Hans Mezger
Engine designer who powered Lauda and Prost to world titles
HANS MEZGER, who has died aged 90, was one of Germany’s senior post-war engineering figures and a key figure in global motorsport; he was a kingpin in the development of the Porsche car company, and the Mclaren Formula One team also benefited from Mezger’s genius – as did Harley-davidson, for whom he designed a motorcycle engine.
For more than three decades Mezger was responsible for Porsche’s most successful racing cars and engine developments, notably the introduction of turbocharging. His defining work on the air-cooled, six-cylinder, horizontally opposed engine of the original Porsche 911 sports car of 1964 led to the “Mezger engine” which was developed up until 2011.
His career at Porsche had blossomed under Ernst Fuhrmann in the late 1950s, and he went on to work on the first Porsche F1 racing car. His entire working life was spent at Porsche; he had begun in post-war Swabia the engineering crucible that was home to Porsche, Mercedes Benz, NSU and the celebrated engineering school at Stuttgart.
Mezger was a calm, precise thinker unfettered by academic blinkers or engineering traditions and his lateral thinking inspired many innovations; he also offered body design ideas, but it was his radical thinking about engines that fuelled Porsche’s progress.
His ideas centred on the use of lightweight alloy, magnesium, and aluminium engine components, and he paid meticulous attention to the combustion process, and numerous other design refinements to engine parts such as camshafts, crankshafts, pistons, and valves. He was pivotal in the realisation of reliable turbocharging – now commonplace in family cars.
Born on November 18 1929 at Ottmarsheim, near Ludwigsburg, Swabia, Hans Mezger was the youngest of five children; his parents owned a country inn. The Mezger family were artistic and musical and he became an excellent piano player.
His technical bent emerged in childhood when he became interested in aircraft and attended gliding clubs. In April 1945, aged 15, he sidestepped enlistment thanks to a faked medical rating courtesy of a sympathetic army officer.
Mezger considered an aeronautical career but in the late 1940s German aviation was restricted, so he turned to cars and motorcycles. He studied Engineering at Stuttgart Technical University, graduating in 1956.
He turned down more than two dozen job offers in order to join the fledgling Porsche company as a junior engineer in the calculation department working on tractor engine designs. Mezger soon fell under the guidance of Ferry Porsche, the son of Porsche’s founder Ferdinand.
Ferdinand Piech, another Porsche family member, became the mercurial boss of Porsche’s new motorsport department; he saw Mezger’s talents and in 1965 made him head of the racing car design department.
Mezger created new engines as Porsche strove to dominate the sport, particularly the Le Mans 24 Hours race. His 12-cylinder engine for the Porsche 917 powered the British driver Richard Attwood to victory in 1970, and many more Le Mans wins followed.
His twin turbochargers for the 917 created the “Can-am” race car which produced more than 1,100 horsepower – the most powerful car engine then known. The road-going Porsche 911 Turbo soon debuted as Porsche’s first “supercar”.
Mezger created Mclaren’s Porsche-designed, 1.5-litre V6-turbocharged F1 engine for Ron Dennis and the TAG Mclaren team in the 1980s. Its triumphs included a world title for Niki Lauda in 1984, and two for Alain Prost, in 1985 and 1986; the engine won 25 grands prix between 1984 and 1987.
Retiring in 1993 to his Swabian farmhouse, he continued to work as a consultant. The debonair Mezger married Helga in 1958; she survives him with their two children.