdinand ‘Butzi’ Porsche, grandson of the company’s founder, and was conceived as a return to the company’s sports car roots after a misfiring adventure in Formula One with the 804.

Porsche’s first US importer was Austrian expat Max Hoffman, who began bringing cars into the country in 1950. While Ferry Porsche hoped that Hoffman might sell five cars per year, the man himself was more optimistic. "If I cannot sell five per week, then I’m not interested in the business." By 1954, Hoffman was shifting 11 Porsches per week, 30 per cent of the young company’s overall output. This is an invoice card for a sale made in 1963, although by now Porsche was a well-established corporate entity on its own in the US, with a base in New Jersey.

A Typ 911R owner’s manual, a copy of which recently sold for €15k. The 911R was a 1967 lightweight progenitor of the later RS and Clubsport cars, and an early example of Ferdinand Piech’s obsession with weight reduction. Only 23 were ever made.

Ferry Porsche pictured with his sons, Hans-Peter, Ferdinand Alexander ‘Butzi’, and (in front) Wolfgang.

Another family photo, this one showing a young Ferdinand Piech, son of Ferry Porsche’s sister Louise, who had married a Viennese attorney called Anton Piech. You might recognise the man and the surname...

Inside the number two factory in Zuffenhausen, circa 1953. Note the 356 America Roadster on the left of the image – one of only 16 examples ever made. Skinny doors and an aluminium body kept the weight down to just 605kg.

A folder ascribed to Ferdinand Porsche’s cousin Herbert Kaes, outlining progress on the KDF-Wagen – which would become the VW Beetle – and various related projects, including the amphibious Schwimmwagen (Typ 166/15).

Baron Fritz ‘Huschke’ von Hanstein was a successful racing driver who became Porsche’s PR boss and racing manager in 1952. Renowned for his raconteurish manner and rakish behaviour, he was also a phenomenal ambassador for Porsche as the company expanded throughout the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Here he’s pictured with Stirling Moss and friend, near Goodwood.

Ever the engineer, Ferry Porsche created his own seat/umbrella to deal with the privations of the Le Mans 24 hour race. He’s pictured here with the device and legendary driver Jo Siffert.

The Porsche archive has more than 3000 original racing posters on file. Another example of the company’s far-sighted and fastidious approach to archiving.

Karl Rabe was one of Ferdinand Porsche’s closest allies and confidants, working with him at Austro-Daimler and Steyr, until Porsche set up his own design company in 1931, with Father Rabe, as he was known, installed as chief designer. From then on, he played a key role in Porsche’s development, as the company carried out projects for Wanderer, Auto Union (notably the legendary 16 cylinder Type C racing car), Zündapp and NSU, before working on the Beetle and ultimately establishing Porsche as a standalone venture. Rabe kept highly detailed journals and diaries, from 1926 until the 1960s, one of the reasons Porsche’s activities are so well documented. This is an image from one of them.

Film footage of the 1969 Targa Florio. The Museum is in the process of digitising every millimetre of celluloid and video it owns.

Ferdinand Porsche made many forays to the US in the post-war period. This is a receipt for one of his plane tickets.

One of the most breathtaking parts of the Museum archive contains these scale models of Porsche road and racing cars for wind tunnel evaluation, including Le Mans winners and prototype road cars that never saw the light of day.

A wooden engineering model of the 1954 550 Spyder. This only came to light relatively recently when a local Stuttgart judge happened to mention to a friend of the Museum’s director that he’d been given a Porsche model many years ago by a client. It turned to be the only surviving example of a contemporary engineering buck.

The vast film archive, documenting countless race victories and product development milestones.

Ferdinand Porsche hoped to meet up with engineer and industrialist Vincent Bendix – who invented the starter motor, among other things – during one of his trips to the US. This is a telegram from Bendix, sent on October 1st 1936, apologising for his unavailability.

Ferry Porsche (left) with his father Ferdinand onboard the SS Bremen to New York in 1937.

Hitler first met Ferdinand Porsche at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin to discuss his plans for ‘a people’s car’. The Führer planned to pay for the project by using five mark-per-week deductions from workers’ pay, via the ‘Kraft durch Freunde’ fund (hence the initial name KDF-wagen). In June 1934, the German Automobile Industry Association (RDA) contracted Porsche to begin work on the Volkswagen – known as the Typ 60 in Porsche parlance. Erwin Komenda was responsible for its design, while long-time Porsche associate Karl Rabe was the project leader.

Pictured here is a 1936 V3/1 prototype, and by the middle of 1938 this had become the VW38, the first cars being manufactured at Porsche’s number one Zuffenhausen plant before moving to a facility that would later become known as Wolfsburg. Oddly enough, it was an article published in 1938 in the New York Times that first compared the car to a Beetle. Although 67 million deutschmarks had been collected and approximately 250,000 German workers had signed up, the Russians seized the money at the end of the war. Not much joy there, then.

Images from the private family archive taken during extensive prototype testing of the VW30. The cars would rack up 2.4m kilometres, and spent a lot of time in the Alps.

Images from the private archive of the Typ 64, a car conceived for a proposed record run from Berlin to Rome, an idea designed to promote Volkswagen and the autobahn. For obvious reasons, the run was never held, but the car did give Ferdinand Porsche the idea of creating his own sports car.

One of Ferdinand Porsche’s business cards, marked Savoy Hotel.

PR boss and motorsport chief Huschke von Hanstein, pictured here with an unidentified lady. As with many car companies at the time, Porsche often used female models. Due to budgetary constraints, they were usually secretaries borrowed for press shoots.

This is an image of the Lohner-Porsche electric vehicle, a remarkably prescient device that caused uproar when it was shown at the 1900 Paris World Exposition. Ferdinand Porsche was expert in electrical engineering, and the Elektromobil featured an electric wheel hub motor of his design. Shortly after this, he pioneered the world’s first hybrid automobile, which used two electrical generators hooked up to an internal combustion engine. Porsche’s archivists also recently found the 1898 Egger-Lohner C2 Phaeton (known as the P1), currently on display in the Museum, having been sat in a warehouse since 1902 and presumed long lost. Having started as an intern at Edison, Porsche was working on the electrification of Vienna when he began working with Lohner. Egger also worked there, and was a neighbour of Sigmund Freud’s. At that point, electric cars were just as viable as gasoline powered ones, a point underlined by Freud’s suggestion that electric propulsion was a better bet because ‘gasoline engines would drive mankind mad’.

Dieter Landenberger, Porsche’s chief archivist, and a man with a planet-sized brain and the knowledge of Porsche to match.

Tazio Nuvolari, described by Ferdinand Porsche as the ‘the greatest driver of the past, present and future’.

The cover of Motoring News, featuring the triumphant ‘no.23’ Porsche 917 K. This is part of a huge collection of cuttings drawn from Porsche’s first overall win at Le Mans.