Story of Ernst Fuhrmann
Total 911 looks at the rise and fall of the man hired to lead the Zuffenhausen manufacturer out of day-to-day running by the Porsche family
A genius engineer and one-time CEO who gave Porsche so much, Total 911 looks at the rise – and fall – of Dr Ernst Fuhrmann
The telephone rang. In the drawing room of his home in Teufenbach in southern Austria, Ernst Fuhrmann went over to answer it. The caller was Helmuth Bott. “Herr Fuhrmann, we have a proposition for you. Herr Piëch and I would like to come and see you to discuss it.”
In October 1970 the Porsche and Piëch families had decided to relinquish control of their company and turn it into a limited company with professional management. To lead the new Porsche AG, Ferry thought of his former colleague. He knew that Fuhrmann had recently left his current employment and to see how interested his fellow Austrian might be in returning to Porsche, he had deputed Bott and Piëch to find out. They made Fuhrmann an attractive offer: Ferry would stand back to become chairman of the supervisory board of the new limited company and Fuhrmann would be technical director. As he told Randy Leffingwell in 1991, “They showed me designs for new cars. I had nothing else to do: the position was simple, easy to handle. It was nothing complicated.” So, 15 years on began Ernst Fuhrmann’s second stint at Porsche which, like the first, would last exactly nine years.
A 28-year-old mechanical engineer from Vienna, he had joined Porsche at Gmünd in 1947. Described later by his assistant Tilman Brodbeck as a “total car nut”, Fuhrmann’s intelligence and commitment soon made themselves felt: he would work with Ferry on the dauntingly complex flat 12 Cisitalia and other major thirdparty engineering projects, and once Porsche was re-established at Zuffenhausen he masterminded the immensely powerful four-cam flat four: this had twin ignition and roller bearings for the crankshaft and the connecting rods and was dry sumped, the start of a long production engineering tradition at Porsche. The prototype produced a remarkable 112bhp at 6,400rpm and the four cam became the backbone of Porsche’s competition successes for a decade.
Fuhrmann was ambitious: it was said that if the factory would not give him the components that he needed for development projects, he would go out and buy them from his own pocket. But he began to feel underappreciated and when in 1956 Klaus von Rücker was appointed technical director, a post Fuhrmann believed that after a decade at Porsche should be his, he resigned. He would not remain unemployed for long: among the enthusiastic band of Porsche racing privateers he knew was Rolf Goetze, head of the piston ring and engine parts maker. Both Fuhrmann’s engine and the man himself had impressed Goetze, and he invited the Austrian to join his company where he would become technical director and by 1962, board member.
When he returned to Porsche, Ernst Fuhrmann saw the company needed to maintain the impetus generated by its Le Mans and Canam successes: that meant some sort of renewal for the now eight-year-old 911 and in the longer term, a new model to replace it. The 911 after all could not expect to have a lifespan much longer than the 13 years of its predecessor.
Fuhrmann was always a racing enthusiast – numerous Porsche Archive pictures show him in the Le Mans pits or at hill climbs in the early 1950s and at Canam races 20 years later, often with stopwatch in hand. He also liked to get involved in test sessions too and Mark Donohue was impressed to see him even wielding a spanner at a wintry Paul Ricard on one occasion. He saw first-hand the
impact of the Canam campaign and he sought a way to repeat such exposure in Europe.
At Hockenheim, he watched as 2.4 911s were outrun by works Cologne Capris and BMW 2800CSS and held their own only with difficulty against private Ferrari Daytonas and V8 De Tomaso Panteras. He asked Wolfgang Berger, one of Norbert Singer’s young engineers about Ford’s superiority. Berger explained that most of the 911s were standard cars whereas Ford’s racing department was interpreting FIA rules liberally to produce carefully pared-down racers with aerodynamic aids and wider competition tyres. Alpina was doing the same for BMW. Fuhrmann set Berger the task of transforming the 2.4 911S into a Rennsport model and the result was the Carrera 2.7 RS. Porsche had been there before with Ferdinand Piëch’s 911R, but this remained a prototype because Piëch failed to get it into production. However, Fuhrmann would quash objections from Porsche’s conservative salesmen who did not want to be lumbered with selling the homologation minimum of 500 examples, and he was proved right when the initial 500 cars sold out just as soon as Zuffenhausen could build them, having to scramble to make another 1,000 to meet demand before the line ended in mid 1973.
