Customer Reviews

Porsche: The Engineering Story

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The late Jeff Daniels brought excellent credentials to this project, as a long time writer for the Autocar and author of many other engineering pieces. It's a bit daunting to think of doing a book that would do justice to the topic of engineering, which after all, is the heart of any Porsche. I would say Daniels succeeds to a great degree by not only dissecting the actual technical aspects, but also discussing the politics and marketing decisions behind each new idea. The chapters are nicely divided to delineate each model series and he covers a lot of ground with text that is clear, with technical explanations easily grasped by the layman. Because of the sheer volume of data, it's not surprising that a few facts get garbled, as in the 911L of 1968. For the most part, these are quibbles only a rabid enthusiast would be concerned about. It's interesting that he devotes only few paragraphs to the 912, when in fact it outsold the 911 during its years of production. One other gripe is that for the amount of information contained in the book, it should have at least three times as many illustrations. Visual aids would have been a boon to digesting much of this data. The book is fairly current, with models through the 997 included. Nicely packaged with a clean layout and good paper, it's a good addition to any Porsche library.

Being a Porsche fanatic I could find in this book a lot of details that I couldn't find before in other publications. Details mentioned does not refer only to mechanical details but historical also.

I appreciated the detail this book went into on the mechanical and engineering side of the car. It was nice to see the transparent engine and drivetrain photos. Most of the books are alot of pretty pictures, I've seen enough of those.

I liked the pictures, the text is more organized and has less fluff, as compared to the Leffingwell book. But the depth is missing...