The World’s Oldest Surviving Porsche Is Up For Sale

The story of the Type 64 is an incredible one, starting in 1930s Nazi Germany but reborn in post-War Austria under a new, and now legendary, brand name
The World’s Oldest Surviving Porsche Is Up For Sale

When you ask most ordinary car enthusiasts which immediately post-War cars made the leap from Volkswagen to Porsche, they say the closely-related Beetle and 356. But they’d be wrong. Welcome to the story of the oldest ‘Porsche’ in the world, which is soon heading to auction.

During the 1930s, Germany was an uncomfortable place to be if you didn’t hold to the ruling Nazi party’s fascist values, but at least the car engineers could do what they did best. At the time, the state (therefore the Nazis) owned Volkswagen and commanded a certain Professor Ferdinand Porsche and his son Ferry to build three racing cars to contest the 1500km Berlin to Rome race scheduled for September 1939.

The World’s Oldest Surviving Porsche Is Up For Sale

The idea was to promote Germany’s advanced autobahn motorway network and show how quickly traffic could cross the country, but on 1 September Hitler pulled the trigger on his long-planned invasion of Poland and started World War II. The Berlin-Rome race never happened and the Volkswagen engineers were shunted towards military projects.

Just one of the rear-engined racers had been built by the outbreak of war, officially called the KdF Wagen (Kraft durch Freude Wagen; Strength Through Joy Car) but known to the Porsche family as the Type 64. As the fighting began, it became the property of the German people, which was to say senior Nazis. The managing director of Volkswagen used it until he crashed it.

The World’s Oldest Surviving Porsche Is Up For Sale

The Porsches knew what their ultra-aerodynamic car would be capable of, and persisted. Through the war Ferry slowly continued with the project to build the two remaining Type 64s, reusing the chassis from the crashed first car for the third.

Despite both finished cars being moved to the stunning town of Zell-am-See in Austria in 1944, the second was lost. The third survived and made it to 1946, when Ferry himself applied new lettering to the Type 64’s nose to coincide with the launch of his and his father’s new brand: Porsche.

The World’s Oldest Surviving Porsche Is Up For Sale

Now one of a kind, the Type 64 may have initially been designed as a Volkswagen but became the very first Porsche sports car with a thumping 32bhp. In 1947 it was lightly restored and tweaked by a young Pinin Farina in Turin, before in 1948 the fledgling Porsche brand unveiled the 356. Porsche displayed 356 #1 alongside the Type 64 in Innsbruck that year, where Austrian privateer racer Otto Mathé fell in love with the latter and bought it by 1949.

The one and only surviving Type 46 in action
The one and only surviving Type 46 in action

He raced it to vast success in the 1950s and became Porsche’s first winning racing driver in the process. He kept the car until his death in 1995. It was sold in 1997 to Vienna-based Dr Thomas Gruber, a world-renowned Porsche specialist.

This exact car, which Ferdinand and Ferry Porsche themselves built, drove and fettled, and which Pinin Farina himself has touched, is for sale with auctioneer RM Sotheby’s. It’s presented in “delightfully patinated” condition (remember that one next time you’re selling a damaged car) along with a huge amount of spare parts, photographs taken throughout its astonishing history and documents to support it.

The World’s Oldest Surviving Porsche Is Up For Sale

This is a quite incredible piece of Porsche history, and what a thing it is to behold. Estimates put the expected selling price in the region of $20 million when it goes under the hammer at the Monterey auction starting 15 August. We want it.

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Comments

Ali Mahfooz

That car should be kept in Porsche Museum with it’s amazing history as how the brand took shape. :)

05/14/2019 - 10:05 |
106 | 0

I remember seeing one similar to this at said museum. I thought it was this but I guess not.

05/15/2019 - 02:31 |
0 | 0
Anonymous

Very pretty

05/14/2019 - 10:38 |
0 | 0
Robert Gracie

That car deserves to be kept as it is inside of a museum its that important to Porsche so who in their right mind would sell that thing….its a piece of porsche history!

05/14/2019 - 10:42 |
42 | 0
Lord Saucius The Divine

Fantastic!

05/14/2019 - 11:13 |
0 | 0
GTRTURTLE 🔰 🐢(Oo \ S K Y L I N E / oO) (Koen

For the 1930s it looks really good

05/14/2019 - 11:30 |
8 | 0

All the cars from the 30s look good. LoL

05/14/2019 - 14:07 |
2 | 0

Still looks amazing

05/14/2019 - 15:38 |
2 | 0
Anonymous

Okay, so I was a bit confused at first at what you meant by first Porsche. for a second I thought you were talking about the first car Ferdinand Porsche built.because he started to build cars before the turn of the 20th Century.

05/15/2019 - 04:29 |
0 | 0
RodriguezRacer456 (Aventador SV) (Lambo Squad)

They’ve come a long way

05/15/2019 - 16:44 |
4 | 0
Extreme Daniel

The Beetle was the Kraft durch Freude Wagen, not this one. Kraft durch Freude was a program, sort of lifestyle wise. It included Hotels and among other things the Beetle (the Peoples Car).
James Mays cars of the people has a great part on this

05/16/2019 - 16:31 |
0 | 0
Anonymous

I thought this was the first Porsche???

05/22/2019 - 08:01 |
0 | 0