PORSCHE 718 RSK
This works Porsche 718 RSK raced at Le Mans and more, and often punished its driver. John Simister takes his chances
Why the baby spyder is the king of Porsches
Sometimes, when a famous and valuable old racing car has a whole lot of history and the pundits are hinting at such huge values that the zero key seems to be sticking on the keyboard, it’s better to clear the head of all that noise. Then your mind can think back to the car itself, how it looks, how it feels, how it sounds. A different sort of noise. ‘Can you keep the revs down a bit, or maybe not accelerate as hard?’ That’s what James Turner of Sports Purpose, purveyor of highend historic Porsches to the well-heeled enthusiast, has just asked me. This is because the noise, the wonderful, tuneful, searing howl of a lemming-like flat-four, has moved the needle of the noise meter at Bicester Heritage a touch further than it is allowed to go. Why is this a problem? There are no houses nearby, the site is full of businesses that understand and celebrate loud motor cars, and it used to be an airfield. But rules, self-evidently, are rules.
So I do as I am bid, slightly. There’s also a good reason for delicacy with my right foot: Porsche’s original Carrera motor, four overhead camshafts, painstakingly set-up gear meshings and unicorn scarcity, is an engine of such rarity and mystic magic that I really don’t want to be the one to blow it up.
The car into which this engine is midmounted is a Porsche 718. This is a number recently thrust into mainstream car culture as the faux-type number of Porsche’s most recent Boxster and Cayman models, the flat-four turbocharged versions whose real type number is 982, but Porsche did that to capitalise on the kudos of the original 718.
It’s the middle of three variations of diminutive, rather similar-looking, Porsche sports-racers of the 1950s and early 1960s, and the first with a multi-tube chassis. The earliest was the 550A RS, the latest was the RS60 – and between those two was the 718 RSK.
Porsche made RSKs for customers to race. Before that it had to make prototypes, followed by a few cars to be raced by the works team, which could then inform the development of the production cars. The RSK here is one of those very works racers: 718-004, right in the middle of the works-car sequence of 002 to 006. The prototypes that preceded them were, unsurprisingly, 718-001 and, perhaps more surprisingly, 718-1, which was really the first of the breed.
These two featured an unusual variation of Porsche’s Beetle-like front suspension in which the torsion-bar tubes, instead of running straight across the chassis, were angled back to meet at a crossmember and form, in plan view, a letter K. That’s where the ‘K’ in RSK comes from, unlike the K in later Porsche nomenclature, which normally means kurz (short) and relates to the length of the tail.
Those prototypes were built in the middle of 1957, but they didn’t work as well as their creators had hoped. ‘Skittish’ was the verdict on the handling, so by spring 1958, when cars 002 to 006 were being built (004 was completed in May), there had been some new thinking on the suspension. The front torsion-bar tubes reverted to a straight layout while the rear suspension evolved significantly from the prototype’s swing axles.
This then featured transverse lower arms and double-jointed driveshafts to give, geometrically at least, almost a doublewishbone layout with the shafts acting as the upper links. Coil-spring/damper units replaced the torsion bars, the whole system attached to an ultra-light spaceframe chassis clad in similarly featherweight aluminium panels.
For the works cars these panels included a slightly longer and more aerodynamic nose, behind which was a double-skinned bonnet, the inner skin of which was ribbed to form a grid of oil pipes – yes, the whole bonnet acted as a giant surface-chilled oil cooler. And just
to make sure, another oil cooler was set immediately ahead of the left rear wheel, fed by a works-only duct in the sill.
PORSCHE ENTERED THREE of its revised RSKs, including this one, in the June 1958 Le Mans 24 Hours, along with two 550As. Driving chassis 004 with race number 30 were Richard von Frankenburg and the French rally champion, Claude Storez. In place of the original 1498cc engines, one of which (from a 550A) is in 004 today, Porsche fitted 1587cc units to the RSKs so they could run in the 2.0-litre class. That’s confidence.
It was not misplaced, although 718-004 wasn’t the one to bask in glory. During that wet and stormy night it was beset by engine trouble and ended up being pushed off the track and into an earth bank by a Ferrari. At least the bonnet oil cooler was effective, judging by the blistered number 30 on its surface, which remains evident to this day – and the other 718s did extraordinarily well. Grand Prix star Jean Behra and Hans Herrmann finished third overall in 718-005 to win the 2.0-litre category, while 718-003 came fourth and a 550 followed in fifth.
Was 718-004 cursed in some way? When its second outing proved yet more disastrous than its first, it might have seemed so. It was at July’s 12km-long Freiburg Schauinsland hillclimb. The driver that time was Porsche works ace Edgar Barth, winner of the previous year’s event in a 550A, with Behra and Wolfgang von Trips in two other RSKs. Barth went on to win the following year’s event in a different RSK, but the 1958 one ended for Barth and 004 with a heavy crash into a tree.
