The Porsche Museum – A Mecca for Car Enthusiasts

“Turn here! Yes, it’s definitely here. Look, there’s a Porsche 911 Turbo in the next lane to us heading down that road so it must be the right place.”

Oh flipping heck. We missed it. We were far too busy taking in the two huge Porsche buildings to notice we were in the wrong lane. We get the car turned around. This time we get it right.

Driving past the main entranceway to the Porsche museum here in Stuttgart, Germany, I’ve got an urge to jump out the car while it’s moving, and perhaps do some sort of Ninja-type roll through the doors in order to get into the place more quickly. I’ve been looking forward to visiting Stuttgart for ages now, and parking the car is just hindering our time in the museum. Stuttgart is a true Mecca for fans of both the Porsche and Mercedes-Benz marques, as the companies still design, test and make the cars here (Mercedes museum article coming soon).

The Porsche museum only opened in January 2009, so it’s brand new, with delivery milage only. This is one seriously clinically clean place too. When Porsche say it’s a museum, don’t think that this is some musty old place, where talking is hushed and people stand at a respectful distance from the displays. Quite the opposite in fact!

People love being able to be so up close and personal with cars that they’ve only ever seen in magazines or on the internet, or maybe in films, and they don’t hide their enthusiasm when they do set eyes on them. Good. It’s the sort of atmosphere that this place should have, and Porsche clearly encourage it.

The museum is a state-of-the-art building. Beautiful isn’t really a word to describe the look of it. It’s more a wonderful piece of design work than anything. Functional, smart-looking and serves its purpose perfectly. Very German, very Porsche.

After entering the museum, you’re first struck by just how cheap the tickets are. A mere 8 Euros (£7, $10), gets you into one of the most modern museums in the world. Inside, it’s all very Apple Mac. Clean-cut square and angular edges abound, with white being the primary colour, and the occasional splash of black thrown in for good measure. Very cool.

You can request an electronic audio guide at the desk if you want. As you walk around the cars, there are numbers on the information boards which you put into the audio guide. These then give you a more in-depth descriptions of the cars and displays through your headphones. They also contain soundtracks to the various films which are dotted about.

Taking the steep escalator up to the first part of the museum, you gets a real sense of excitement and you almost will the escalator to go faster. Finally, coming up to the top of it, your eyes catch sight of the first car on display. The famous Porsche Type 64. It has an all-aluminium body, which is un-painted. The look of the 911 was clearly inspired by this car, which was built in 1939 for the Berlin to Rome race. It could hit an amazing (for the era) 99 mph.

The museum is laid out so that the earliest cars are featured first, like the Type 64 and the Ferdinand Porsche-designed Volks Wagen (meaning ‘peoples car’) Type 1, or Beetle, as it’s commonly known, which was also first built in 1939.

After that you move on to the later race cars built in the 1960’s and ’70s. What is amazing about this museum is that the cars are not protected by barriers. You’re free to look closely, feel the lines of the bodywork and take in the fact that at any minute a small army of security personnel will come and drag you off the Porsche 917 sporting the Gulf colours, like the one that Steve McQueen drove in the film Le Mans, that you’re currently (literally) drooling over.

Another great thing here is that, in Porsche’s own words, the museum is a ‘museum on wheels’. In other words, the cars are still used and participate regularly in various events such as the Mille Miglia and the Goodwood Festival of Speed.

On some of the race cars with open engine compartments, you catch a rich scent of petrol and oil coming from them. It just makes the cars a lot more real and alive, and you can easily imagine them noisily firing up just before the start of some race, throttles being blipped to keep the engines from stalling, a haze of heat rising up from the track and the cars.

Some of the vehicles that really stood out to me included a beautiful dark green 911 Turbo 3.0 Coupé. The first production car that Porsche made which used a turbocharger on the engine. We’re talking 260 bhp on car that weighed nothing and had no ABS or traction control. It would do the 0-60 run in just 5.5 seconds. Not bad for a car from the 1970’s eh.

A few other crowd-pulling models that also stood out were the insanely fast 959, 911 GT1 and the Carrera GT (production number 0001). All three of these are road-legal cars for the track. Particularly the 959 and the 911 GT1 though. These are 2 cars that Porsche produced for the road, just so that they could compete in races, so you know that they’re going to be completely mad.

There is so much more to the Porsche museum than described here, and the displays are constantly changed and updated to keep the museum ‘alive’. It’s an experience just to be around some of the most successful racing pedigree cars ever produced.

As we leave there’s about 20 or so Porsches, ranging from 944’s and 928’s to 911 4 S’ and Turbos, parked up outside the entrance, and their drivers are just getting into them,and starting up their engines, so we wait around for a while. After they’ve all warmed them up they set off in a line.

They don’t hang about though. Flooring the accelerators, they wheel spin off one by one, using the cars as they designed to be treated, and as I watch them disappear off into the distance I can’t help but feel slightly envious.

One day though, one day…

We have 100+ more photographs of the cars from the Porsche museum. We’ll be adding them to our Flickr photostream over the next week, so keep checking it.

For more information on the Porsche museum click here.

All photos taken with a Nikon D90 DSLR