Page 35 - Sample pages "Forty Six: The Birth of Porsche Motorsport"

FORTY SIX 269 The Birth of Porsche Motorsport
CHAPTER 10
THE RESTORATION
read accounts of the accident, but these new images held a treasure trove of information. One of the Porsche Corporate Archive images that never made complete sense to us was a workshop image of a car (wearing number 47 on its bonnet) under repair with another crash-damaged vehicle behind it. The car under repair has the oval-shaped pockets, a telltale sign of a Reutter-prepared car. However, SL 054 was a Dannenhauer-prepped car with the teardrop-shaped pockets. The possibilities are that the number 47 branded hood was put onto the lesser damaged car whose front left quarter needed repairing or that the doors from the “crashed trailer car” (Chapter 9, page 232) were put onto the number 47 Le Mans car during the repair.
Thinking back to our chassis number conundrum, four cars were prepared for endurance competition as called for in the Porsche work order for Reutter and Dannenhauer. Our car carries both serial numbers of the two chassis that were sent to Reutter. In light of the accidents that occurred before Le Mans and the fact that only two of the four cars showed up at Le Mans, it is surmised that the original SL 063 had crashed during testing (on the Bruchsal-Karlsruhe Autobahn in Germany) very close to the race date. Porsche had
[THIS PAGE] During the restoration, details about SL 063’s engine and compartment were gleaned from the Porsche Corporate Archive photo (top). Very late in the restoration, another image of a 356 engine bay (bottom) surfaced in the Seinfeld scrapbook which gave the team pause. Ultimately, the team concluded that the top photo was the correct one because of the color of the air cleaners and other details.
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