INTERCITY EXPRESS
As Otto Matthé’s Berlin-rome car comes up for auction, we tell the full story
Is it the Volkswagen 60K10 or Porsche T64? The media fever and PR hype surrounding the imminent sale of the Berlin-rome car has described it variously as the ‘first Porsche’, ‘the oldest surviving Porsche’, or ‘the missing link’, but are any of these descriptions actually true?
Without in any way wanting to diminish its importance, the car you see here – the surviving Berlin-rome race car, is what it is: a special-bodied Volkswagen, paid for by the German State, built entirely on a Volkswagen chassis and, although it could be accurately described as a ‘link’ in the evolution of the 356, it has never been missing. What is true is that in the eyes of many it is the most important Porsche-designed car to come on the market this millennium.
During the First World War, Italy fought alongside France and Britain against Germany, but post-war frustration at the lack of what they considered a fair share of the reparations imposed on the defeated enemy and the country’s dire financial circumstances led to Italy in 1922 becoming Europe’s first Fascist dictatorship, ruled by Benito Mussolini,
On 1st November 1936, Mussolini gave a speech declaring that Italy now shared the political aims of his admirer to the north and Europe’s most recent dictator, Adolf Hitler. In it he stated that, ‘This Berlin-rome protocol is not a barrier, it is rather an axis around which all European states animated by a desire for peace may collaborate on troubles.’ The former enemies were now officially declared friends and international press reports soon began to paraphrase this new alignment as a ‘Rome-berlin-axis’. Without this alliance it is unlikely that Porsche’s sensational Volkswagen racer
would have left the drawing board.
Incidentally, the following year Mussolini embarked on a heavily publicised and symbolic rail journey from Rome to the German capital, where Hitler entertained him like a visiting Roman emperor.
Following the announcement of the new alignment, SS Major Adolf Hühnlein, head of the NSKK (National Socialist Motor Corps) the organising body for all German motor sport activity, in June 1937 announced a propaganda spectacular – a road race between the Axis capitals.
The race would be a taxing 1300km high-speed top-gear blast from the German capital down the new autobahn to Munich, a traverse of Austria via the Brenner Pass into Italy and another flat-out dash down Mussolini’s autostrada to Rome. With Mercedes and Auto Union blitzing the opposition on the Grand Prix circuits,it was hoped that the race would be another opportunity to demonstrate Germany’s technological superiority.
Originally planned for 1938, the race was postponed several times before eventually being rescheduled for September 1939, which, as it happened, coincided with the date that the much-anticipated Volkswagen was due to enter full production. It was suddenly all systems go for a publicity-building racing version of the VW.
Porsche had met Hitler in May 1933 shortly after he was declared Chancellor of Germany, when he persuaded the
Fuhrer to split the 500,000 Reichsmarks subsidy that the state had offered Mercedes to build a Grand Prix winner with his own Auto-union Grand Prix design.
Soon after, and angered by the lack of enthusiasm from the German auto industry for his own pet project, Hitler tasked the Professor with turning his idea for a ‘people’s car’ into steel at the State’s expense. In the Porsche bureau’s ledger it was assigned job number 60.
As so often with his projects, and with an eye on eventually building his own car from VW components, Porsche also had his team draw up plans for a sports version, and it was allocated the job number T64. However, in 1937 the whole Volkswagen project, car and new factory, came under the overall control of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF), a wing of the Nazi Party, which had no time for a sports car and vetoed the idea. Plus, much to the Professor’s dismay, his beloved Volkswagen was for propaganda reasons to be renamed the Kdf-wagen, for Kraft durch Freude – Strength through Joy Car – KDF being the massive state-run leisure organisation.
Disappointed but undaunted, Porsche commissioned a selffunded in-house project for a ‘sportswagen’. Given work number T114 and known by staff as the F-wagen – for Ferdinand – the dramatic design featured a mid-mounted water-cooled 1500cc V10 engine in a super streamlined two-seater body. (A centresteered three abreast version was also on the drawing board.) Yet another parallel project was number T116, a sporting development of the VW theme, actually commissioned by Volkswagenwerk. Neither project progressed beyond the drawing board but a wind tunnel model of the T114 was made that would soon prove significant.
With a racing version of the KDF now officially sanctioned by the DAF and the pressure on, the Porsche team – Karl Rabe, Erwin Komenda, Franz Xaver Reimspeiss, Karl Fröhlich and aerodynamicist and mathematical wizard Josef Mickl (most of whom would go on to work on the 356 and other Porsches up until the 1960s) – rapidly reappraised their various sports car designs and amalgamated them into the dormant T64 project. For obvious reasons the DAF stipulated that the racing KDF be
“WITHIN PORSCHE, IT IS GENERALLY REFERRED TO AS THE T64…”
identified as such and as a consequence it was also allocated a Type 60 job number. As the tenth variant of the VW body it was designated the VW-60 K 10 – where K stood for Karroserie. Within Porsche however it was generally referred to as ‘the T64’.
