The Sonderwunsch Man – Rolf Sprenger

Rolf Sprenger was a versatile engineer whose Porsche career was founded almost entirely on customer service. “If I want a trailer (caravan) with a swimming pool, Herr Sprenger will build it for me,” so said Peter Schutz to a potential client, while Sprenger looking on, would groan inwardly: yet another customer whose expectations had been over-excited would have to be brought down to earth. But, although he was the man who devised the highly successful Sonderwunsch scheme, and ran it for many years, there is far more than the special wish department to Rolf Sprenger’s career.

“You know I was a mechanical engineering apprentice at Bosch,” he says, “and then Bosch sent me to Sims & Gray in London, a Lucas subsidiary developing fuel injection for diesels.”