Source: Porsche Road And Race Magazine

During 1938, Ferdinand Porsche and Major Adolf Hühnlein met, and the subject of establishing an endurance motor sport event was discussed. Hühnlein was inspired, and he set in motion a plan to organise a race from Berlin to Rome, a 1500km event that would take place in September 1939. No doubt Hühnlein’s motivation to his superiors included promoting Germany’s excellent system of Autobahns which this race would utilise, and the event would also tie in conveniently with the start of production of the KdF-Wagen.

In preparation for the race, it was decided to build three special long-distance race cars, and to Ferdinand Porsche’s delight, these were ordered and paid for by Volkswagen. For political reasons the cars were called KdF-Wagen and so in Volkswagen circles the car was known as the Type 60K10, although the Porsche engineers referred to it as the Type 64.

The 64 was to have an aluminium body, and the wheels were fully covered with removable alloy panels. Due to the event being a long-distance road race, Karl Fröhlich designed the car to carry two spare wheels in its nose, a move which meant the standard fuel tank would have to be relocated further back on the passenger side.

The engine used in the Type 64/60K10 was the standard 985cc unit as used in the KdF-Wagen, by increasing the compression ratio, power output was raised to 32 bhp at 3500 rpm.

With the race date set for September 1939, production of the three cars, Sports Car 1, 2 and 3, commenced in the summer of that year. The three chassis numbers allocated to the race cars, also referred to as the KdF-Rekordwagen, was 38/41, 38/42 and 38/43.

Karosseriewerk Reutter were given the task of making the bodies for the three cars from 0.5mm alloy sheets, but it wasn’t until 19 August 1939 that the first body was completed, a fortnight before the official start date of the Second World War. The second car was only completed on 20 December that year in a dark colour, while the third car, finished in the same silver colour as the first car, was only completed on 15 June 1940.

The plans for Porsche’s own sports car were already on the drawing board in 1947 and the first of the new 356 models was officially registered in June 1948. Just as the Type 64 had looked so ultra-modern when compared to contemporary sports machinery of the day, so too did the Porsche 356 immediately date other sports cars of the period. It was at this time that, with the war now over and plans to develop the 356 into a really competitive sports car in the market, that the old Type 64 became redundant to Porsche. Fortunately, the Swiss racing driver Otto Mathé had shown an interest in acquiring the Type 64, otherwise this crucially important piece of Porsche history may well have gone the way of its two siblings, and been scrapped.

“Otto Mathé, was one of the first, if not the very first driver, to use Porsche products for racing,” said Oliver Schmidt of the Prototyp Museum in Hamburg. Today there are two Type 64s in existence, the first being the 38/41 car Mathé bought from Porsche in 1949. The second car has been built up from the spares that Mathé bought from Porsche, and before the purists raise their hands and say that can’t be, consider the following.

The first public appearance of the Porsche Type 64 after the Second World War was at the Innsbrucker Hofgarten race in 1948, but this was before Mathé had acquired the car. Between 1949 and 1953, Mathé competed with the Porsche in around eighteen different events including the Coppa Dolomiti in Northern Italy, Österreichische Alpenfahrt, Stella Alpina, Straßenrennen Meran and Korneuburg, Krems, Linz, Gmünd, Innsbruck, Eifelrennen, as well as several circuit races.

At the time that the Prototyp Museum Hamburg acquired the Otto Mathé cars, they filled almost two lorries with parts, together with the Fetzenflieger (literally translated means ‘Scrap-flyer’). But they did not realise at the time that they had bought into the history of the remaining Type 64 parts. Oliver Schmidt explains, “The story about rebuilding car number 2 starts for us when we had problems with the gearbox of the Fetzenflieger. When we took the gearbox out we saw the number ‘38/42’ on it and at first we didn’t know what it was, but later we found out that this was the number of the second Berlin-Rome car. And then we found more parts stamped with ‘38/42’ and finally we also found the almost complete chassis and front axle. One of the door handles we found in a box full of aluminium ski bindings, and so we also had many other parts for the car, but not the body.”