‘I still get younger designers telling me it was a really cool car’
Grant Larson joined Porsche’s design department in 1989 aged 32. Just two years later he found himself styling a new model that had a big job to do
By late 1991, Porsche was in trouble. Annual sales had dropped from 40,000 to 15,000 as the company struggled to shift an increasingly expensive range. There were painful redundancies and changes at board level too. Nonetheless, an idea was taking shape for a small roadster that could share components with the next-gen 911. As R&D director Horst Marchart sought board approval for this plan, a young American-born designer was suggesting something similar elsewhere in the company. That man was Grant Larson, who is today Porsche’s Director, Special Projects. Twenty-five years on from the 986 Boxster’s successful launch, he spoke to Classic Cars to share his memories of an exciting and challenging time.
‘My boss, Harm Lagaay, told me to participate in something called the Advanced Development Group where people from various Porsche departments could talk about what they wanted to develop next. I listened to all their plans and when I was asked I said, “Let’s combine all this stuff and do a lightweight roadster.” And parallel to that, though I didn’t know it, Horst Marchart was talking to the board about the exact same thing.’
Porsche was still a far from happy place in mid-1991. The company was well advanced with a four-door 911-based proposal called the 989, on which Larson was working. High projected cost led to its cancellation and the mood in the company was low. But approval from the board to do a pre-study on the Boxster project brought some optimism with it, and late in the year the design team decided to build a show car to explore the look that the little roadster might have – and to tease the public a little.
‘Every August I went to the Oldtimer Grand Prix,’ says Larson. ‘You think there are some pretty great classic cars around if you go to events in Southern California but when you come to Europe, it blows you away! I loved historic Porsches and in particular the 718RSK, more so than the 550 Spyder. I still have a picture of the RSK as inspiration next to my sketch board. I wanted the Boxster to have a longer front end than the little flat-nose 550. Proportionally I wanted a longer nose, but a tight, small, rounded rear end.
‘I drew sketches for a show car proposal and by the end of March 1992 we had a rough wood and foam modelling buck; in April the clay started going on. But around summertime, work started on the production car too, so from the middle of ’92 we were doing two cars at once, and taking them in two different technical directions. We were done with the show car by August or September because it had to be built in time for the Detroit show in January 1993.’
Doing two different cars at once seems at odds with German efficiency until Larson explains how it worked. ‘Harm Lagaay made up this name, “simultaneous engineering”’, says Larson with a chuckle. ‘The two teams fed off each other and it meant that we could do two things at once; the car as we really wanted it, and also the production car as it had to be for packaging reasons. And the show car played a big role in getting the Boxster down to the compact dimensions it ended up with.’
The show car’s reception at Detroit was so positive that Porsche’s management instructed the team to stop series design development for the Boxster and build the concept. Easier said than done, of course, and so began two years of work in which the packaging requirements and the styling aims were gradually integrated. One of the Boxster’s most recognisable shared features with the 996, those famous ‘fried egg’ lamps, was already in place though.
‘The modular headlamps were a team effort,’ says Larson. ‘The design side came from me and a British designer called Steve Murkett who participated in the early phase, plus Harm Lagaay. But the main push was from cost-saving, and also from a real clever inventor and tech wizard in the electric department called Hans Weiner. He was so tickled about getting some high-tech stuff in there. He saw it as a challenge because the board of directors said you have to pack it all in one unit. Look at typical older Porsches like the 928 and 993 and they have round lamps with little additional lamps down below, but we didn’t have the money for that!’
From a production point of view, the approach made excellent sense. ‘If you’ve ever removed or installed a Boxster headlamp… it’s so fast,’ says Larson. ‘Dr Wendelin Wiederking was really streamlining production, especially on the Boxster and 996.’
One early sketch shows a Boxster with great, thick doors and heavily bowed-out front wings that curve into the centre line, giving real logic to the shape of the lamps. This had to be toned down by the time it met reality in the show car, but Larson still feels it worked well – though rather less so in final production form.
‘On the front of the 986 Boxster you’re sharing two designers’ handwriting (because of the amount shared with the 996, including the bonnet panel and front wings): mine and Pinky Lai’s. I had more freedom at the back. I think that’s where the car is mostly admired; it looks good with the 18-inch wheels, the general contouring, and the central exhaust idea from the “peashooter” on the 550 Spyder.’
