The Powerplant That Nearly Broke the First Porsche

In the fragile postwar years, the team behind the first Porsche was driven by two forces: stubborn ambition and harsh reality. They had the vision for a true sports car, but building one was another matter entirely. The sleek shape of the Porsche 356 came together relatively quickly, but under its curves, a more complicated debate brewed. What would power this new machine? Among the boldest answers was the Type 367 engine: a highly advanced, high-revving boxer that could have cemented Porsche’s performance credentials right out of the gate. But as history shows, brilliance alone isn’t always enough.

The Supersport That Was Almost the Start

Credit: Porsche

The Type 367 wasn’t just another tweaked VW motor. Born from a series of increasingly ambitious designs, it aimed to outclass the humble Beetle-derived engines Ferry Porsche and his team had relied on up to that point. Drawing from wartime experiments and high-performance prototypes like the never-built Type 114 (a V10, no less), the 367 was cutting-edge. It packed features like hemispherical combustion chambers, a sharp camshaft, a reinforced valvetrain, and vertically aligned valves in a V arrangement, all squeezed into a sub-1.1-liter boxer layout to keep it motorsport-legal.