Porsche 356 Carrera 2
The Carrera 2 was the ultimate 356 evolution, with qualities that continue to define Porsche today. So how come it’s so little-known compared to its 911 successors? We take one on a drive of discovery
It’s just past 10am on a sunny morning as I sidle this 1963 Porsche 356B Carrera 2 onto the M40, warbling up to 70mph, spearing its way out of London towards the promise of open country lanes, when today’s thumb-up-and-nod count edges into double figures. One of the most gratifying things about driving an instantly-recognisable classic car is the way in which it seems to brighten so many people’s days. There are only a handful of classics with this kind of true mass instant-recognition appeal – Jaguar E-type and Mk2, early Ford Mustang, Aston DB5 – but ‘an old Porsche’, be it an early 911 or a 356, is definitely on that list. People see it, they like it, they smile, and they raise a thumb. It’s a gesture of thanks for bringing it out as much as anything. They appreciate your car and they want you to know it.
And yet, today, my sense of satisfaction is tinged with an odd sensation that feels almost like frustration. It’s a feeling that gets even more acute when the thumb-and-nod comes from Berkshire’s umpteenth passing new Porsche – do they know how special this car is? It’s a Carrera 2!
It’s always been a problem with unusual Porsches. Unlike Ferraris, much of Porsche’s range at any one time has all looked alike. Unless you read car magazines, pore over Porsche books and attend marque-specialist events, then the special code of skirts, scoops, spoilers and little badges remains baffling and the difference between the CEO’S comfortable commuter express and something fire-spitting and bone-shaking that’s merely a trim removal job away from potential Le Mans stardom goes unnoticed.
It’s with this in mind that I find myself silently urging those passing 911 pilots to look at the rear of this car. To the gold Carrera lettering and the aggressive chromed trumpet-exhausts emerging from the slatted skirt that hangs beneath the bumper. The little clues that would visually define a super-porsche and legendary 911s to come. The fastest and most powerful of the range. The one dripping with racing technology of the sort explained in incredible depth by earnest Sixties motoring correspondents with engineering backgrounds and access to cutaway drawings. The sort of car run as a daily by off-duty racing drivers.
The biggest clue to the Carrera 2’s specialness is revealed as I jab the throttle pedal on the downchange, moving off the motorway and onto the meandering tarmac ribbons of the Chilterns. Tap the accelerator in a regular pushrod-engined 356 and you’ll hear a deep, sonorous, multi-rhythmic drone, as though someone’s tapping out complex Nigerian-style drumming patterns on the inside of an old brass church bell. The Carrera 2’s engine note, on the other hand, is deeper to start with. Gravelly, bassy at idle, it revs faster and harder at the pedal, erupting in an energetic fizz that translates into even more urgent acceleration.
That effervescent whizzing is the true heartbeat of modern world motor sport – the sound of dual overhead camshafts. Say what you like about the merits of big American V8s, or argue over the character of one screaming Formula One powerplant over another. But rallying, touring-cars, most sports-prototypes and single-seater series howl with the sounds of twin-cam fourcylinder engines of no more than two litres’ displacement.
‘It sounds like someone tapping out complex Nigerian-style drumming patterns on the inside of an old brass church bell’
Beneath the Carrera 2’s rear grille lies Porsche’s Ernst Fuhrmann-designed Type 587/1 2.0-litre, gear-driven quad-cam flat-four. It followed a pattern set by the 1.5-litre 550 and a generation of race-ready quad-cam 356 Carreras. Like the original 356 Carrera, the Carrera 2 was still a race-bred Porsche super-sports car with lightweight aluminium doors, bonnet and bootlid, twice the price of a regular 356. But unlike its predecessor, you didn’t have to drive with a racing mechanic’s sense of mechanical sympathy and technical knowledge in mind every time you went to the shops in it.
By contrast, the original Carrera featured an exotic racer-style roller-bearing crankshaft, and a six-point starting procedure in its owners’ manual that included using two ignition switches and pressing both clutch and accelerator pedals before the ignition key was even turned. There were even instructions to refit and resite the oil lines for its dry-sump lubrication system as the seasons changed. This sheer fiddliness of ownership, coupled with spark plugs that had a tendency to foul in stop-start traffic, left many disappointed drivers berating the Carrera as unreliable. An initial flurry of excitement saw 447 1.5-litre Carreras sold, mainly in the US, but by the time the 1.6-litre evolution replaced it in 1960 along with the ‘B’ revisions to the 356, concerns about its reliability meant that just 40 found homes. At the same time, Porsche sold 28,500 regular 356Bs. The 1.6 Carrera lasted just one year in production.
The Carrera 2 certainly doesn’t intimidate or baffle as a straightforward driving experience today. It starts on the simple turn of a key, and although my scalp rubs the headlining, it’s a comfortable place to sit once you’re in. Those rear seats, with
their squashy leather upholstery are actually usable, almost as roomy as a VW Beetle’s. Treat them as luggage space and the Carrera 2 starts to make sense as a tourer – rapid and accommodating, yet compact. It’s reflected in the original ownership of this car, chassis 123978. Finished in a subdued shade of dark green with brown leatherette interior, it was delivered new not to a racing driver, but the boss of Bavarian metalworking business Weisse & Eschrich. Service records show he had already covered 19,690km by the time it was seven months old. Restored in the Nineties by Ambrosi and repainted white, it has since lived in collections in Norway, Belgium and Switzerland, having covered just 960km. It’s possibly the closest you can get to a brand new Carrera 2.
