The man behind Porsche’s iconic liveries

Did you know the roof section of the 1987/88 Shell/Dunlop ‘works’ 962C cars was, in fact, not black but grey? Code RAL 7021 black/grey, to be precise, because the mastermind of the livery – one of the very finest in the whole of motorsport history, in my humble opinion – thought that pure black would be “too harsh”.
 
Such gems and more are what you discover when you sit down and talk with Rob Powell, the English designer who began his professional career in the Porsche styling studio during a fascinating time for the company.
 
WALKING THE WALK
A hands-on approach to creativity defined Rob as a youngster. “I went to a comprehensive school which was very much about woodwork, metalwork, drawing and technical drawing,” he recounts, “and those experiences were where I was much more comfortable. In fact, it was only around 20 years ago I was found to be dyslexic, so I was always happier being creative and making things rather than doing maths and English. At 16, I was thinking maybe I’d go into architecture, but I’d always loved cars. Then I discovered an Italian styling magazine with renderings from Giorgetto Guigiaro and started reproducing the drawing technique.”
 
Rob initially got a job as a model maker in the Chrysler Design Studio in Coventry, but quickly progressed to the Royal College of Art studying design under – among others – Peter Stevens. It was there that he met another designer who worked at Porsche and who let it be known the German firm was on the lookout for new talent. That’s how, in September 1978, Rob came to pack his bags and head for Stuttgart.
 
“I arrived with my bag and my tennis racket, and managed to take a taxi to the wrong village, before eventually finding my way to my guest house in Mönsheim, just to the west of Weissach [where the studio was]. I was feeling remarkably nervous and took a taxi to the studio the next morning. I was met by, among others, Tony Lapine [Porsche’s then-design director], who I had met briefly at my interview. He drove me in a 928 – which seemed like a space rocket – down to Stuttgart to the personnel department, where we did the paperwork and I got my pass. I stayed at the guest house for several weeks and didn’t have a car so, on some evenings, I actually walked home from Weissach if I couldn’t get a lift!”



REFLECTIONS AND INFLECTIONS
From this slightly inauspicious beginning, Rob began to settle at his new employers. He bought a green Fiat X1/9 from a co-worker, but the language was still a hurdle and, surprisingly, there were no language courses. He resorted to learning it from a cassette and concedes that this led to him tending to mix in groups with other English-speakers for the first couple of years until he felt confident enough to use his own German.
 
Rob worked in a team that was headed up by Lapine, with Wolfgang Möbius as head of exterior design, Arnold ‘Ginger’ Ostle as head of interior design (and Rob’s first boss) and Richard Söderberg leading special projects. Along with Rob were names like Freeman Thomas, Tony Hatter, Ben and Cheryl Dimson and, soon, Steve Murkett.
 
With the demise of many automotive design studios in Britain around this time, many British model makers began to work in Europe and what had been an all-German clay modelling team at Porsche began to change. With his experience in this field, Rob wasn’t averse to picking up the scrapers of an evening if there was an adjustment on a clay model he wanted to implement there and then.
 
Rob found the Porsche studio wasn’t as busy as he had expected. Looking back, he remembers how designers such as Möbius would spend “an amazing amount of time” working on getting the perfect reflections on a car’s surfaces on the model, such as the ‘S’ reflection you’ll see if you watch how the light plays across the front wing of a 928. He chooses his words carefully as he recalls the tension around the 911 being killed off and what direction the 928 was to go in. “It was a time of uncertainty”, he says, politely.
 


A PEARL BEYOND PRICE
Rob’s early work for Porsche included an advanced new concept interior for the 924 that featured screen-like displays (very prescient of the car interiors of today) and work on the new 944 interior. He also played a part in the outrageous all-red cabin as conceived for the Pearl White 924 Carrera GT show car, exhibited at the 1981 Frankfurt International Motor Show. “The 924 GT exterior was basically the other half of the styling model that wasn’t chosen for the 944,” he reveals.
 
Talking of that Pearl White paint, he also contributed to the interior of the similarly hued Gruppe B concept (the precursor to the 959) with the centre console taking advantage of a new technology in lighting known as ‘LEDs’, and the 956 ‘road’ car that was also shown at the 1983 Frankfurt International Motor Show which he conceived with a black leather interior.
 
“Design wanted to do a brand-new car [for the Gruppe B], but Engineering knew that would take a lot, lot longer, so that was where the idea of keeping the centre section and the roof came from. Even though it’s a stunning car, it still doesn’t look right because the angle of the front screen is already a little bit vintage compared to the dynamics of the rest of the car.”
 
Rob recalls the struggle Söderberg and his team had in translating the Gruppe B to the production 959, with the requirements for ramp angles at the front and rear, legal headlight height and “all of the feedback from Aerodynamics”. For him, the 959 lacked the dynamism of the concept car.
 
When it came to the production 959, Rob got the job of designing interior parts and the now-iconic triple stripe. “There was no money for developing new stuff; except for the special-order cars, the actual interior had to be fairly cheap. There wasn’t any capacity left in the colour and trim department, so I did it.” The requirement was to use the usual sports seats, but Rob’s bold graphical treatment certainly gave them a unique look and feel.

