In A Way, Chevrolet Made The First Porsche 911

First off, let me be clear that I do understand that the headline I picked here is a bit, um, flexible with the truth. I don’t think I’d go so far to say it is clickbaity, but I am desirous of your clicks, all your sweet, sweet clicks, so, sure, okay, maybe I did bait some clicks. But there is a corn kernel of truth in that healthy bowel movement of a headline, and I think it’s a fun thing to just ponder as you start your day.

I guess perhaps a more accurate way to say the same thing would be to note that Chevy made the first six-cylinder Porsche, and if we want to be reductive and say that a Porsche 911 is, essentially, a rear-engined, air-cooled Porsche with a flat-six engine, then Chevrolet did that a good six years before the Porsche 911 (well, 901 at first) hit the market.

Why did this happen? I suspect most of our readers have figured that out already, but if you’re hungover or something this morning, I can just tell you: it was part of the process of developing the Corvair.

This was the picture that got me thinking along these lines; it’s from an excellent 1970 Karl Ludvigsen article in Automobile Quarterly, volume 8, issue 4, titled Remember the Corvair? Here’s a Look at What We Lost. The picture shows a GM tech removing a prototype Corvair flat-six engine from a Porsche 356.

In a later article, Karl pins down exactly what year that 356 was – it was bought in early summer of 1957, and Karl includes this wonderful bit of geekery of the sort that’s close to my heart:

“We can date it fairly precisely because it had the new teardrop-shaped tail lamps introduced that spring but not yet the exhaust outlets in the bumper overriders of the 1958 models.”

That article includes this really evocative photo:

Holy crap, look how well, if tightly, that engine fits in there! I wonder if they had to cut any sheetmetal to get it to fit? I think it looks like they may have, making a sort of tunnel in that rear firewall there. After all, there’s an extra pair of cylinders in there.

You can also see very clearly the distinctive Corvair cooling setup, with that crazy belt that makes a 90° turn to drive that horizontal cooling fan.

So, what we have here is a Porsche 356 1600 with an air-cooled flat-6 engine in it, which I think one could argue is, at the very least, thematically what the Porsche 911 would be.

I just find it kind of a fascinating thing to ponder; that humble Chevrolet essentially tested what would be the 911 formula back in 1957, long before Porsche released the 911 in 1963.

It’s not surprising at all that Chevy was looking at Porsche and Volkswagen while they were developing the Corvair engine – VW and Porsche were the big dogs of air-cooled, horizontally-opposed engines, so it’s not surprising at all that the Corvair borrowed from both of those.

What’s also fascinating is the realization of just how uncommon flat-6 engines were when the Corvair was being developed. Mercedes-Benz had built one in the ’30s for an experimental front-wheel drive car called the 130 W 144, and of course there was Tucker, who used an adapted helicopter engine from Franklin, but that was also never fully mass-produced, and there were really hardly any other automotive examples.

There were plenty of aircraft engines from Continental and others, but for cars? Chevy was really doing some pioneering work there.

Anyway, I suppose the point of all this is that if you have an annoying Porsche fetishist in your life, feel free to take a moment and let them know that the first Porsche with a flat-six wasn’t the 911, but was instead built by the same company that gave the world the Vega.

If delivered right, you might get a drink thrown in your face.

Top graphic images: Chevrolet; Porsche