Turning the world’s toughest endurance race into the perfect proving ground.
Words: Matt Master
Photos: Porsche Archive
From 1965 until its demise in 1971, the Marathon de la Route was the Nürburgring’s ultimate endurance event, combining the northern and southern loops of this infamous racing arena to create a 17.6-mile rollercoaster through the Eifel Mountains that lasted an almost incomprehensible 84 hours. That’s three-and-a-half days in an XXL Green Hell. What better place then, for Porsche to showcase a radical new drivetrain development?
So long and so arduous was the Marathon de la Route that few drivers fancied their chances, and even fewer manufacturers wanted to put their cars through the potentially humiliating rigours. The upshot was an eclectic entry list of pro-am racing veterans and improbably matched cars in a complex time trial that allocated maximum lap times based on engine and seating capacity and heavily penalised teams for excessive periods in the pits.
For Porsche in 1967, this was more of a battle with its own limits, and with the forces nature, than with a rival manufacturer. Winning was always important, but in reality this was part development exercise and, should its car win, part marketing coup.
Rolled out onto the starting grid that late afternoon in August was a true curio in Porsche’s competitive back catalogue: an original 911 R equipped with the as yet unproven Sportomatic gearbox. This was Zuffenhausen’s first stab at a two-pedal set up, a forerunner to the Tiptronic and PDK transmissions that we all know today.
What distinguished Sportomatic from these later iterations, however, was that it was not an automatic in the most literal sense. The car did not change gear for you – instead you had a clutchless manual that still required a physical shift through the H-pattern, disengaging the clutch via a vacuum cylinder when you depressed the gear knob. Highly complex and undeniably ingenious, but was an 84-hour endurance race around the most demanding and unpredictable circuit in the world the best place to pressure test it?
Porsche obviously thought so, and recruited a stellar cast of works drivers to trial the technology. Lead helm was Vic Elford, alongside Jochen Neerpasch and Hans Herrmann, with whom Elford would win the Daytona 24 Hours the following year. Porsche would also field one 911S equipped with Sportomatic and a standard five-speed manual ‘S’ as a control. The three cars lined up against works entrants from the likes of Tatra and DAF among a sea of plucky privateers.
The race began late on Tuesday, 22 August, and through a dark and difficult first few hours Elford and his teammates pulled away from the field, finding themselves a full lap ahead of their next-best sister car after six hours. The 911R was performing perfectly, the Sportomatic gearbox apparently untroubled by the high-speed straights or tricky shorter sections that demanded fast and unforgiving shifts. Elford’s team was in its ascendency, and after 48 hours was maintaining a comfortable cushion at the front when the weather took a marked turn for the worse.
The Eifel Mountains is a haven for pea soup fog and the summer of 1967 was no exception. When it eventually descended, visibility around the Nürburgring immediately dropped to a matter of yards. Cars were dropping out all over the circuit, many with mechanical failure and now as many due to accidents, one of which would prove fatal. It has been reported that at one point the fog became so bad that a car was driven the wrong way down the pit lane, accelerating straight into a retaining wall.
No such ignominy befell the works Porsches, but the demands of the Marathon were still taking their toll. Elford’s car suffered a damaged brake disc, forcing it to pit for time-consuming repairs and relinquish the lead for the first time in the race.
Porsche’s first retirement came in the early hours of 25 August, when the manual 911 S suffered a heavy accident. The other Sportomatic waved the white flag a few hours later, although the fault lay with a surprise engine failure rather than anything to do with its radical new transmission. An exhausted Elford, Neerpasch and Herrmann now found themselves back in front, clear of their nearest rivals, but still facing a long, uphill battle to the finish.
They would prove to be up to the task. As dawn broke over the Nürburgring on Saturday, 26 August, the last remaining works Porsche was now commanding an unassailable lead. All the drivers had to do was stay out of trouble and be as gentle on the drivetrain as was humanly possible. Hour after hour ticked past for the exhausted crew, nursing the car and themselves toward that illusive chequered flag. The strength of the complex new Sportomatic gearbox proved unwavering, however, and the end was suddenly in sight.
At midday on Saturday, the 911 R took the flag, having driven 323 laps and 5684 miles in the process. Despite the innumerable hazards, lengthy pit stops and atrocious weather, they had achieved an astonishing average speed of almost 70mph. Proof positive for the suits in Zuffenhausen that the Sportomatic gearbox was ready for market.