Porsche 904 Carrera GTS Review

Porsche left Formula One at the end of 1962 and went back to sports car racing, where the two liter GT class required at least 100 road cars. The 904 debuted late in 1963 for the 1964 season, and because Peugeot claimed three-digit names with a zero in the middle, it was sold as the Carrera GTS. Porsche built 106 four-cylinder cars, plus works cars with six- and eight-cylinder engines, and orders ran past the homologation number. The American list price was $7,245, delivered at the factory in Stuttgart.

It was a clean break. F. A. Porsche, known as Butzi, drew the body at 28 as head of Porsche's new styling department, and it was the first Porsche with a fiberglass body, made with the aircraft builder Heinkel and bonded to a steel ladder frame for stiffness. It was also the first Porsche to abandon trailing arms and swing axles, for coil springs and front wishbones. Behind the seats sat the Type 587/3, a two liter version of Ernst Fuhrmann's four-cam flat-four with 180 hp, driving a five-speed gearbox, in a car that weighed about 650 kg ready to race. Because chopped fiberglass was sprayed into the molds, panel thickness and weight varied from car to car.

It won at once. A four-cylinder 904 won the 1964 Targa Florio outright with another second, and all five 904s that started Le Mans that year finished in the top twelve. The cars were famously durable: at Reims in 1964 a customer car driven to the track from Stuttgart won without needing spares, and in 1965 a 904 finished second overall on the Monte Carlo Rally. That is the sense in which this review grades a racing car as a road car. Owners did drive them on the road, but the cabin, the noise and the ride are all set up for competition.

Owning one now means the four-cam engine, which Stuttcars describes as expensive and slow to build but very durable, and which, in the words of the four-cam specialist profiled by Porsche's heritage writers, can only be kept running by someone who knows it and works with extreme care. Values reflect the rest: Broad Arrow sold a 1964 car for $2,535,000 at its Porsche 75th Anniversary Auction in Atlanta in June 2023, and the specialist Rod Emory called that car the perfect Porsche. The cabin, features and running-cost marks are those of a racing car; the shape, the engineering and an outright Targa Florio win are why the overall sits well above them.