Walter Röhrl interview
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?
The German driving extraordinaire reveals his other passions away from cars
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 Ascari Race Resort, 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. “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 – 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 always the motivation 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 Röhrl 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