Fuhrmann also revived turbocharging, another Piëch project: he realised that a blown 911 would create a flagship model. He had seen from the blown 917s that turbocharging did not fundamentally affect the engine. It would be very cost-effective with no need to undertake expensive structural work to make blocs or cylinder heads stronger. The most important aspect for a production car would be fuelling and emissions and he pressed 911 development manager Paul Hensler to make the turbo installation work with the Bosch injection system, which was replacing mechanical fuel injection on the rest of the 911s.
The 930 was specifically built to be converted easily for racing. Despite Porsche’s trepidations, the homologation minimum (400) proved easy to sell: Porsche pitched the 930 with every luxury option it could muster and discovered a new and affluent clientele and a highly profitable side line which brought about the creation of Sonderwunsch, later Porsche Exclusive. Homologation of the
930 allowed the firm to enter high-profile Group 4 racing and Porsche became the acknowledged masters of turbocharging. Fuhrmann was an engineer’s engineer: those he trusted enjoyed the kind of latitude that enabled Norbert Singer to transform the 934 Turbo into the ‘silhouette’ 935 which would dominate Group 5 until the early 1980s.
To outsiders such as Donohue, Ernst Fuhrmann could seem charming and personable, but to colleagues and subordinates he could be imperious, unyielding. These traits became more evident
with the development of the 928, a model which in 1972 the Porsche board had reluctantly decided to pursue because the rumpus caused by Ralph Nader had made the future of the air-cooled, rear-engine 911 in the US very uncertain. By the time the 928 was ready for launch in 1977 this threat had largely evaporated, nevertheless Fuhrmann was making moves to end 911 production. He regarded the frontengine transaxle 928 as very much his creation and although both engineering and the design studio had worked hard and imaginatively to produce it, few in Porsche ultimately liked the result: it was too far from the Porsche tradition, said Horst Marchart, the man who would later mastermind the 986-996 platform.
The 928 would fatally undermine the relationship between Fuhrmann and Ferry Porsche. Pointedly, Ferry did not attend the Car of the Year ceremony in late 1977 when the award was presented to the 928, the only sports car ever to receive this honour. Feeling usurped by his CEO, relations between them deteriorated to the point where Ferry moved his office to Ludwigsburg so that he would not have to see Fuhrmann on a daily basis. Meanwhile Fuhrmann’s decree that no further development of the 911 was to be allowed caused dismay in the competition department, as the 928 was clearly too heavy to race and developing the 924 to be a mere classwinner was unsatisfying after a decade of designing and building championship-winning racers.
The surreal stand-off between founder and CEO could not, however, continue: boardroom dissensions were almost paralysing the company. At last mutual friends arranged for Fuhrmann to retire elegantly by taking a professorship at Vienna Technical University which had become vacant.
With hindsight, it is easy to condemn Ernst Fuhrmann for seeking to phase out the 911, but in 1972 a distinct uncertainty hung over the 911 concept. As for the 928, in its early years almost as many units were sold as 911s; its transaxle sibling, the 924 (and later 944) provided vital turnover for more than a decade and broadened Porsche’s market. In 1991, reflecting on his departure from Porsche, Fuhrmann told Leffingwell: “The 928 failed because it wasn’t a 911. In 1979 I even said to Dr Porsche I was prepared to go any day he had a new man capable of starting a new (post-911) programme.”
With some justification Fuhrmann maintained that his three achievements at Porsche were the four-cam engine, turbocharging the 911 and giving Porsche engineers the freedom to be creative. He argued, again not without reason, that in 1972 he had saved the company. And despite their differences, his Porsche colleagues did not all forget him: in October 1993, technical director and fellow Austrian Horst Marchart was part of a small group from Weissach which journeyed to Teufenbach to celebrate their former boss’s 75th birthday. Peter Falk, the engineer most associated with the aircooled 911, was also a regular visitor. He has always maintained that Fuhrmann was not against the 911.
Small in stature, Ernst Fuhrmann had to make up for this disadvantage, says Karl Ludvigsen in Excellence Was Expected, through sheer competence: and that he did. A brilliant engineer whose enthusiasm inspired others and whose vision for the 911 put it on race tracks and in the public eye as never before, he effectively created through the 911’s storming second decade the icon it would become. If Fuhrmann erred it was in not recognising this. His continued obsession with leaving his mark at Porsche finally blinded him to the fact that he already had: his vision gave Porsche, flagging slightly after two momentous decades, a vital second wind and the 911 Turbo, arguably with the E type Jaguar, the most recognisable and aspirational sports car of the 20th century.
“Fuhrmann maintained that his three achievements at Porsche were the four-cam engine, turbocharging the 911 and giving Porsche engineers the freedom to be creative”