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1966 Porsche ‘Carrera 6’ Typ 906

Sale 14018 - An Important Sale of Collectors' Motorcars and Automobilia, 18 Aug 2006
Quail Lodge Resort & Golf Club, Carmel, California. Bonhams & Butterfields
Lot No: 510
1966 Porsche ‘Carrera 6’ Typ 906 Endurance Racing ‘Gullwing’ Coupé
Chassis no. 906-147
Within the cosy cockpit – how could any enthusiast load himself in here and resist the urge to take this Porsche out and use it? – the air of period originality and correctness in almost every detail is further underlined.

Sold for $557,000 inclusive of Buyer's Premium

The shapely Porsche 906 or ‘Carrera 6’ as it was more commonly known in period needs precious little introduction. The cars which first emerged in the Spring of 1966 were the latest step on the Stuttgart factory’s long march towards World Championship domination in the endurance racing world. Aimed squarely at the customer racing market the 906 proved an instant success while the engineering team at Zuffenhausen concentrated upon three particular areas of potential improvement, weight-saving, improved handling and increased power and torque from the air-cooled flat-6 engine. Titanium progressively replaced steel for many running gear components and Porsche’s finest even tried superlight beryllium metal in experimental brake discs. Frontier technology was absolutely what the Porsche experimental department was all about, and in the 906 design this extended – remarkably – throughout the customer racing programme.

The 906 was already remarkably light, combining its multi-tubular spaceframe chassis structure with the latest in thin-gauge moulded glassfiber body paneling. For Porsche in period racing was approached with a pragmatic attitude that regarded function as everything, finish (except where quality is vital) was irrelevant. This works team racing attitude was softened a little where the customer cars were concerned, a little more importance being attached there to aesthetics, but speed, reliability and above all endurance was always the key.

Here we offer a quite remarkable example of the sleek, shapely, lightweight Porsche 906 ‘gullwing’ Coupe. This particular individual car is in our long experience almost unique in its combination of now extremely rare fixtures, fittings and features that combine to produce an extremely high level of concours originality. Just ease open that long, graceful, Kamm-tailed engine cover, and study the unspoiled mechanical assembly it reveals. Here you have an original 1966-67 906 engine bay featuring the original model unpainted glassfiber air-cooling shrouds. There are the original unpainted glassfiber carburetor decks. Up front against the rear cockpit firewall is the original pattern cooling air intake ‘hopper’. The downdraught carburetor trumpets are snugly protected within the original period type leather covers. The combined brake and gearbox cooling intakes are in unpainted glassfiber. The engine appears from external examination to be correct, concours-standard in originality if not – inevitably after so many years on museum display – aesthetically so. But this is no corroded old museum relic – this Porsche 906’s mechanicals are in a few places merely slightly tarnished, the occasional mildest dusting of surface rust adhering to exposed or scratched ferrous parts. The car is in running condition, with operational gearbox and brakes, but will of course require re-commissioning for serious road and track use.

But search on through the car. Note the pure competition-standard transaxle gearbox with its distinctive longitudinal finning on its flanks. Note the original small-size starter motor atop the engine. Most unusually this car also retains the original-style FIA luggage container tucked there into its opening tail. And what’s more, within this container there is the original type quick-lift jack. Rather like the greatest of comic cartoons – the more one looks, the more one sees…

Within the cosy cockpit – how could any enthusiast load himself in here and resist the urge to take this Porsche out and use it? – the air of period originality and correctness in almost every detail is further underlined. And then stand back from this 906 and study its stance, its proportions and even the wheels on which it rides – the now very rare and expensive aluminum-steel combination type as supplied with the car, as new…

As a German Porsche returned to its native land, this Carrera 6 had a special pride of place within the Rosso Bianco Collection displays at Aschaffenburg. We believe that it was originally an American market export car, and from available records it appears to have been supplied new to Jim Hall, or to his brother Charles, in Texas. It seems to have spent virtually all its competitive life within the American racing scene, and although there appears to be no documentation detailing its history in Collection records we believe that it eventually found its way into the personal collection of a prominent Porsche enthusiast in the north-west who had the car restored with the painstaking and enormously impressive sympathy we have tried to describe above. From his collection it eventually passed to the Rosso Bianco ownership in which it has been generally so well preserved through the 1990s and on into the 21st Century.

This is a most rare Porsche Carrera 6, or 906, one which remains true to its factory origins and more particularly to Zuffenhausen customer standards as delivered, yet which still has a delightful aura of used usability. This strikes a chord within the viewing enthusiast’s heart as being one of those unspoiled Vintage or Historic racing Coupes from the 1960s which after many years on silent display is now somehow just yearning to be taken out, and to be given its head again on the race circuits of the world…a lovely car, indeed.