1955 PORSCHE 550/1500 RS SPYDER

1955 PORSCHE 550/1500 RS SPYDER 0077 ESTIMATE Call for estimate HIGHLIGHTS Four-Cam Type 547 Engine No. 90089, 3rd and final engine installed by Porsche factory Engine internal No. 212 Two Solex 40 PPJ double-downdraft carbs Racing spec 4-speed manual gearbox Original Blue interior color combination 0077 is believed to be the first 550 built with the stiffened chassis Delivered new by Porsche in January 1956 to Owner/Pilot Christian Goethals of Belgium Featured by Porsche as the Brussels Salon Auto Show Car in February 1956 Well documented European racing history piloted by Goethals in 1956 Raced in the United States from 1957-1961 by Suzy Dietrich and Tom Payne Acquired by Peter and Cheryl Dunkel from Harry Keeler in late 1989 Restoration commissioned by the Dunkels and completed by Bill Perrone in Huntington Beach and Jim Ansite in Los Alamitos Paintwork by Bad Company of Sun Valley, CA Porsche Metallic Silver with Blue fender scallops and Porsche painted on hood for high visibility during track events Recipient of the Design Achievement Award at 2011 Dana Point Concours d?Elegance Shown at Rennsport 2011, the largest gathering of 550s and 4-cam Porsches Brian Redman and other judges presented 0077 an award for its history and restoration Featured at the Quail Lodge Porsche Race Car Classic to benefit lung cancer research Offered from the collection of Peter and Cheryl Dunkel after nearly 25 years of ownership Introduced to the public at the 1953 Paris Motor Show, the 550 was Porsche’s first dedicated sports racer, an open-cockpit design inspired by the earlier sports cars built and campaigned by German Volkswagen dealer Walter Glockler in 1949-50 using Porsche mechanicals in lightweight tubular frames. It was Glockler’s success that encouraged Ferry Porsche to authorize the 550 project in 1952. The need for such a car had become quite evident by then. Porsche was beginning to face stiff competition from a new breed of sports cars specifically geared for racing on the larger European circuits. The dual-purpose production Porsches were no match for such barely streetable competition machines as the Mercedes-Benz 300SL and Jaguar C-Type racers. Worse, companies such as Gordini and OSCA were fielding the same type of racers – “production” cars stripped down and practically devoid of creature comforts – in direct competition with Porsches at the class level as well. There was obviously no future for production-based Porsches against such competition; only a dedicated sports racer could solve the problem, and Glockler had already shown the way, collaborating with Porsche on a series of German championship-winning specials that wore the Porsche nameplate. Indeed, the most famous of the Glockler specials was widely promoted as a Porsche, even appearing on the company stand at the Geneva and Frankfurt auto shows in 1953. Unlike the rear-engined production 356, the 550 followed both the original Porsche and the Glockler designs, its engine mounted ahead of the rear axle in a simple ladder-type frame layout. To accommodate the design, the entire powertrain and rear suspension was reversed, placing the engine ahead of the transaxle and using leading rather than trailing arms to operate the torsion bars. The front suspension was typical Porsche, with trailing arms and transverse torsion bars. The first two prototypes used alloy bodies built by Weidenhausen of Frankfurt, who had earlier dressed the Glockler cars. The goal was to enter them at Le Mans in June 1953, but in a rain-soaked trial race at the Nurburgring on May 31, Walter Glockler’s cousin Helm staved off entries from Borgward and East Germany’s EMW to make the first prototype, 550-01, a winner on its very first outing. That victory and a 1-2 class win at Le Mans were accomplished with the 1500 Super engine, which developed 80 HP on pump gasoline. The two prototypes were raced in Europe for the rest of the season, during which they made another appearance at the Nurburgring along with a third prototype. It did not race, but onlookers noted the distinctly harsh bark emanating from its single large exhaust outlet, the source of which was a brand new powerplant designed in conjunction with the 550: the Type 547 engine. Designed with considerable input from Dr. Ernst Fuhrmann, an expert engineer who later became chairman of Porsche, the 547 was much more than the 356’s 1,500 CC 4-cylinder air-cooled boxer engine; it was the first Porsche engine to use twin camshafts per cylinder bank. Conventional thinking dictated an end-mounted chain or gear drive system that would have added to the overall length of the engine. However, Fuhrmann wanted to ensure that the Type 547 would fit within the confines of a regular production 356, an inspired foresight that soon spawned the legendary Carrera. Fuhrmann drew on his experience with the ingenious and ill-fated Cisitalia Grand Prix car to design a diabolically complicated cam-drive system using nine drive shafts and 14 bevel gears to route the crank’s rotation first to the exhaust cams and then to the intake cams. The entire affair was tightly packaged between the cylinder banks to further complicate the 547, which also bristled with roller crank bearings, dual distributors for its twin-plug combustion chambers, twin Solex 2-barrel downdraft carburetors and a highly efficient dual-inlet cooling fan arrangement.