Too many horses...
Sometimes on Eddie McGuire’s popular TV quiz show Millionaire Hot Seat, you just know which of the four possible answers will be correct. That’s what threw me when the question read, “Which of these cars has a prancing horse on its badge?”
So that’s an easy one. Ferrari. Right? Why don’t they make the questions harder for experts like me? Then they listed the four option cars: Maserati, Lamborghini, Porsche... and of course the last one will be Ferrari. It was Aston Martin instead!
I was laughing now because of the way the demon quizmaker had made such a dumb mistake. The poor chap in the quiz seat picked “Porsche” and I laughed some more. I’d owned a Porsche for several years in the 1970s and never spotted a horse hanging around.
That’s when my pride took a tumble while it was explained that there was a prancing horse in the middle of the very Germanic Porsche coat of arms badge... And as well as all those years my Porsche 911T sat in my drive in Surrey, I worked with Gulf and John Wyer with the big 917s, then the fastest cars Porsche had ever built, and that prancing horse still avoided my notice! I was so peeved that I went out and found a parked Porsche in 2013, and there was the prancing horse rearing up and dominating the badge on the nose...
Until the 4.5-litre 917s appeared in 1969, the Works Porsche entries had been the 3-litre 908s. The day the first 917 appeared at a Hockenheim test, Wyer asked if I’d like to do a few laps in a 908 on my own! That was after a few hectic laps with Pedro Rodriguez and Jo Siffert in light snow (!) with the novelty new storming 917.