As Volkswagen owners worldwide begin receiving their recall paperwork for the emissions débacle, the new CEO Matthias Müller has given the clearest indication yet of the scale of changes that are coming at Volkswagen. In a speech to 20,000 Volkswagen employees at Wolfsburg’s Hall 11, Müller made it clear that the Volkswagen of the future would be a very different organisation.
“Apart from the enormous financial damage which it is still not possible to quantify as of today,” said the Chairman, “this crisis is first and foremost a crisis of confidence. Our most important task will be to win back the trust we have lost with our customers, partners, investors and the general public. Only when everything has been put on the table, when no single stone has been left unturned, only then will people begin to trust us again.”
Volkswagen shares plummet by $60 Billion
Meanwhile, Volkswagen shares continue to nosedive, with a staggering $60 billion now wiped off the company’s value since the scandal broke. Even more staggering is the number of industry commentators who continue to insist that this is a fuss about nothing – either they have an errant line of code in their programming or this is costing VW PRs more than a few VIP perks. As more than half the value of Volkswagen AG has now evaporated, Müller is right to let his people and the global stock markets know that cuts are coming.
Suzuki Motor Company is the most recent bulk shareholder to abandon ship: Porsche SE buying back a 1.5% Volkswagen shareholding owned by the Japanese firm. As Porsche spends on share buybacks, ex-Porsche CEO Müller looks to slice billions off Volkswagen’s costs. “It is not possible to quantify the commercial and financial implications at present. That is why we have initiated a further critical review of all planned investments. Anything that is not absolutely necessary will be cancelled or postponed. And it is why we will be intensifying the efficiency program. To be perfectly frank: this will not be a painless process.”
A number of analysts have put their best interns on the job that Volkswagen says is currently impossible: quantifying the scale of the financial implications. Possibly the best/worst one was a Credit Suisse report estimating the total cost (not including long term damage to reputation) at somewhere between $25 billion and $87 billion, with shares dropping another 20%. Volkswagen insists the numbers are nonsense, and the top estimate does seem completely ridiculous, but the lowest number is at least what it will run to, including settling the lawsuits and discounting replacement car prices for those affected. This will put a huge strain on Volswagen’s finances.
No doubt the shares will bounce back from wherever they bottom out, but another 20% would take Volkswagen to a third of its pre-dieselgate value. The VW emissions affair is certainly not a fuss over nothing and it is very relevant to the future of Porsche.
I’ve been working on the legendary Tour de Corse rally all weekend, where the Tuthill Porsche team has just won its class and the inaugural R-GT Cup with the exciting Porsche 997 R-GT rally car.
Victory on Tour de Corse – Round 11 of the 2015 World Rally Championship and the fourth round of the FIA R-GT Cup – is the second win for Tuthill’s Porsche R-GT car this season, following a proper result on January’s Monte Carlo Rally, opening round of WRC 2015. Four-time WRC winner, François Delecour, has driven the R-GT Porsche all season, but brought a new driving partner to Corsica in the form of Sabrina de Castelli: a Tour de Corse veteran with numerous class wins and podiums to her credit.
Pairing Frenchman Delecour’s experience on the Tour de Corse, including a win in 1993, with de Castelli’s considerable expertise on this historic WRC event proved an unbeatable combination on a Tour de Corse blighted by the worst weather seen on the Mediterranean island for more than thirty years. Torrential rain washed away some rally roads and led to multiple stage cancellations.
François Delecour Porsche wins WRC Tour de Corse
Starting the second day of the rally just twelve seconds behind season-long R-GT rival, Romain Dumas, Delecour was prepared for the slippery first stage of the day. As Dumas suffered a puncture and then car damage in the treacherous conditions, Delecour rocketed past to seize the R-GT lead. Dumas failed to arrive at the following stage, later announcing retirement from the Tour de Corse rally.
Losing Dumas did not hand Delecour a guaranteed win, as the Corsican landscape with its unforgiving stone walls, sheer rock faces and 500-metre vertical drops can always bite back. The Tuthill Porsche crew and its drivers still had to get the car to the finish, which it did with delight on lunchtime on Sunday.
A New Chapter in Porsche Rally Heritage
“Rallying is not about getting one thing right,” said our friend Richard Tuthill at the end. “This is a sport where any one weakness will damage a team’s ability to compete and to finish. Just as in the historic rallies where we earned our reputation and continue to excel, it is our team’s ability to build Porsche 911s that perform and finish rallies that has really made the difference.
