The overdrive beer from Porsche
07/08/2018
Drinking five beers a week significantly increases the risk of dying prematurely or suffering from cardiovascular disease, an extensive medical study recently found. The people on the Porsche test team were probably unaware of this over 50 years ago.
In the mid-sixties, technician Helmuth Bott was concerned about the well-being of the six-cylinder boxer engine of the new Porsche Carrera 6, which led to an agreement at a "meeting" in the "Wienerwald" restaurant in Wolfsburg on February 5, 1965, that anyone who exceeded the permitted 7800 revolutions per minute when running the new racing sports car would have to pay for a round of beer (12 bottles) for every 100 revolutions.
And that added up to quite a lot! Storz came to 8300 rpm, Piech, Linge and Hannes to 8000 rpm, Falk to 8100 rpm, so a total of 168 bottles came together, which, according to a joint decision, were supplemented by a further 24 bottles, which Wütherich had to pay for because he left the track while driving impetuously, so that 192 bottles had to be distributed. This resulted in 16 bottles of beer (or the equivalent in money, i.e. DM 8.00) for each participant in the test drives.
What can we learn from this? The Porsche test drivers obviously didn't lack a sense of humor back then. The fact that the whole result was officially announced in an in-house press release, which we can show here thanks to the Porsche forum "Elferteam " , clearly proves this. And apparently the Carrera 6 also proved to be sufficiently stable at high revs.
