Customer Reviews

Porsche: The Rally Story

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Laurence Meredith's Porsche: The Rally Story is a fascinating overview of Porsche's rally history. The author is authoritative on the subject, at least where it concerns the '50s, '60s and '70s. He goes into great depth and detail about Porsche's successes and failures contesting rallies during this period and a lot of the politics involved at the time. He weaves an interesting story of the ups and downs of Stuttgart's efforts against the establishment that looked down on the rear-engined German cars. While at times colored by a true fan's bias, it is nothing if not entertaining and informative. He even goes into the results of races that Porsche did not compete in, simply for the context of competition. This is true thoroughness, and while it can feel a little repetitive at times, you are convinced that the author lived the seasons he talks about so lovingly. The treasure of historic photographs is worth the price of the book alone.

Where the text breaks down is in the chapter on the Group B and Rally Raid period of the '80s, where the author is clearly less informed. Very little of the detail Mr. Meredith brought to the earlier days of rallying is present in his overview of the Rothmans 911SCRS campaign, being a quick gloss-over of Henri Toivenen's few outright victories despite the Porsches being quite the force to be reckoned with in the European Championship at the time. Nothing is said of the development of the cars (having been prepared by English company Prodrive, their first such effort before going on to dominate the sport with the legendary WRC-winning Subarus of the 90's) and I learned more about Porsche's efforts during this period from Peter Collins' exceptional book on the Lancia 037! A gross oversight that could have been overcome with just a little research. Otherwise this book should have focused on the era the author was clearly passionate about and not promote itself as a comprehensive history.

The section on the Paris-Dakar rally and rally raids is also fraught with minor factual errors. (The author refers to the 1984 Dakar-winning car as 'simplified' 959, rather than as the four-wheel-drive 911 or type 953. And he refers to the '86 winning 959 as the 961, which was Porsche's designation for the Group B Le Mans version, though on an earlier page he contradictorily makes this distinction clear.)

The only fault that truly mars this book however is the utterly incompetent captioning and placement of the photographs. Photo editing and captioning was clearly not performed by the author, who could not have so frequently mis-identified the rallies and cars portrayed, and the captions are generally so generic and inane as to undermine the effectiveness of the photos in telling the author's story. Photos are frequently placed on pages where they have nothing to do with the text or in completely inappropriate chapters, and are absent when they would most effectively illustrate the subject. Six full pages of the chapter on the 1980s is illustrated with pictures of the 1978 Safari Rally contender (not identified or mentioned in the text here), while a rare and fascinating photo of one of the Rothmans four-wheel-drive type 953s being prepared for the '84 Paris-Dakar (obvious from the whale-tail spoiler and the 4wd drive-train sitting in front) is inexplicably used to illustrate rally prep for the 1970 season. These sorts of errors and missed opportunities abound, making the text and image combination utterly confusing when it could have been enriching. I can only speculate that the publication was either rushed or the publisher simply didn't care enough to put someone with the least knowledge of the subject matter (or simple observation skills) on the job.

All that said, this is still worth the buy and a must for any rally or Porsche motorsport library, though at the steep list price you are bound to feel horrendously cheated.