Your chance to own the very first Porsche ever made

What is the Type 64? It is Professor Ferdinand Porsche’s pre-war attempt to make a sleek, lightweight racer out of his people’s car, the Volkswagen. It is the very first car to whose bonnet his son Ferry applied the seven raised letters spelling out their surname; the car he and Ferry kept as their personal car until 1948.

“Without the Type 64, there would be no Porsche 356, no 550, no 911,” says Marcus Görig of RM Sotheby’s which will be selling this most precious of Porsches at its Monterey sale on 15-17^th August.

Marcus adds: “This is Porsche’s origin story, the car that birthed the company’s legend, and it offers collectors what is likely an unrepeatable opportunity to sit in the seat of Ferdinand and Ferry Porsche. With this car, the new owner will not only be invited to the first row of every Porsche event worldwide – they will be the first row!”

As you might imagine, the car has already been front row – including at Goodwood events in the past. When the Porsche family sold it, the car was bought by the Austrian privateer racing driver Otto Mathé. He successfully raced it through the 1950s and kept it for 46 years until his death in 1995. It was then bought by its third owner, Dr Thomas Gruber of Vienna.

Now the opportunity to be only the car’s fourth owner in 80 years is up for grabs… but with RM Sotheby’s putting a presale estimate of $20m on it, only the most well-heeled Porsche collectors need apply. If it makes its estimate it would be the most valuable Porsche ever by some margin. The record for the most expensive Porsche is currently held by the 1970 917K that was the Porsche star of the film Le Mans, driven by Jo Siffert and Steve McQueen. Gooding & Co sold that car at its Pebble Beach auction on Monterey in 2017 for US $14.08m.

$20m is not too shabby for a go-faster VW Beetle, then, or what was known at the time as the VW Type 1, or KdF-Wagen, the car that Prof. Porsche designed to get Germany’s masses moving on the country’s new autobahns. The Beetle was an achievement in its own right of course, but Porsche’s dream was always sports cars and motor racing. That was something he was able to realise in 1939 with a highly aerodynamic and lightweight coupe using the Type 1’s running gear and rear-mounted air-cooled engine.

Ferdinand Porsche and his bunch of engineers in Zuffenhausen – the same people who would later create the first 356 – were commissioned by VW to make three Type 64s to compete in the 1,500km Berlin to Rome road race that was set for September 1939. With a tuned engine giving 32bhp and streamlined alloy body complete with wheels covered by removable spats, the Type 64 was considered just the long-distance speed machine to showcase Germany’s technological prowess. But with war declared, the race never took place.

Of the three cars built in 1939-40 the car in the sale is the only surviving example. The last of the trio, it was built around the chassis of the first Type 64 which had been pranged on a test drive by the managing director of VW.

After the war Ferdinand’s son Ferry resurrected the project as a test bed for what would become the 356. In 1948 the car you see in the pictures here was wheeled out alongside the first 356 when it made its debut as the first production Porsche in Innsbruck. It must have looked pristine: Ferry Porsche had shipped it to Italy where a young Pinin Farina restored it.

And the rest, as they say, is history. As marque specialist Andy Prill says: “I’ve seen countless special Porsches in my career, but nothing like this. This is the most historically significant of all Porsche cars and it is simply incredible to find the very first Porsche in this original condition.”

Photography courtesy of R.M. Sotheby’s.