GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY

Funny, isn’t it, how in the blink of an eye, companies can go from being seemingly unshakeable to a footnote in history. Nowhere is this as noticeable than in the ongoing war for the internet, where Yahoo! once reigned supreme, but is now a name barely anyone under the age of forty recognises. Ranked in order from top to bottom, the currently most visited websites are Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but how long these titans of the online world can hold on to their popularity is far from certain.

Company fragility is true in all industries.

Even our beloved Porsche has found itself dangerously close to bankruptcy over the years. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a particularly difficult period for the Stuttgart marque. Antiquated tooling, skyhigh development costs and models being assembled on entirely different production lines — with hardly any shared componentry — almost brought the business to its knees, but thanks to a radical rethinking of the way the manufacturer designed and created its products (an approach massively influenced by Toyota’s ‘just-in-time’ methodology, whereby only the items needed at a given point in the assembly cycle land at a technician’s workstation) in readiness for the discontinuation of its air-cooled engines, Porsche is now the world’s most profitable car maker on a per unit basis.

Before the Boxster, Cayman and 996 turned the brand’s fortunes around, Porsche had spent fifty years evolving and refining the recipe for its air-cooled cars, starting with 356 no.1 in

1948 and stretching all the way to the last of the 993-generation 911s in 1998. As you’d expect, early and late air-cooled Porsches are very different vehicles, but common characteristics are ingrained in all Porsche output of this era: class-leading engineering, rock-solid reliability, sublime handling and exquisite design.

In this issue, we’ve paired bookends of the company’s air-cooled history: the 356 Pre-a and 993 Carrera RS. Just how easy is it to detect similarities between these very different Porsches? Let’s take to the road and find out.