During the ensuing repairs, the front track was widened by 40mm as part of a programme to make the RSK feel more stable at the limit of grip, and the new nose no longer incorporated an oil cooler in the bonnet lid. Instead the cooler was mounted low in the nose behind a cooling slot, previewing the system used in the customer cars that began production in 1959.
By the September, 718-004 was back in one piece and ready for Dutchman Carel de Beaufort, later a Formula 1 driver, to race it at Berlin’s ultra-fast Avus circuit, two long straights formed from a dual carriageway and linked by banked turns. De Beaufort was quick but his car was disqualified because the engine hadn’t been homologated for the class in which the RSK was entered. Next came a race at Austria’s Innsbruck airport, Porsche team manager and public relations chief Huschke von Hanstein driving. This time the engine was an experimental 1678cc unit, but von Hanstein didn’t finish.
In late November, 718-004 had a test session at the Nürburgring with Jean Behra driving. Was he testing that larger engine? We don’t know, but in early 1959 the RSK, after a dismal career with its maker, found itself sold to one Count Anton von Dory, a Hungarian aristocrat who abandoned Europe for Argentina after World War Two.
Von Dory was soon out racing his new purchase, beginning with March 1959’s Sebring 12 Hours and an entry in the 1.5-litre class – suggesting that 718-004 had regained its original engine capacity. He, his brother, and the Argentinian Formula 1 driver Roberto Mieres were to share the driving, but a broken camshaft ended their race after two hours. That curse again.
And then, at last, exorcism and glory. It came in April’s Daytona 1000km, the precursor to the later 24 Hours race. Despite being penalised a lap for taking a shortcut to the pits when about to run out of fuel, von Dory and Mieres won the race outright.
Around this time, von Dory, his adopted home of Argentina, and 718-004 played a role in another significant piece of Porsche history. It involved the four-wheel-drive Cisitalia Grand Prix car that Ferdinand Porsche and Rudolf Hruska (later to be the man behind the Alfasud) designed after the war when the former was still interned. Von Dory had become the Porsche company’s representative in Latin America, and Porsche was keen to gain possession of the Cisitalia, which it had designated its Type 360, and safeguard its future.
Cisitalia founder Piero Dusio moved to Argentina after his original company’s Italian
‘GLORY CAME AT DAYTONA: VON DORY AND MIERES WON THE RACE OUTRIGHT’
bankruptcy in 1949, and he took the Type 360 with him. When the Perón regime took power, Dusio gave the Cisitalia to the new president to help secure permission to stay in business after another company failure. Perón was overthrown in 1955 and his assets were seized. Via mysterious intermediaries, not necessarily of entirely solid legitimacy, von Dory arranged the purchase of the Cisitalia.
It lay hidden for the next few years, at one point covered up in a boathouse until a flood forced its rescue, but in 1960 von Dory and complicit customs officials hatched a scheme to export it in a crate to Germany. As far as the officials were concerned, the car in the crate was not the Cisitalia but RSK no.718-004, imported into Argentina in January 1960 and being sent back to Germany ‘for repairs’.
The Cisitalia has resided in the Porsche Museum ever since, but 718-004 has led a more turbulent life. Von Dory ran it in the Buenos Aires 1000km, before genuinely exporting it to Cuba for Havana’s February 1960 Speed Week (which continued even under Castro’s new revolutionary regime) along with his production RSK, 718-034.
Successful Portuguese racing driver Mario Cabral, on discovering that 718-004 was von Dory’s ‘spare’ car, persuaded his rich Portuguese friend Daniel de Magalhaes to buy it. This he did, and Cabral climbed to fourth place before, yes, the engine broke.
The RSK arrived in Portugal via repairs at the Porsche factory, but in September it was globetrotting again – this time to Angola, then still a Portuguese colony, for the Grand Prix on the street circuit of the capital, Luanda. Owner-driver de Magalhaes retired.
Next, another country with Portuguese connections: Brazil, a race in Rio de Janeiro and a third-place finish. De Magalhaes achieved the same result in the following year’s Angolan GP, but the 1962 Nürburgring 1000km was catastrophic for the RSK. De Magalhaes misinterpreted co-driver Cabral’s instructions on where to apply full throttle at a particular point on the circuit, mis-counting some vital bumps and launching the RSK
into the air at around 120mph. After its landing, every panel was bent.
