Roaring Forties

Sing it loud: “Happy Birthday!” Launched in 1977, the 928 design masterpiece is 40-years old.

- Johnny Tipler 

Welcome to Nirvana! We’re at the Porsche Museum, Zuffenhausen, where every other passing vehicle is…a Porsche, of course. Like an intergalactic space vessel that’s landed randomly in the heart of a German industrial conurbation, the vast cuboid Museum building faces factory and showroom, a conurbation of silver and white, while the soaring tripod monument silhouetted against the blue sky, topped with three generations of heaven-bound 911s, bestrides the traffic intersection. And, appropriately enough, the pair of 928 space rockets we’ve come to photograph are as interplanetary modules descended to earth.

We’ve bookended this appraisal of the birthday basher by showcasing the earliest Geneva show car and the late-model GTS. We should be down on our knees at this point, hands raised in supplication, because, appropriately enough, the ’77 Geneva car belonged to Ferry Porsche till 1979, and the dark blue GTS was CEO Wendelin Wiedeking’s car in the mid-’90s till it fetched up in the Collection here, so both cars have been steered by the hands of greatness.

It’s a Monday, and the Museum’s not officially open to the public, making it easier to conduct our shoot on the spacious sloping concourse outside the monumental edifice. We’re greeted by museum PR Jessica Fritsch who’s extricated the 928 GTS from the collection for us. It’s all go, and people constantly sidle up to discuss these 928s. As my colleague busies himself with lights, camera, action – smoke and mirrors, some might say – groups of schoolchildren crocodile by, while bemused winners of a newspaper competition that’s put them in the seat of the One-Millionth 911 are earnestly pursued by a film crew shepherded by bustling Porsche marketing exec Conny von Bühler.