Porsche versus Ferrari
11/23/2018
Anyone asked to name the most famous sports car will usually answer Porsche or Ferrari . The two brands have been "part of it" for over 70 years. The huge selection of books shows just how important they are. Porsche has over 750, Ferrari hardly fewer.
Porsche was ahead of the pack when it was founded, with a design office established as early as 1930/31, followed by Ferrari in 1947, but Enzo Ferrari was first when it came to presenting a sports car bearing his name: the Ferrari 125 C Sport appeared as early as 1947, while the Porsche 356/1 was presented a year later.
While Porsche has since pulled far ahead in terms of unit sales, the profitability per car presented by Ferrari is incomparably higher than that of any other sports car brand.
There were also major differences in philosophies. While Porsche built road-going sports cars that would also prove their worth on the racetrack, Enzo Ferrari liked to focus on racing cars that could also be driven on the road if necessary. However, while Porsche relied on inexpensive production parts from Volkswagen, Ferrari built its own (twelve-cylinder) engines right from the start.
The great importance of the two brands is also evident on Zwischengas. If you enter Ferrari in the search, you will find 34,320 results , compared with 52,586 for Porsche . So Porsche has the longer end of the stick here.
Things look different when you analyze the auction results of the last 12 months. Ferrari sports/racing cars were traded 340 times and sold for an average of EUR 812,436, while Porsche cars went under the hammer 468 times, but were "only" valued at an average of EUR 325,080. The most expensive Ferrari was a 250 GTO from 1962 for EUR 41.6 million, while the most valuable Porsche was the 959 Paris-Dakar from 1985 for EUR 5.2 million. But the "race" continues ...
