Weissach: Where the Modern Porsche Era Began

A land record from 1910 described the ground between Weissach and Flacht as remarkably mountainous and rocky, not very fertile and very difficult to cultivate. That description is a large part of why Porsche bought it. Ferry Porsche did not want to take good farmland for a test track, and Herbert Linge, a Porsche man from the early days as well as a respected racing and rally driver, knew a stretch of bad ground near his home village. His argument was practical, as he recalled decades later. Weissach sat close enough to Zuffenhausen to be convenient and far enough into the countryside to attract very little attention.

On October 16, 1961 Ferry Porsche turned up to the groundbreaking driving the bulldozer himself. Before that morning, Porsche developed its cars on public roads, at a borrowed airfield and in competition itself. Afterward it developed them in one place, with a stopwatch running. Almost everything the company has done since has a date attached to it, and most of those dates happened here.