My secret tip is the incredible Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. It has the original building where Ferry Porsche built the first Porsche – a little, red brick building that is surrounded by massive, sprawling factories. The museum is so true to the brand’s DNA and history and has absolutely everything there. With timelines on the walls explaining everything clearly, it has all the old race cars, prototypes, pretty much every competition car, and things even a Porsche fanatic like myself wouldn’t necessarily know about. There are certain models that never made it to the end of the production.
I’m a member of Porsche Club GB and we had dinner overnight at the museum. They didn’t call it Night at the Museum, but it was a surreal experience.
You can book either a factory or museum tour. In certain areas you can’t take photos, but they don’t keep anything under wraps. It’s amazing to see the Taycans and the next generation of electric cars right where Porsche built their first petrol cars. The factory is divided between petrol cars (their 718 Caymans and their 911s) in one building and all their electric stuff in another.
The Taycan production line is geared for the future. Everything’s automated and people are on hand just to make sure the machines are doing what they’re supposed to. With the petrol cars, however, it’s surprising how many people are on the ground manually doing things. So many different cars are produced in one line on the petrol side that machines can’t be programmed to do it all properly. You might look at a brand new 911 and think, ‘a machine has done that’. But you’d be wrong. Most of it is done by hand, which is really endearing. There’s still that passion and human element.
All the employees and locals are absolutely obsessed with the brand. As a Porsche collector, I love its fascinating history and the fact it produces designs that don’t generally break. You can get in a 911 of any generation and it will be fantastic. You could blindfold someone who knows their Porsches, put them in a 911, and they’d know it’s a 911 right off the bat. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a brand new one or a model from the 1960s: it has that same feel and DNA.
Porscheplatz 1, 70435 Stuttgart, Germany; porsche.com/porschemuseum
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