There are just two turns lock-tolock on the steering, but in truth this is more reflective of the car’s limited steering lock and enormous turning circle than a sign of twitchy wheel sensitivity and razor-sharp response. Rather than inspiring a white-knuckled clench of the wheel, with every acceleration an attempt to see how fast it’s possible to go, the Carrera 2 encourages a more languorous driving style. I find myself holding the wheel loosely, hanging my fingers off the lateral spokes as the car eats the dual-carriageway. The Carrera 2’s ride quality is superb, a legacy of long-travel damping, softer torsion bars than earlier 356s and generously sidewalled 185/65 R15 tyres.
The steering has a lovely balance; your movements translate into immediate action, but unlike a 911 it’s not hyperactive or
‘There’s no alarming 911-style bobbing and weaving, just calm exactitude’
overflowing with the kind of buzzy communication that’s exciting when you’re pressing on but ultimately tiring over a long drive. The cam-and-peg setup is so immediate you’d swear it was rack-andpinion. Turn in and the sidewalls lean slightly while the nose goes exactly where you point it. There’s no alarming 911-style bobbing and weaving either, just calm exactitude.
Sadly the same can’t be said for the gearchange. A long-winded, clonky shift was something all rear-engined Porsches seemed lumbered with until the introduction of the G50 in 1987 with its Borg-warner synchromesh. The Carrera 2’s 741/2A four-speeder is swift enough across its vertical planes, but anything horizontal gets vague. You have to be ultracareful not to accidentally snatch reverse while looking for first gear, and there’s an odd double-gating sensation when slotting the lever home. The Carrera 2 responds best to gradual, deliberate actions.
And with this in mind, its best role is not therefore as a chuckabout four-cylinder sports car in the MG mould, but as an autobahnkurier in the German tradition. A car that uses its quad-cam racing technology in the manner of a bolide high on the banking at Monza or Avus rather than something specifically for scrapping for Targa Florio honours on Sicilian hairpins. Don’t get it wrong – the Carrera 2 made for a highly capable rally car, but that was more because of its handling than specifically the engine. The quad-cam technology is designed to extract a lot from a little, in order to propel a teardrop-shaped GT towards a headline-making
200kmph (124mph) after a 0-60 time of 8.7 seconds. Porsche may have found its thunder stolen by Jaguar in 1961, as the new E-type managed to undercut and outrun the new Carrera 2, but it carved out a niche for Porsche as a purveyor of intelligent performance that sat between mass-produced sports cars and £5k exotica. A firm that united compact-car handling and six-cylinder performance from four. Only the Alfa Romeo Giulia SS was directly comparable.
Perhaps the most satisfying place for a Carrera 2 to be is the overtaking lane, flexing a right foot and feeling 119lb ft ooze it effortlessly past surprised-looking drivers of modern hatchbacks, without having to do anything so vulgar as drop a gear and floor the throttle. Its thoroughbred nature reveals itself, however, if you allow the revs to fall beneath 2000rpm. Do this, and the engine bogs down and demands a downshift. It doesn’t do pottering.
In VW’S in-house magazine Gute Fahrt, editor Englebert Männer felt obliged to make a differentiation between the earlier Carrera – a ‘high-strung sprinter, which only developed adequate power at high rpm’ – and the more tractable newcomer. He went on to describe ‘cannonball-like acceleration’, noting that, ‘as I demonstrated it to an acquaintance, I applied full throttle in first gear, at 30kmph without warning. He was pushed back into his seat...’
After the debacle of the original 356 Carrera, the American press was sceptical of this new development. Its launch at the 1961 French Grand Prix at Reims was relatively quiet, reliability concerns plus logistics problems at the factory had resulted in slow supply of cars at a time when Porsche was trumpeting its entry into F1 and experimenting with flat-eight race engines. At twice the price of a standard 356 1600, the Carrera 2 seemed like a lot to ask for, but Car & Driver’s road tester was deeply impressed by its performance and highway-cruising abilities. Rather than making it a regular production model, Porsche hinted to Car &
Driver that it was only going to build a run of 100 cars in order to homologate it for new GT racing regulations scheduled for 1962, and seemed unsure whether to fit the four-wheel disc brakes it was experimenting with at the time. In the end, they made their way onto the Carrera 2 in its final year of production, 1964, as part of the 356’s ‘C’ revisions. This car just missed out on them.
Porsche may have been deliberately coy about projected production figures, but in the end 436 were built in three years, effectively rehabilitating the Carrera concept. It remained elusive and largely known only to the congnoscenti though. Throughout its life it remained a special-order car, its list price given only in Deutschmarks (DM23,700, roughly £4250 – Mercedes-benz 300SL money), and in order to carry out a belated UK road test in July 1964, Autocar had to borrow racing driver Dickie Stoop’s example. By this point, of course, the 140bhp flat-six 911 had been launched, eclipsing the old Carrera 2 as a grand-touring Porsche, and the Type 587 quad-cam had found a home in the new 904 customer sports-racer. Although both cars seemed to plunge the Carrera 2 into obscurity, the fact that they both stem from it in some way demonstrates how crucial this car was to the future of Porsche as we know it. Obscure badges, skirts, scoops and all.
Thanks to Girardo & Co, where this car is for sale, and Jens Torner, Porsche Archive.