By 1938 the original 12 Porsche disciples had grown to nearly 200 and had recently moved to a purpose built factory in the Zuffenhausen suburb of Stuttgart, where their immediate task was to build a series of 44 pre-production Volkswagens (or rather, Kdfs) for final testing. Reutter, the long established and well-respected coachbuilder, were given responsibility for constructing the bodies, which were all given VW38 chassis numbers. Three, 38/41, 42 and 43 with matching engines, were selected for the racers, and a fourth engine, 38/46, was set aside as a spare. (In 1950 Reutter would build the first steel 356 bodies after the Porsche personnel returned from their wartime relocation to Gmünd).
Unlike the Volkswagen, whose body was bolted to a simple pressed steel floorpan attached to a central spine, the lightweight aluminium K10 bodies were constructed along the lines of a contemporary aircraft fuselage. The extravagantly curvaceous outer skin, as smooth as a jelly mould, swells outwards from the narrow cockpit down to sill level where it continues under the car in a completely flat under surface. The floor is in fact a deep sandwich with the outer separated from the inner by a trellis of triangulated perforated spars radiating from a central tunnel that sits over the VW backbone chassis. The body is in fact a completely independent, self-supporting shell of considerable strength.
In plan the shape adhered to the principles of Hungarian pioneer vehicle aerodynamicist Paul Jaray, being two tapered aerofoils superimposed on each other, with the width of the cockpit so dramatically cut to reduce frontal area that it is hard to imagine there is room for two within.
To achieve shoulder room, the passenger seat is staggered a foot to the rear of the driver’s. This also creates space ahead of the passenger’s knees for the intrusion of a 60-litre (13.2 gallon) long-range fuel tank. To create more elbowroom the deeply curved doors are lined simply with fabric. Having driven the Prototyp Museum’s fabulous recreation of the 2nd car (Classic Porsche issue #6) I can vouch that the proximity of driver and passenger gives new meaning to the term ‘close-coupled’.
Through the windscreen the steeply sloping front bonnet plunges from sight between the tops of the swollen front wings, a feature that has endured through rear-engined Porsches to this day. Under that bonnet, with the prospect of 800 miles of flat-out racing, two spare wheels lie flat in tandem, and not much else, the battery being located behind the driver. At the rear the engine cover is side-hinged and sits beneath a swash of vertical air inlet slots as featured on the production KDF.
Inexplicably, given the brief to look like a KDF, the curved rear window is not the famous ‘pretzel’ that characterised Volkswagens up until 1952 and which also featured on the T114 and T116 models! A centrally-mounted KDF speedometer is calibrated to 160kph but there’s no rev counter – one presumes that in top gear you would simply press the pedal to the metal and let the engine rev until it ran out of breath. Unlike the proposed T114, the 60K10 wheels are fully enclosed rear and front.
While the Reutter artisans were busy the Porsche technicians set to work upping the horsepower of the engines. Increased compression ratio, bigger valves and twin carburettors resulted in lifting power from 23.5bhp to 32bhp at 3500rpm, at which a new higher rear axle ratio was calculated to give the tiny projectile a theoretical top speed of 94.5 mph (152kph) – 30 mph more than the standard car. The light alloy engine was lightened further by reproducing many of the ancillaries, such as the fan housing and valve covers, in lightweight alloys. Later, new pistons and barrels increased the capacity from the Kdf’s 985cc to 1131cc, giving 40bhp.
The first Berlin-rome car was finished on 19th August 1939, only a few weeks before the start date of the race. However, in a fateful move, Hitler decided to send his troops storming into Poland rather than his cars dashing south to Italy.
Presumably optimistic, as most Germans then were, that the war would be a short affair, Ferry Porsche pushed ahead to finish the other two cars. The second was finished in December 1939 and the third in June 1940 – as British and French troops were being pushed into the Channel at Dunkirk and
Göring’s Luftwaffe was massing for its assault on Britain.
With the nation now on a war footing the K10s were racers with nowhere to race. (Curiously they were not entered in the last major competition of the era, Italy’s Mille Miglia, held in April 1940 and won by a special-bodied aerodynamic BMW 328 coupe.) It would be another decade before a K10 turned a wheel in anger.
The first K10 was presented to Volkswagenwerk board member Bodo Lafferentz who promptly damaged it in an accident and returned it to the Porsche works. Lafferentz never repossessed the car, perhaps the unusual handling of a rear
“THE FIRST BERLIN-ROME CAR WAS FINISHED IN AUGUST 1939”
engined car was a bit too much of a novelty for him, but at some point, for reasons still unexplained, the chassis found its way under the body of car number three. The other two Berlin-rome coupés remained with Porsche throughout the war and were used as experimental test beds, and by both father and son as high-speed transport.
