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    The Porsche That Almost Beat the 356 by a Decade

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    By 1938 Ferdinand had given up trying to arrange for a supply of VW parts for the Type 64, the sports car variant of the Volkswagen he'd designed for the German government. German law prevented a government entity from selling parts to a private company, which left the Porsches with a problem. They wanted to build a sports car. They couldn't use the obvious components. So Ferdinand and his son Ferry decided to start from scratch. This would have been the first car actually built by Porsche themselves, known as the Type 114, or F-Wagen, a sort of portmanteau of Ferry and P-Wagen. What they designed was extraordinary for 1938. The design drawings were all but completed and included a novel water cooled 72 degree V10 twin camshaft engine in a true mid engine layout, as opposed to the VW's rear engine layout. The engine displaced 1.5 liters and produced 72 horsepower. Ten cylinders were rare at the time, with only Ford and Lancia having similar developments in the late 1930s. The chassis was equally ambitious. Suspension was by trailing arms in front and swing axles in the rear, with drum brakes at all four corners, while the body was aluminum and resembled a lower, stretched, and streamlined VW. Three scale models were built from wood for wind tunnel testing, each with different details, with one variant intended to be a three seater with a two plus one layout. Karl Fröhlich led the engineering work, and the project progressed to the point where complete documentation for production was within reach. Then it stopped. International tensions and a poor economy led to its cancellation. War was coming. Germany had other priorities. A small sports car project from an engineering consultancy didn't rate resources or attention. The design documentation needed to build a working model was never completed. The Type 114 remained drawings and wind tunnel models, nothing more. The frustration must have been considerable. Ferdinand Porsche had wanted to build his own cars for years. When he left Austro Daimler in 1923 to go to Mercedes, he had the idea to do something like what Bugatti had done, but it was a question of either having enough money to start a factory or go to Mercedes as technical director. He didn't have the money then. By 1938 he did, or at least enough to attempt it. The Type 114 was that attempt, and it died before a single piece of metal was cut. After World War II Ferry Porsche began to build sports cars based on the VW, and eventually began production of the Porsche 356 which in concept was identical to the Type 64. The 356 became the foundation of the Porsche company, a rear engined sports car using modified Volkswagen components. It was successful, beloved, and spawned a dynasty. But it was also the fallback plan, the idea they'd abandoned a decade earlier because they couldn't get the parts. Aerodynamic research for the 114 led to a series of bodies produced by Porsche for racing and land speed record cars, such as the Type 60K10, a highly modified VW Beetle. The mid engine layout reappeared decades later in the 906 and 917 race cars. The thinking that went into the Type 114 didn't vanish. It went dormant, waiting for the right moment and the right application.   History turned on German bureaucracy preventing the sale of Volkswagen parts to a private company. If that hadn't happened, the Type 114 never gets designed. If the war hadn't intervened, the Type 114 might have been built, and Porsche becomes a manufacturer in 1939 instead of 1948. The first Porsche would have been mid engined with a V10, not rear engined with a flat four. Everything that came after changes accordingly.
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