Porsche 550 Spyder

It is difficult  to separate the Porsche 550 Spyder from the legend of actor James Dean, so why don’t we get it all out of the way right now. On September 30, 1955, Dean, fresh off the film Giant, left George Barris’s shop in Los Angeles to go racing in Salinas, a farm town inland of Monterrey made popular  by John Steinbeck. (Dean, of course, had recently starred in the movie of Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden, set in the same location.) The young movie actor was at the wheel of his Porsche 550 Spyder.

By that time, Dean had done more than a bit  racing. A Porsche enthusiast, he had just traded his 356 for the racier, LeMans-winning 550 Spyder, and he was desirous of testing its mettle (and his own) on the track in Salinas. But as he drove toward the sun on that late Friday afternoon along Highway 46,Donald Turnupseed,a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo,  was driving home in his 1950 Ford. Not seeing Dean’s car in the twilight, Turnupseed turned into the path of the actor’s speeding car, and, with little, almost no time to react, the 550 Spyder crashed headlong into the Ford. Dean’s side of the Porsche got the worst of it, and he died instantly. His mechanic, Rolf Wutherich, who was riding shotgun, was thrown from the wreck and survived with a a broken leg, smashed jaw,  and multiple contusions, cuts and abrasions. Turnupseed, who escaped with just a bruised nose and a gash in his forehead, was not charged by the California Highway Patrol officers who investigated the accident. They reasoned that the glare from the setting sun made it impossible for him to see Dean’s rapidly approaching car, and when I recreated Dean’s drive for a 1985 Motor Trend article, I encountered the same conditions, so I can attest to the verdict of the police.

The tragic crash spelled the end for a legendary movie actor who seemed always to be plunging forward toward oblivion, but it marked just the mid-point in the legendary success of the 550 Spyder. Born of Porsche’s aspiration to gain publicity (and sales) by winning in the world’s most prestigious races, the 550 Spyder still had two more years of race wins ahead of it.

Porsche had strong roots

Though the Porsche name had been connected with topnotch automotive engineering since right after the turn of the 20th Century, the first car to bear the Porsche name wasn’t built until after World War II. Emerging from Allied captivity, Ferry Porsche, son of famed auto engineer, Ferdinand Porsche, returned to Gmund, Austria, to pick up the pieces of his shattered company and  play with the idea of building a sports car based on available components, mostly from Volkswagen.

The car he drew up, the first to carry the Porsche name, used a very rigid welded space frame and positioned its diminutive air-cooled engine amidships, just ahead of the rear axle. Of course, this was the configuration that would be used to great effect in the 550 Spyder. Porsche’s Gmund-based group assembled a running prototype of the tiny roadster in June 1948, and it was shown off to the gathered press at the Swiss Grand Prix one month later. The press was impressed  by the vehicle, which was called the 356 because that was the number of the design in the company’s organization scheme. The public seemed quite willing to buy, but Porsche recognized  that making his little sportster a commercial success would be hard, because the hand-hammered aluminum skin over the space frame would be cost-prohibitive. So Porsche wasted no time in drawing up a completely different chassis that significantly changed  the basic layout of the car. Rather than a space frame, the new car had a monocoque chassis formed from sheet steel, and the midships engine placement was jettisoned in  place  of a rear-engine layout. This served to open the cabin area, and simplified the installation of the modified Volkswagen flat-four engine.

The production 356 then went on to become a commercial achievement. In 1949, after the production of 50 356s in Gmund, Porsche returned to its conventional home base of Stuttgart, Germany, and the 356 underwent another transformation, this time from an aluminum body to steel. With  transactions in place with various European distributors and American import maven Max Hoffman, the Porsche enterprise then started to crank out 356s in a fairly conventional way, although sales volume was always low by mass-market standards.

Though the 356 had become a sales success, Porsche engineers realized that the brand  had a number of shortcomings when it came to international racing. The steel body, while perfect  for a production car, was just too heavy, and its monocoque structure was too flexible for optimum handling. So when Porsche contemplated a new car for full-on competition, the designers revisited the first Porsche, the space-frame, mid-engined original model 356.

Prepared for racing

Work on the new racer  started in late 1952, and by spring 1953 the mid-engined Type 550 was ready to go racing. It was a basic  design: ladder frame with six cross members made of welded tubes topped with a hand-built aluminum body. The Volkswagen-based Super 1500 opposed four-cylinder engine was mounted inboard of the rear axle,  providing the design nearly 50/50 front/rear weight distribution with a driver aboard.

Producing a scant 70 horsepower in street trim, the 1500 S engine wasn’t going to frighten the Ferraris or Jaguars, but out of the box the Type 550-01 won its first race on the famed Nurburgring, and then it, along with the second example, Type 550-02, scored a one-two finish in its class in the 24 Hours of LeMans, the world’s most prestigious sports car race. Those same two cars went on to triumph in the Carrera Panamericana, the legendary Mexican Road Race, whose name continues to be emblazoned on Porsches today.

Set to capitalize on its racing victories, Porsche unveiled a mid-engine, two-seat production car prototype called the Type 550 at the Paris motor show in October 1953. But it wasn’t until late in 1954 that the Porsche factory, in fact,  had a production 550 Spyder to sell. (The “Spyder” name is said to have been coined by Johnny Von Neuman, an American Porsche importer .)

Developments to the engine

With initial success under their respective suspenders, Porsche engineers set about making the 550 better, and a logical place to look for  enhancement was in the engine compartment. The pushrod 1500S engine was just a tweaked VW powerplant, so Porsche commissioned Ernst Fuhrman to draw up a more superior engine more befitting a LeMans winner. The result was the Type 547, an incredibly complicated roller-bearing-equipped quad-cam that initially delivered 110 horsepower at a screaming 7800 rpm. The substantial percentage increase in horsepower led to a similar increase in performance, and the Fuhrman-designed engine, though complex, proved very dependable even in long-distance events. Before the 550 series was retired, the engine would be overhauled to produce 135 horsepower at a slightly less frenetic 7200 rpm.

For 1956, Porsche decided to revitalize  the 550 chassis, essentially re-designing the car in the process. The stiffer,  lighter space frame resulted in a car that weighed just 1170 pounds, and it was called the 550A. The car  quickly proved itself by winning a 1,000-kilometer endurance race at the ‘Ring and finishing a surprising first in the Targa Florio. By the time the 550A ceased big-time racing after the 1958 season, it had not just established its own legend, but it had also begun to create the mystique of the Porsche marque.

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