De Magalhaes got 718-004 straightened out, entered two more Angola GPs and several other races, but eventually lost patience with the mechanical failures of the by-then purplepainted RSK. He sold it in 1964 to Portuguese amateur racer Carlos Faustino, in whose hands the Porsche continued to break on a regular basis. By 1967, Faustino had had enough and 718-004 went into hiding.
It emerged in 1978, bought by car dealer Duarte Pinto Coelho who recognised what the car was despite the red-painted, Kamm-tailed glassfibre body it had acquired in the meantime. A friend of Coelho’s had been using 718-004 as a beach buggy, albeit not with the Carrera four-camshaft engine, which had gone missing. Coelho sold the RSK to a French collector who passed it on to Peter Kaus, the German owner of the now-dispersed Rosso Bianco collection. Kaus commissioned restoration work and, by the time the Louwman Museum in the Netherlands bought 718-004 in 2008, it was looking quite like a works RSK again. Though not quite enough.
A year later, Dutch Porsche collector Albert Westerman bought 718-004 and set about restoring it properly with the help of German specialists. This included re-making the nose section to the longer works format with nose-mounted oil-cooler, and finding a suitable engine. Work finished in 2013, and Albert’s son Robert demonstrated the RSK at the Goodwood Revival in 2019.
WHAT MAGNIFICENT work it was. The RSK could easily have been resurrected as a super-shiny concours queen, all hint of a life on the tracks expunged, but its silver panelwork is do-the-job dull, the finishes are natural, the aura tidy but not precious, the chassis repairs following the Freiburg hillclimb crash still visible. The bonnet is bare aluminium, the number 30 is that of Le Mans 1958.
I climb in, making sure not to stand on the thin aluminium floor, noting the latticework of slender chassis tubes longitudinal, transverse
‘THE PINT-SIZE PORSCHE SITS ON ITS OUTSIDE REAR WHEEL AND SPEARS ONTO THE NEXT STRAIGHT’
and diagonal, marvelling as I close it at the lightness of the rigid and perfectly fitting driver’s door. I have two tachometers to look at, but the original one in the dashboard apparently multiplies the correct reading by approximately two. The one to watch is in a panel to my left, where the key and the starter button also live.
Before I press that, I must pull – starting at the left – a row of switches: two for ignition (there are two coils, one for each inaccessible distributor that supplies one of each cylinder’s two spark plugs), two for fuel pumps to feed the pair of twin-choke downdraught Weber 46 IDAs, bigger than the original 40mm units. Their fuel is drawn from a tank under the bonnet and another, in series, to the right of the passenger seat – trimmed in red, like the seats of all the works cars.
The engine starts, the oil pressure is minimal. Not to worry; there’s a roller-bearing crankshaft so it’s meant to be that way. What was conceived as a four-speed gearbox has been made into a five-speed, the unsynchronised, dog-toothengaged first gear found in a slot next to what is now second and hiding behind the same push-down detent that guards the reverse slot opposite. Obtaining first at rest is helped
by easing the clutch up as the lever is pushed, which rotates the dog-teeth just enough to snick into engagement. Second is achieved in a U-shaped movement of the vague and springy-feeling lever as the exhaust beats like a steroidal Beetle’s. Already the RSK feels like it weighs practically nothing. Soon I can familiarise myself with the shapes of corners as the engine slowly warms through; the nose oil-cooler is disconnected but the side one is doing an efficient job.
After a few laps of the Bicester track the oil temperature has struggled upwards far enough to let me press the stiff throttle a bit harder. At 3000rpm the engine note changes from chuntering beat to vocal blare, at 4000rpm we’re really flying, 6000rpm appears in an instant. I’m wary of heading higher, especially given the disasters that have befallen 718-004’s previous motors, but given the chance I’m sure we’d shoot straight past the 7000rpm scale-end with unabated urge. The original tacho is calibrated to 10,000rpm.
I think I’ve worked out the optimal gears for each bend now, a lower one most neatly selected with a double-declutch and careful guiding of the lever because the gate is indistinct
and the synchromesh isn’t very strong. The brakes – drums cooled by crooked-helical fins – need a hard push, but are firm and confident enough, and the ZF steering box gives accurate control once past a slight central looseness.
All of which means that the RSK is supernimble in the corners, taut and grippy and with no sign of a loose, wayward tail. Too much power with too much steering lock on a tight exit pushes the nose wide but, if you ease the four throttles a touch, let the front wheels bite and reapply the power, the pint-size Porsche just sits on its outside rear wheel and spears onto the next straight as the steering lightens. It’s a fabulous feeling with an equally fabulous soundtrack. Given the chance, I’d continue lapping all day long.
Albert Westerman died recently, and some of his collection is to be sold, including this RSK. To see it race again in a new owner’s hands would be wonderful. After all, given its imperfect race record to date, it still has a point to prove.