In the spring of 1955, James Dean won his first race in a Porsche Speedster. Nine months later, one of the last of the original Speedsters left Zuffenhausen with a larger engine but the authentic styling.
John von Neumann knew precisely who would buy the Speedster: a young man on Sunset Boulevard on a summer evening, elbow over the door, making sure he was seen. In March 1955 that young man walked into von Neumann’s Hollywood showroom. He was an actor called James Dean, and he was about to become rather better at being seen than anyone had anticipated. Dean arrived with an MG TD to trade in, which says a good deal about what the Speedster was up against. What he drove away was the product of a long transatlantic campaign. Max Hoffman, the Viennese émigré who sold Porsches from Park Avenue, had spent years telling Stuttgart that America wanted a cheaper, simpler open car; von Neumann, out on the West Coast, knew exactly what could be left off it. Ferry Porsche, whose instincts ran to engineering rather than economy, eventually agreed.
The result went on sale in New York for $2,995, the lowest price yet asked for a Porsche. Hoffman reached it partly by declaring things optional, the tachometer and the heater among them. It was hard to fault the logic: Californians seldom need a heater, and anyone serious about racing would buy the tachometer anyway, but the optional aspect was largely theoretical. The windscreen was cut so low that taller drivers looked over it rather than through it (but it was easily removed for racing at the weekend). Nobody in Los Angeles seemed to mind. Anyone who did could buy a Cabriolet.
Dean seems to have understood the car at once. He reputedly covered a thousand miles in his first week of ownership, much of it on the mountain roads above Santa Monica. It was less a running-in period than a rehearsal. Picture Palm Springs on the last weekend of March 1955. The circuit is laid out on the airfield, all long, fast straights, and the desert light is flat and unforgiving. Straw bales mark the corners. The crowd has come partly for the racing and partly for the film people, and is seldom disappointed on either count. In the paddock, a young actor in a car he has owned for barely a fortnight is smoking one cigarette after another. Then the flag falls, the little Porsche gets away, and Dean leads his race to the finish. Within days he is on set for Rebel Without a Cause. The studios would soon ask him to keep his racing in moderation; studios, then as now, preferred their stars intact. By September he had traded the Speedster, with $3,000 on top, for a 550 Spyder. The rest of that story is well known and needs no retelling here.
In Stuttgart, meanwhile, the Speedster was being overtaken by its own family. At the Frankfurt show that September, Porsche unveiled the 356 A. It brought a one-piece curved windscreen for the closed cars, a new dashboard and, more usefully, a thorough rethink of the suspension: softer front springs, a stiffer anti-roll bar, twice the castor, and 15-inch wheels on wider rims. It also arrived with a larger, 1600cc engine.
However, the Speedster did not follow at once. Reutter still had Pre-A Speedster bodies in hand, and Porsche, being a careful firm, saw no reason to waste them. So for a few months the new 1600 engine went into the old clothes. The A-type Speedster did not arrive until the new year, and chassis 81234 closed the original Pre-A series.
Chassis 81216 is one of that small rearguard, among the last twenty Pre-A Speedsters built. Finished in red with black trim, with sealed-beam headlamps and a speedometer in miles, it was despatched to Hoffman in New York on 4 January 1956. It carries the earlier dashboard, the curved sills and the beehive tail lamps of the original design, but with the larger engine of the new A-type. A factory bulletin announced the 356A Speedster’s arrival the following day.
It found its way, in time, to California, the place it had been conceived for. In 1978 it passed to William H. Benz, an attorney and a pillar of the Porsche Club of America’s Golden Gate Region, which he served as president, treasurer, secretary, competition director and head of its autocross school, which is to say he ran most of it. He approached the car’s restoration with a lawyer’s thoroughness, down to tables comparing the prices of rival parts suppliers, and it remained with him for more than twenty years. Since 2017 it has lived in England, where it has lately returned to its original red.
Settle into the bucket seat today and the view is much as it was in 1956: the spare early dashboard, a thin-rimmed wheel, a gear lever as slender as a conductor’s baton. Start it, and the flat four answers with that familiar air-cooled thrum. One understands at once what von Neumann was selling.
Von Neumann’s young man on Sunset Boulevard has long since grown up. The Speedster, rather pleasingly, has not, and the elbow over the door remains entirely optional. Chassis 81216 is now on offer from Brian Classic & Co., and we would be delighted to show it to you.
