Walter Röhrl
He’s the people’s face of Porsche, having raced and developed the 911, among others, for years – but who is Walter Röhrl outside the car?
Total 911 sits down for a candid chat with motorsport legend Herr Röhrl
“For me, life is movement,” says Walter Röhrl.
“If I have to be somewhere sitting without any movement I feel sick, in my life I just want to be under pressure.” I’ve met Röhrl many times, his role at Porsche meaning he’s more often than not driving the car I’ll be trying to follow around a track on various product launches. We’ve just been doing so around Race Resort Ascari in the new 718 Cayman GTS, Röhrl admitting that even here, lapping endlessly as the world’s press try in vain to keep up, he enjoys himself.
He’s just as happy to have some ballast on board too, so any time he’s around I’ll jump in the passenger seat. Doing so means I’ve been lucky enough to have witnessed his driving in everything from a 911 Turbo on a frozen lake to a seven-anda-half minute lap around the Nürburgring in a 997 GT2 RS. Well, there was some traffic that day, and that ballast…
More than any driver I’ve sat alongside, watching Röhrl at work is mesmerising. The efficiency of his movement, the way he controls a car is on another level altogether. It is as remarkable as it is humbling, even more so when you consider that in March of 2017, Röhrl’s odometer ticked over into its seventh decade.
Not that you’d know it. He’s still incredibly fit, Röhrl very much a pioneer for modern sportsmen and women. His life has always been about sport, and that movement. We’ve grabbed a few moments before lunch today, Röhrl being his typical, affable, measured self as we sit for a chat, hiding well that earlier admission that he’d rather be moving.
We’re not here to focus on his rallying and racing achievements, they’ve rightfully been documented ad-infinitum elsewhere. Nor am I going to talk about Porsche’s future models, Röhrl famously difficult for the PR people’s managing of product information. Instead I want to get an idea of the man behind the victories, what his passions are, what drives him.
“Okay, for me the car is my life, but when I was a boy I was never dreaming of being a race driver,” he says. As a young man Röhrl worked for the Episcopal ordinate of Regensburg, chauffeuring an administrative official, covering as much as 75,000 miles a year. Briskly.
The driving part of his job was what young Röhrl enjoyed, admitting that with every corner he would try to drive around it correctly. “Already at this time I would start, if there was a corner and I didn’t get it right I was annoyed, it was always about perfection,” he says, saying that striving for perfection has always been his goal.
“Everything I’m doing – car driving, skiing, bicycling or anything else – it is not a question of speed, it is ‘I want to be perfect.’” Skiing was another of Röhrl’s passions, training to be an instructor in his early days, his strive for perfection encompassing his time in the mountains, too. “It must be perfect, it is the thing I have in my head, I want to ski with my legs like I have no skis on, it must be a part of my body. It is the same with the car. It must be part of my body, it must do exactly what I want it to do, that is the motivation always to do it. If I go here, it’s every lap, I check if it is better than the lap before, if it is the exact line to go, that is the motivation to do it.”
It was a skiing friend, Herbert Marecek, who recognised Röhrl’s skill as a driver as they drove up the mountain roads to go skiing. He suggested that Röhrl take up road racing or rallying. Röhrl was initially sceptical because of the potential costs, but Marecek persisted, helping find the money and a car for Röhrl to compete in, and writing to magazine editors about his friend. It worked and, well, we all know the rest.
Röhrl says one of the most difficult things was telling his mother he was going to take up competitive driving. His older brother had died in a car accident, Röhrl promising his mother that he would never drive dangerously, even if the sport at the time was notoriously so. That he lived through and was so successful in rallying’s most fearsome era is testament to both that promise and his desire for perfection over outright speed, though his strive for the former had obvious benefits against the stopwatch.
It would be his older brother who ignited his passion for Porsche, so often as is the case, in his younger, formative years. It is serendipitous that Walter would end up working as a test driver and ambassador for the company whose products he admired so much. He says: “My brother was ten years older than me, and when he was 21 he had a Porsche. On Sundays my parents told him to take me, and I was sitting in the back of his 356. Many times when he was driving, he would say ‘buy a car, buy a car that is a good car, a good car is a Porsche.’” Those words resonated. “That was my aim, and when I started to work, I earned 355 German marks; 350 went in my account, and just 5 in my pocket, I was not going out, I saved until I had the money to buy a used 356.”
The rationale behind that was very much in keeping with Röhrl’s strive for perfection. Porsche’s engineering appealed to him, as did the fact it should be inexpensive to run. “The philosophy was that I can only buy a Porsche, as I won’t have any repair costs, and that worked for me. For three or four years I had the car, I had no repairs, and from then on, even when signed to Ford, Opel, Audi and Fiat, privately I always had a Porsche in my garage.”
He has several Porsches now, all manuals.
“All my cars have manual gearboxes, my 911 R, Boxster Spyder and all my air-cooled cars have manual shifts. I want to have the feeling that I am the man who makes it good driving, it’s not the electronics.”
His favourite, if he had to keep just one? “Maybe the 964 RS. It is something, really impressive, but I’m lucky I never have to answer this question, because all are good. The 356 is a fantastic car, I like it very much, and the 993 RS, and I have a Speedster, also a 2.7-litre. They’re all nice. I sold just one car, a 3.0 Turbo, because it was a four-speed gearbox and not really fun. If you wanted to go fast on twisty roads you had to stay in second gear and rev it very high. I felt sorry for the car. I thought about it for a whole year, I was
fighting with which one should go away, because with seven I have the perfect garage where I can drive them straight out. With eight I had a problem, because one was standing in the middle and I had to move it to get others out.”
