Porsche 550 Spyder Review

The 550 was the first Porsche built for racing rather than adapted to it. An early car won the Eifel race at the Nürburgring in May 1953, the first race it entered, and the Spyder was shown at the Paris Auto Show that autumn. In 1954 Hans Herrmann drove one under a closing railway barrier on the Mille Miglia, and a class win and third place overall in the Carrera Panamericana made the name Carrera part of Porsche's vocabulary. Porsche built 90 of them, with aluminum bodies by Wendler, before the space-frame 550 A took over in 1956, and privateers kept them racing after the works team moved on to the 718.

Its heart is Ernst Fuhrmann's Type 547, an all-aluminum, air-cooled 1.5 liter flat-four with two overhead camshafts per bank driven by vertical shafts, twin ignition and twin Solex carburettors. In its first form it made 110 PS at 6,200 rpm, mounted ahead of the rear axle with a four-speed gearbox, in a car weighing about 550 kg.

This review grades it as the racing car it was, but it was also road registered: owners commonly drove to the circuit, raced and drove home, and Porsche's American arm still calls it a road and race model. The layout gives largely neutral handling and a low polar moment that can let it spin suddenly. James Dean bought one at Competition Motors in Hollywood on September 21, 1955 and was killed in it nine days later, before its first race.

Nobody buys one for the running costs. The four-cam engine was notoriously slow to build, and Porsche's own heritage writers profiled a specialist who spent more than 200 hours on a single Fuhrmann engine and warned that it is not frost-proof: the intermediate-shaft bearings have no clearance at room temperature and can jam in the cold. The 550 is also among the most copied classic cars, so a chassis number with documented history matters more than anything else. Porsche listed it at 24,600 marks in Germany in 1955, and American buyers paid about $6,800. Bonhams sold an unrestored 1956 car for £4,593,500 at the Goodwood Revival in September 2016, a record for the model at the time.

As a road car the 550 barely qualifies: there is no proper roof, no comfort and nothing cheap to maintain, and its interior, features, economy and maintenance marks are the honest cost of a competition car. As a racing car sold to amateurs it was close to ideal, light and quick enough to beat cars with far bigger engines, which is why the overall sits well above the average of its marks. The mid-engined layout it raced became the dominant design for top-level racing cars by the mid-1960s, and the Carrera name it earned is still on Porsche's price lists.