The big interview: Tony Hatter
Designer of the 993 and project manager for the Carrera GT, Tony Hatter discusses his career with Total 911
He’s the Yorkshireman whose dream was simply to work for Porsche, yet as the designer of the last air-cooled 911, Tony Hatter’s legacy at the company is greater than he’d ever have imagined. Hatter chats to Total 911 about his early career at Porsche and his influence on the iconic 993 generation Total 911: Tony, you worked for Porsche for 34 years, what does it mean to have worked at the company for such a long time?
Tony Hatter: First of all, it’s hard to believe I achieved a childhood goal of working for Porsche and lived out my dream. I was born in Newcastle but brought up in Yorkshire: I went to a school near Leeds and everyone there was a football freak, apart from me. I was always about cars. You never saw an exotic car out and about in those days. Because of my fascination with cars, my parents decided that my career would have to go in an engineering direction because back then, up in Yorkshire, no one had heard of industrial design or anything like that. I was channelled into a mechanical engineering course at school, then a diploma in technology, and then I went to Sheffield to study mechanical engineering, which I failed in the first year. During that year I found out there was an industrial design course at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry, and I got in. The tutors there were dead against car design – they thought it was ugly and that I could choose anything other than car design, which was ironic because the course had been set up by Rootes and there was even a room where you could do clay modelling on cars.
I spent four years with a great bunch of guys doing all sorts of other transport projects, but I still wanted to do car design and I managed to get into the Royal College of Art based on the stuff I had been doing. I spent two years there and that was the catalyst to getting me into this job. From there I applied to Porsche. Initially, I didn’t get in because there were no vacancies available but I also applied for Opel and before I knew it, I was working in Germany but for a company that were about 200km down the road from Porsche – it really was a step in the right direction.
I then applied to Porsche in 1986 but I wasn’t really aware of the Porsche Styling Studio or how it came together. In 1973, the Porsche family had to leave the company, and that included the head of the design department, Ferdinand Alexander ‘Butzi’ Porsche. The company then set up their own design department with Anatole Lapine, who at the time was working for Opel. He took with him chief modeller, Peter Reisinger, Wolfgang Möbius, and
Dick Söderberg. He took this group and they were basically General Motors guys. I was also a Porsche General Motors guy but I hadn’t realised that there was this history behind me!
Even when I got to the studio, there was a claustrophobic effect because it was a miniature version of the design studio from Opel in Germany. It was identical, except it was a quarter of the size.
A few years later I was involved in customer projects and acquiring customer projects for our design department. I also visited the General Motors Tech Centre in Detroit and again, it was a larger version of Opel.
A couple of years ago, Ed Welburn was scheduled to visit the Frankfurt Motor Show and at that time, Ed was the General Motors chief designer. I was contacted because Ed Welburn and his chief of staff wanted to come and visit our brand new design studio. They arrived and I got to show Ed Welburn and his team our new design centre. So believe
it or not, there is actually a huge General Motors connection to Porsche.
Did the familiarity between General Motors help you when you moved across to Porsche?
Yes, it also helped that I knew most of the people that were there as well!
It was 1986 by the time you joined Porsche. What was that like?
As an Englishman in Germany, I actually had it relatively easy because working for Opel, I was working with a bunch of Americans who all spoke English, however I was slowly learning German on the job. Then when I moved, I had to relearn the language because even though it is the same vocabulary, it sounds completely different.
The company, back then, was in the midst of bringing out an amazing 959 but in the studio, there wasn’t actually a lot happening.
We were constantly being called up last minute to do graphics for racing cars and they were always trying to find sponsors for the 962 series, the world championship cars. Then the Supercup cars started with the 944 Turbo, so we were kept busy doing the graphics for those.
How did it feel coming in and then rubbing shoulders with the likes of Anatole Lapine?
I liked him but it was still daunting, because there was still the idea of hierarchy, but also there was a lot of respect for the engineering department.
We’ve heard that Lapine liked to host and have his team back to his home?
Yes, he had a set of drums and would play those. When I joined he had a fantastic motorbike in his office. He also had a lot of cars done whilst he was at Porsche. He had a beautiful black, four-cam 356. He had an American sprint car too, which he raced. His pride and joy though was an MG TC with a Fiat twin cam engine, with the gearbox slightly mounted to one side to balance the weight of the driver and the engine.
What was it that made you realise you wanted to work for Porsche in the first place?
I went to Leeds on the bus, with a friend, to see the film Le Mans. Seeing Steve Mcqueen drive the 911 to the track, that was it. The racing scenes were fantastic. I honestly didn’t know you could draw and design cars for a living though so I didn’t know I wanted to be a designer at that point. That didn’t come until later on in my education. Initially I wanted to be a racing driver, but I never got the chance to do that.
One of your first jobs was looking at the rear bumper of the 964 Turbo…
Yes, I went with a more flared design because the steel fenders were the same as on the G-model, but the plastic bumper had to be flared into that.
When I got there, there was a project called the 984. It was a mid-engined, two-seater roadster with an elaborate folding roof mechanism. It was very small but everyone was hoping that this project would work and come off as the small, entry-level Porsche, which would have ultimately been behind the Boxster.
Did the company see the 911 as its future or were there some doubts among staff over that at the time?
I don’t believe we ever thought the 911 would die. In terms of the company at that time, I think I was