That would be inefficient, time which I suggest would be better spent out on his bicycle. Röhrl laughs. “Yes, absolutely,” he says, Röhrl famously spending any spare time in the saddle. Indeed, the first time I met him, on the 997 Carrera 4 launch, was in a lift in a hotel in Monte Carlo. I was going down for breakfast. He was in his cycling gear, and I asked if he was going out for a ride. His answer was that he’d been, already having ridden 100km around the Cols where he cemented his reputation as one of the world’s most gifted drivers, and all before breakfast.
Those four Monte wins are the ones he covets, not least because he achieved them in different cars. His regret in the sport he chose is that some success could be attributed to the machinery, his dominance at the Monte underlining his determination that that not be the case for him. “In my sport I never can be sure I was the best, maybe it’s my car that was the best. The best thing would be like Bolt in the 100m sprint, he knows he is the best. That is one place where I feel a little bit sorry that my sport was something where the instrument can be the best thing, not just me. It was the motivation for me with my four victories in Monte Carlo with four different cars: I wanted to show that it was the driver that was the important thing, not just the car. I was not always in the best car, with my last victory in the Audi I was in the best car, but I also had teammates who were in one…”
His ability to dominate comes from both his natural talent and his fitness. He’s famously unconcerned with the accolade that his rallying success has brought him, but is grateful for the opportunities they have presented. Mixing with other elite sports people, he skied all through his rallying years with the best, even though his contracts forbade him to do so for fear of injury. His position also allows him to count legends like the cyclist Eddy Merckx as a friend.
“After Eddie finished his career, he invited me to ride with him every year. He invited me for one week in France and Italy, and we would do 800 to 900km in one week, and every mountain was a challenge. On the climbs every year I beat him, on a mountain he had no chance. He was so angry when he saw the mountain coming, he would curse the mountain in his own language.
“All my cars have manual gearboxes… I want to have the feeling that I am the man who makes good driving, it’s not the electronics”
Those were good times, riding with about 15 people, all his friends. 12 of them had ridden in the Tour de France no less than ten times, all great names, all these great riders. In the evenings they would tell all the old stories, what they had done, it was one of the best things in my life that week with those cyclists.”
Cycling remains a passion, his relaxation, though he concedes, like driving, the roads are a bit too busy and dangerous to enjoy as much now. He mountain bikes more often now, though still does the odd Alpine road ride. “If I’m sitting on my bike in the Alps and I’m going to big mountains, say 2,900m, I think it’s too hard, but if I’m at the top I say, yeah, that’s good. It’s the same if I go skiing. I walk up, I don’t use the lift.” He admits to never enjoying running, largely because it’s not technical enough: “It’s only shoes,” he says.
Embracing new technology where it brings an advantage to skis and bicycles, he admits there are synergies between his sports and his job, even if he’s got a foot in the old-school camp (and on the clutch) when it comes to his cars. He helps develop his own skis and bicycles: “A big friend of mine owns a ski factory and I am always testing his skis for him. It’s the same for bicycles; a friend is a producer of mountain bikes in Germany and if he has something new he says try it, tell me what you think. Even on my touring skis there is this rocker system, before we had 170cm long, it’s now 190cm because it’s so easy to turn. Every year we have something new. My race bike – it is a complete carbon bike – I have a big frame, of course, but it’s 5.9kg, it’s incredible.”
In many regards he pioneered what we now see as the complete driver, using his fitness to his advantage, in an era where drivers relied on natural talent alone. He would deliberately ski in poor conditions to improve his balance, that helping him drive in the fog, and he never enjoyed the libation, while so common among his countrymen, of a beer.
“I don’t drink beer, if I liked it I would do it, but I don’t, and I don’t miss it. I think that was from the very start one of my biggest advantages, because when I started the sport was already dominated by people from Scandinavia. They have good feeling about the car, but they were not doing other sports. They enjoyed drinking, and on the second night stages their concentration would drop, I was one minute faster, another minute faster. That was because of my fitness.”
About his vices, he concedes he has a sweet tooth: “I like sweets, any kind of cakes or tarts.” And driving? He admits now he’s happy to do so slowly, on the road at least: “Sometimes I just go with my old car, really slowly, in the countryside in the evening. The sun is still nice, and I just enjoy the car and the nature outside, just to go and think how fantastic it is where we are living. That is the only time when I am, for one hour, really quiet, just sitting in the car. If I am sitting at home, I am just thinking about getting out.”
He admits to one dream, which we’ve discussed on a few occasions now as he recognises my accent: “I keep planning to go to Scotland, but every year my diary doesn’t allow it. The big problem now is that I have a new cat and it is only one year old. One day I will do it. I must go. Up the east, round the top, then back down through the middle. I would not want to go fast.” That’s relative Walter, but if you want a tour guide then I might just happen to know someone.
Over the course of his professional career from 1973 to 1987, Walter Röhrl won two FIA drivers’ world championship titles (1980 and 1984), one European Rally Championship title (1974), 14 world championship races and four Monte Carlo Rally titles. Since 1993 he has been an active test-driver and representative for Porsche, not a bad track record at all.