Landkreis Esslingen

We made our sprint from Heidelberg to Stuttgart today. We had planned on hitting both Porsche & Mercedes Benz museums, the latter being the better overall due to its rich general automobile history in addition to the MB story. But, we ending up only having time for the Porsche museum since we had to drive on to Frankfurt that night.

Needless to say, it was phenomenal, a must-see for the Porscheaholic. The two high points were Ferdinand Porsche's life before the first Porsche, the 356, was released in 1954, (BTW he's Bohemian by birth👍) and seeing the many race cars that gave this company such a rich racing heritage. Interestingly Ferdinand was initially interested in electrically power. His first car was released in 1900. A gasoline-electric hybrid, it sent power generated by a gas engine to motors powering the car. (There was no intermediary battery.)
Furthermore the electric motors were built into the front wheel hubs.

Also caught in the shop (they service Porsche's here too) was a very special car, the GT 1 Strassenversion, a rare road going version of the Le Mans-winning GT 1 endurance champ. (Like to see this and a Carrera GT hotting it up on the Nordschleife! 👀🏁)

I have a lot of pics that I'll share when we see each other, hopefully soon. In the mean time here's a few.Read more