“We fought a long battle to bring GT cars back to WRC rallying, and our first season with the Porsche R-GT has been much harder work than anyone expected. Winning the FIA R-GT title before the last round is satisfying and it is also terrific to add Tour de Corse to our team’s list of victories. This rally looms large in Porsche folklore, after Jean-Luc Therier’s memorable win here three decades ago. We’re proud to have written an entirely new chapter in Porsche rally heritage.”
Delecour’s Dream of WRC Porsche wins
“What a place to win a rally and the FIA Cup,” said François Delecour. “My dream was to bring Porsche back to the WRC and let fans of modern WRC see how exciting rally used to be. This year with Tuthill Porsche has been a huge challenge, but the team is really born to rally, so we fit together perfectly.
“Tour de Corse is magical: everything a great rally should be. It is fast, spectacular, beautiful and completely unforgettable, just like our Porsche R-GT. Thanks to Richard Tuthill and his hard-working team, my co-drivers Dominique and Sabrina and all the great fans of rallying who have made this year one of my favourites. I am so happy to win this: it is just a dream come true.”
The final round of FIA R-GT 2015 is ERC Rallye du Valais at the end of October. After that, the Porsche team heads for Kenya and the Safari Classic Rally. A busy end of year for all of us rally fans!
Amongst the cool projects I’ve been party to this year is the latest reproduction from EB Motorsport: a flat-fan kit for air-cooled Porsche engines. Under development for the last two years, engineering for a flat fan kit started in the same way as most of the EB Motorsport product range: there was nothing else out there that did the job properly.
Porsche 911 RSR Turbo Replica
I’m not quite sure when EB’s Mark Bates decided he had to have a Porsche 911 RSR Turbo, but we definitely had a conversation about building a 2.1-litre Turbo replica soon after we started working together more than five years ago and the bodywork for the project is well under way (pic below). Since our first conversation, the EB Motorsport product range has expanded to include a lot of products that cross over from RSR to RSR Turbo, but the flat fan is all on its own when it comes to cool Porsche kit.
“If I could have bought a flat fan kit that looked correct and worked well at a sensible price, I wouldn’t have gone down the road of making it myself,” says Mark. “We did buy one kit but it was not what I was looking for, so we ended up doing it the long way.
Mark’s ‘long way’ would be most impossible for most of us, but nothing phases EB Motorsport. When your company has more than sixty years of experience manufacturing food-grade handling plant, including 30-metre-high composite silos that can hold tons upon tons of raw material, the minor details of re-manufacturing unobtainable throttle bodies, complex fuel pressure regulators and flat fan drives are not a big deal.
Flat Fan Components and Testing
That said, all high-end manufacturing takes time to do properly, and this has been done properly. The first step was to find a period composite fan, as making the tooling to replicate an air-cooled flat fan blade is not the work of a moment. That search came up empty handed, so a high-quality carbon fan was obtained that would hold up for testing. “Our own fan is in development, but it involves the most complex tooling we have ever designed,” says Mark. “It will take a while to get this bit right.”
The next step was the fan drive. The obvious way to recreate one of these was to buy an original 935 drive and reverse engineer it, so this is what happened. The process took six months, and the first test device was fitted to a static long block test rig earlier this year, connected to electric motors and tested for hours on end. EB measured details like noise, durability, horsepower consumption, backlash, shim dimensions and airflow with different internal diverters fitted to the custom EB fan shroud.
Flat Fan Horsepower Consumption
Testing revealed lots of interesting data, particularly in the areas of air flow and horsepower. “It’s long been rumoured that the flat fan costs a lot of horsepower due to the convoluted drivetrain, but a vertical fan will also cost horsepower,” says Mark. “Our testing proved that flat fan horsepower consumption was not linear but instead it increased exponentially. At 4k fan rpm, just 1.5 horsepower was lost, but at 12k rpm fan speed which is roughly 8k rpm engine speed, 32 horsepower was lost, mainly due to the volume of air being moved by the fan. Given the increased thermal protection to cylinders 1 and 4 offered by the flat fan installation, we’re comfortable with the test data.”
Tuthill Porsche Flat Fan 911
The video below shows the flat fan fitted to EB’s 2.5-litre ST engine on carbs, in a 911 supplied for road testing by Richard Tuthill. Tuthill Porsche will build the engine for the RSR Turbo replica and there’s even some discussion on building a short run of four RSR Turbo replicas, including EB Motorsport’s own car, all running flat fans and fun-horsepower big turbo engines. Now that would really be cool.
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While Matthias Müller hits the halfway point of his first week as Volkswagen’s latest Chief Executive, his employers have appointed the new chairman of Porsche AG. Forty-seven year-old Doctor Oliver Blume takes the helm at Stuttgart: a move that has been applauded by many including the Chairman of the Works Council. Will putting the young production chief in charge prove the right way to go?
