Two definitions of legendary status
automotive Venn Diagram, BMW and Porsche don’t tend to have a lot of commonality in their middle section. Occasionally they stand toe-to-toe conceptually but, even then, so disparate are the German giants’ personalities and audiences that, like two heavyweight champs holding different belts and never quite setting up that unification fight, they don’t really slug it out.
There is one notable exception, though, and it’s a battle that has been raging for 50 years and counting. It’s not as if the CSL and RS were strict rivals in competition, but the homologation road versions were a different matter altogether. And, I would posit, two of the greatest road cars turned racers turned road cars that the world has ever seen.
These are cars about which every single true enthusiast knows (and readily shares) some element of pub trivia, just as they do with the GT40’s height-name confluence or the fact that Enzo Ferrari waxed lyrical about the beauty of the E-type. With our cover stars it will probably be the fact that, in its home nation, you had to buy your Batmobile with the very thing that made it a Batmobile detached and in the boot. Or they might reel off the siren call names for the vibrant hues on the Porsche colour chart.
That such should-be-obscurities are so widely known is as verifiable a sign of legendary status as I can think of.
Pretty much every obituary for Max Mosley, even in the enthusiast motor racing press, described him as a ‘controversial character’. That would be fair enough if they were referring to his dictatorial running of FOCA, FISA and the FIA, but not one of them was: all they were concerned about was his tarnished surname and his sexual proclivities. Had he changed his name, and had the privacy laws that he later helped bring about existed before the sting operation that entrapped him, would anyone have described him as controversial? I doubt it.
Admittedly my own experience of the man was very limited, but I do know that just two weeks before his death, when, given the nature of the disease that took him he must have been gravely ill and in severe pain and discomfort, he made the effort to unflinchingly answer
Octane’s questions about his beloved Lotus Elite. A proper enthusiast.