Towards the end of the war, most of the Porsche personnel were relocated to the remote Austrian village of Gmünd to avoid the intense bombing of Stuttgart. At the capitulation the Porsche clan gathered at their family estate, 90 miles to the north in Zell am See, to await their fate, hoping it would be at the hands of the Americans rather than the Russians.
The two remaining K10s accompanied the Porsches, with one of them stored at a local gliding school and the other at the Porsche villa. Having survived the war, car two failed to survive the peace. Discovered by American troops it was used for joyriding around the airstrip – made easier by hacking off the roof! The engine finally seized and Ferry Porsche in his autobiography recalled the remains ending up on ‘a dung heap’. It would take another 70-odd-years to discover that the mechanical components of the car were actually salvaged and passed to Otto Mathé when he bought car number three and eventually to Hamburg’s Prototyp Museum where they were reincarnated in a new body.
Ferry Porsche continued to use car three, now converted to hydraulic brakes, and in 1947 it was finally driven to Italy – not to Rome but to Batista ‘Pinin’ Farina’s Carrozzeria in Turin, for a refurb. It is presumed that this was where the nose was modified with the larger oval horn grille.
The Porsche 356 was born in Gmünd in 1948 as nonidentical twins. Chassis 356-001 emerged first, a mid-engined tubular space-framed roadster. The Porsche drawings are titled ‘VW Two Seater Sports Car’ but by the time it came to be registered for the road it carried the now famous Porsche letters on its nose and was registered as such. Chassis 356-002, completed shortly after 001, was a coupé and quite clearly an evolution of the 60K10 but with considerably more interior space. It retained the rear-engine location and VW suspension but dispensed with the VW backbone frame, replaced by a builtup box chassis.
In July, Ferry took the roadster and the 60K10, now also sporting the Porsche name on its prow, for a publicity-building debut at the Rund um den Hofgarten, a street race-cum-parade in Innsbruck, home town of racer Otto Mathé. Competing in the same event, Mathé was immediately smitten by the Berlin-rome car. A year later it was his.
Mathé was born in Zillertal in the Austrian Tyrol in 1907 but grew up in Innsbruck. He started racing motorbikes at the age of 16 but a bad crash in 1934 badly damaged and paralysed his right arm. The handicap did not, however, stop him racing and a condition of the 60K10 sale was that Porsche should convert it to right-hand drive so that he could change gear with his left
hand – while steadying the steering wheel with his chest. On 11th July 1949 the 60K10 was registered in Mathé’s name, receiving the now famous Tyrol number, T2222. (The number was later transferred to one of Mathé's Gmünd coupés, which is now in the Jerry Seinfeld collection.)
Mathé raced and hillclimbed the K10 until well into the 1950s and photographs of his exploits reveal that its beautifully contoured nose was quite severely put out of joint on several occasions. Although judging exactly where those extravagantly curved wings finished and the landscape started presented a challenge, he does seem to have avoided leaving the road backwards, the fate of so many early 356 enthusiasts.
Mathé retired the K10 in 1958 but after sprucing it up with a fresh coat of paint he made several appearances with it decades later at classic events, racing at the Nürburgring in 1981 and even travelling to California to appear at a Porsche Parade at Laguna Seca in 1982.
Mathé died in 1995 and the T64 and his two Gmünd-built 356s eventually found new owners, with the Berlin-rome car passing to fellow Austrian, Porsche connoisseur, and co-author of the definitive work on the 911 RS, Dr Thomas Gruber.
In 1998 Gruber placed the car in the hands of Porsche expert and restorer Michael Barbach, based in Kottingbrunn, Austria, for conversion back to left-hand drive and a structural restoration but carefully retaining the patina accrued over the years. Photos of the car under restoration suggest that the chassis has been updated with that from a post-war VW.
After Gruber’s stewardship the 60K10 passed into the collection of German billionaire businessman, philanthropist and art collector Stefan Schorghuber, who died tragically young in 2008 at the age of 47.
At dinner with Ferry Porsche in the early 1980s I expressed surprise that they had not persuaded Otto Mathé to relinquish the Berlin-rome car and return it to their then tiny museum. Ferry said that it would eventually return as Mathé had ‘promised’ it to them. Somehow in the following years the Mathé Porsche relationship changed and when Mathé died Porsche failed to secure it.
If there is any one of the many vehicles designed by the Professor and Ferry that should rightfully return to the ownership of Porsche this is surely it. One can only hope that they may be bidding, and that their coffers are deep enough…