No doubt Blume is a capable professional, but he has only been at Porsche for two years. Graduating in mechanical engineering from Braunschweig in the early 1990s, Blume headed straight for Audi, where he progressed through the ranks to lead the bodyshell engineering team on the Audi A3 before spending time at the University of Shanghai.
Staying with Audi, Blume led development of a new Audi plant, shifting sideways to SEAT in 2004 and eventually helping to shift production of the Audi A3 to a SEAT plant in Spain, when the Spanish economy collapsed and new car sales plummeted. Success here led to promotion as Global Head of Production for Volkswagen AG in 2009, then onto the Executive Board of Porsche AG as the member responsible for production in 2013.
Porsche Production Cost Cuts?
Wolfgang Porsche renewed Blume’s contract ahead of schedule earlier this year with a five-year extension so, as Müller was always headed for Volkswagen, no doubt this Porsche job has been on the cards for a while. As a Volkswagen man through and through and a keen production cost cutter, Blume may be just what the Supervisory Board wants in charge as global operating costs are pinned to the top of the long-term agenda.
Volkswagen Emissions Scandal: $50 billion
The automotive business unit at Duisburg-Essen University recently estimated that the dieselgate scandal could cost Volkswagen up to $50 billion, so to believe that Porsche will be ringfenced from that would be foolish. As the substantial Chinese market continues to contract, Blume will be expected to deliver increasing sales and enhanced profitability, so what marketing genius will be helping the new boss to achieve this?
New Porsche Sales and Marketing Chief
Fourteen-year Porsche veteran and current head of Sales and Marketing, Bernhard Maier, has just been shot from a cannon towards the Czech Republic to take the reins at Skoda, as the former CEO there has been put in charge of a unifed Volkswagen for Canada, North America and Mexico. This means a new Porsche sales and marketing chief, so Blume will have former Porsche Cars North America boss, Detlev von Platen, to help sell whatever he produces.
Von Platen has seven years with Porsche to his name, so the two biggest jobs on the Porsche board can barely claim double figures in time with the badge between them. Cayenne is already on its way to production in Bratislava (Slovakia) alongside Audi Q7 and VW Touareg and, if Audi A3s can be made down in Spain with minimal impact on sales, where else might Porsches be bolted together? Interesting.
Former Autofarm front man, Josh Sadler, has made a dream come true by flying his former Porsche factory 911 development car and now 1970 Porsche 911 ST to California for this weekend’s Rennsport Reunion V at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey.
A passionate racer for decades, Sadler was uncertain whether his entry would be successful, but didn’t hang around to book his transport when the thumbs up came through. Our headline photo shows the car in transit through Heathrow en route to California, where the 911 has since been unloaded and issued with a temporary Californian registration (below at Half Moon Bay).
Rennsport Reunion: an Iconic Event
“This event is iconic in the Porsche world and I simply had to do it before I got too old,” said Josh. “I was fortunate to gain an entry and thought I’ll crate up the car and do it! I ‘ve never been to Laguna Seca and don’t have an Xbox to practice on. I’m sure we’ll work out which way it goes and have a bit of fun.”
I’ve done a track day at Laguna Seca in an early Porsche 911 and I can testify that indeed it is a bit of fun: the circuit is incredible. All 911s are somewhat similar on track and Laguna is not super complicated, so Sadler’s car will deliver plenty of racing excitment when it heads on track this Saturday. Hopefully it will survive unscathed, but I do believe Josh will give it the beans.
Autofarm Porsche 911 ST
First registered in Stuttgart in July 1969 as a 2.2-litre 911S, the car was run by Porsche for two years until 1971, when it was sold to employee, Gebhard Ruf, with a 2.2T engine fitted. It was punted around Germany for a number of years, until it came to the UK in 1977, owned by Mr Paul Flanagan.
Two years later, Josh bought the car in damaged condition (69 S with a T engine in 1979: don’t ask the price unless you’re already depressed), sold the T engine and stored what was left for almost twenty years. Known for his detailed records of 911 Carrera RS heritage, it didn’t take Sadler too long to realise the significance of the car’s early years. By then, 911 values were rising so the car was rebuilt as an FIA-papered 2.3-litre ST.
I’ve seen the car up close a number of times and it is every bit as crisp as one would expect from a student of Porsche history and someone who has sold RS Carreras in volume. As ever with Josh, the car is for sale at the right price but, in the meantime, it’s great to see it being used as intended.
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