 
BEHIND THE SCENES
Working at Weissach had its benefits. Rob would often hear the firm’s racing cars pounding around the test track and head out to watch. Sometimes, he’d hang around the workshops and get talking to the drivers and famous engineers. “I think some of the greatest memories are the interactions I’ve had and experienced at close quarters with these people. A lot of them were just observing and listening,” he says fondly. It could also lead to some unique projects, such as designing the Tag Turbo script on the cylinder heads of the all-conquering 1.5-litre V6 turbo F1 engine.
 
But perhaps Rob’s lasting legacy at Porsche is not the actual car designs he worked on, but rather the racing liveries he was involved with – even though, as he says, these made up only a fraction of his total time with Porsche. The first was in 1979, when he and two other designers in the team were tasked with implementing the Essex Petroleum sponsorship onto the Group 6 936 racers. In April of that year, Rob’s design was chosen and he soon found himself heading off at speed (in a 928, once again) to the paint shop preferred by Porsche at the time for the Martini liveries. At the start of May, the car was shown to the press in Paris at the Ritz.
 
Rob was also involved with the Rothmans livery, both on the Group C 956s and the 911 Paris-Dakar cars, as were a number of the Porsche designers. “I remember my first battle was getting those curved lines around the cockpit in tape and we’d spend a couple of days doing that until we were happy with them. With the liveries, a great deal of the work was done ‘off the grid’ – working at weekends, being paid outside of Porsche and working for the painter because it was too hard for them to apply the lines – and that’s even though we had created tracings. I always created those so we could transfer the lines from one car to the next.”
 
Another project came about when racer and Porsche test driver Günter Steckkönig asked Rob if he’d work up a design for a 928 to be supported by t-shirt maker Trigema. The resulting car achieved some success in the Nürburgring’s Veedol Cup and hinted at what was possible with the 928 platform in competition if Porsche had been willing and able to take things further.

 
BLAST FROM THE PAST
However, it’s Rob’s final racing livery for Porsche, and the one he had sole responsibility for, that’s perhaps his biggest lasting legacy from his years there.
 
“In early 1987, I was being briefed about the intended sponsorship by Shell and Dunlop for the 1987/88 Group C season,” he says. “The colours were to be red and yellow, with each sponsor’s name receiving equal space on the car. Red and yellow are not colours I would normally willingly combine, but I took the challenge on. As with all Porsche projects, I wasn’t alone in making proposals, but my design became the idea we would present to the management of both companies.”
 
Shell and Dunlop initially had other ideas, but works driver Hans Stuck (who would race the car in the 1987 Supercup – a kind of domestic German Group C championship) was an enthusiastic supporter of Rob’s proposal and it won the day. Rob then busied himself at Bernhard Stahl’s paint shop up the road in Mönsheim, applying tape lines to the plain white 962C (in this case, 962-009 – Stuck’s lightweight Supercup sprint chassis), which the painter would then apply his own masking tape to before beginning the job of painting the car. Once it was painted, the sponsors’ stickers would be added.
 
The livery was seen throughout the 1987 Supercup season and was then used for the trio of 962s entered by the factory at the 1988 24 Hours of Le Mans, where the team was narrowly beaten by TWR Jaguar. Thirty-three years later, Rob was reunited with 009 when the Porsche Museum dug it out of storage and decided to restore what had become a test hack in later life for upgrades to 1987 Supercup spec. Once again, he found himself in an almost-deserted workshop with his tapes, laying out the livery…

 
LIVING LEGEND
Rob’s time at Porsche included so much more. He’s still fairly tight-lipped about his proposals for updating the 928’s exterior design and his design for the fascinating 965, the super 911 set to occupy a space between the 911 Turbo and the 959. Then there’s the work for Porsche’s clients, such as a concept for a flight deck for Airbus, and an interior design for the Porsche-powered Mooney light aircraft.
 
Around 1989, a new design boss arrived in the form of Harm Lagaay and Rob felt it was time to move on. Now married, his new wife had a flat in Munich and he was spending weekends there anyway. Joining BMW Technic seemed like a good idea, so he would go on to spend 10 years in the firm’s exterior concept design department and eventually stayed with BMW Technic until 2000. Although Rob feels he “learned a lot” at Porsche, it’s at BMW that his creativity really shone, with three major concepts making it through to full-scale concept realisation, including the fascinating Z13 three-seat city car and the Just 4/2 concept.
 
Today, Rob’s design consultancy specialises in liveries, a legacy of those brief but memorable projects at Porsche that made so much impact on the world stage. Whether it’s re-imagining the Rothmans livery on a 962 EVO replica or designing racing liveries for current teams, those clients are very much getting the real deal.


If you’re interested in a livery by Rob, please visit powell-livery.de

This feature was written by Adam Towler and first appeared in the July 2025 issue of our monthly Club magazine, Porsche Post. Join today to receive your copy, as well as enjoying a host of exclusive member benefits and savings.