Larson is still a little rueful about the long list of features that didn’t make it through to production, including a central air intake at the front and visible moving ventilator fans in the cabin. ‘I’m a big fan of race cars and I like to see how the air gets in and out of a car,’ he says. ‘I was keen to show that but once we knew we had to share the 996’s side radiators rather than using one central one, that idea for a central cooling intake had to go.’
Another change you’ll notice from the show car to the production version is the air intakes on each side. They’re down low, almost in the sills on the show car. Why did they have to move? ‘That was all to do with the body-in-white and the chassis construction underneath,’ says Larson. Body-in-white is the industry term for the body’s structural assembly before exterior panels, sub-assemblies and mechanical components are added.
‘If you look at that triangular space behind the cut-line at the back of the door and in front of the rear wheel, we found there was only one little spot where air can enter the body-in-white, where the roll-bar structure comes down. I tried to stretch the vents down, but the hole was at the top so I felt like I was over-styling and getting away from the functional quality of the design. It was important to me to give it some depth, though. Also, engineering said that road debris would get into the intake in the original position.’
That phrase – ‘cut-line’- is one Larson comes back to. To the rest of us it’s a shut line or a panel gap, but to a designer, it’s a line you get to draw that helps define the car’s shape.
‘You describe details and parts of the car with the cut-lines,’ says Larson. ‘The one down at the front slices through and separates the blinker (the indicator part of the modular headlamp). It was the trend at the time and it’s something we picked up on.’
Another topic that exercises Larson is that of wheels. ‘The wheel design, especially their position, the stance it gives – that’s everything. I think the 986 suffered at the front because of what we had to share with the 996, so I have 18mm spacers on the front of my Boxsters, but that’s another subject!
‘Budget was lacking, so carrying over older wheels for the production Boxsters was inevitable. The base models came with 16-inch and 17-inch wheels but it wasn’t until the Boxster S arrived with 18-inch wheels that it started to look how I’d imagined. I feel sorry for the souls who ended up with early cars on 16-in wheels because they look tiny, but we nearly ended up with some 15-inch aluminium wheels that were very inexpensive to make. Thankfully Harm convinced the board it was not the way to go.’
When the long months of packaging and productionising were finished, the Boxster was finally launched in September 1996 to a reception so positive it outdid even Porsche’s expectations. How had Larson walked that tightrope between creating something recognisably new and yet obviously a Porsche?
‘I was lucky; I’d just done enough by then to imagine a Porsche of the future, but I would also credit Harm Lagaay for convincing me to make a bigger splash, to go a little further. When I was working on the show car I felt pressure from the board of directors on the one hand, but then when they scrapped the early production designs and I found myself working on the road car, the pressure came from the outside world. You’re just never sure how the public will react. But it was good, really good, and my only regret is that
‘My only regret is that we didn’t get more of the show car into the production version’
we didn’t get more of the show car into the production version. But we had to keep an eye on cost and try to save the company.’
The original Boxster has been slow to date – a feature common to many successful Porsches – and when asked about the timeless quality of the design, Larson simply says, ‘I wanted to be able to look at it ten years later and still like it.’
He must still like it, because Larson has three 986 Boxsters of his own, amongst older Porsches and VWS and the odd reminder of home (a 1968 Dodge Charger R/T and a ’72 Chevy ‘clamshell’ wagon). One 986 is used for driving to the office, one is having parts removed to add lightness – ‘I want to see how much I can take off before it looks silly’ – while one, a 2.5 bought as a wreck, is a long-term project being re-bodied by Larson to his own design… eventually. ‘I’m removing everything from the car because I think the platform is excellent; I’m disassembling it and I’ll re-body it into something. I want to dig into it and see where it goes.’
Back in the Nineties, Larson’s quest for timelessness worked almost too well. He was a little frustrated that strong sales allowed Porsche to delay the introduction of the Boxster S, then the Boxster’s facelift, then the follow-up model. And he reminds us that despite being the entry-level Porsche, the Boxster was pretty bold.
‘It arrived a few months after the Mercedes SLK and the BMW Z3 but it was the only six-cylinder, mid-engined roadster around. Nobody was doing that. And nobody had a central exhaust, though someone said, “There goes your chance of fitting a trailer hitch!” I don’t know what you’re supposed to tow with a Boxster anyway.’ How does he feel about I now?
‘It was an interesting time. We did the best we could with what we had, and we got pretty lucky. It was a really cool car and I still get younger designers telling me that. It did influence a lot of people.’