Book Review: Porsche 718+804 by Födisch, Neßhöver, Behrndt and Roßbach
I’ve written before about a book published by Reinhard Klein/McKlein photography. Their accounts of rally history are definitive, but they’ve also tackled other motorsport subjects including, as here, lesser-known corners of single-seater racing history.
Given Porsche’s modern status as the world’s most prolific race-car manufacturer, it’s hard to imagine a time when competition cars were a small, low-profile part of the business – when there was no dedicated racing department, and cars were developed and operated from small premises on limited resources, by production-car engineers and technicians, with inconsistent backing from management.
Indeed, as the book conveys, it was Ferry Porsche’s preference for sports cars – what the company sold to the public – that finally curtailed the single-seater program, which had begun in 1957 with the 718 Formula 2 car and culminated in the Grand Prix-winning 804 in 1962. But the lessons of the 804’s complicated, eight-cylinder, Type 753 engine fed directly into the subsequent units that would power the 911 and 907.
The book covers the years 1957-1964, from the first Formula 2 cars, through the works 804 Grand Prix machines made famous by Dan Gurney and Jo Bonnier, to the final, privateer 718/2 entries of Belgian nobleman, Carel Godin de Beaufort. I knew nothing about Beaufort beforehand, but his inspiring and ultimately tragic story was one of the book’s most memorable aspects. The tone here is often earnest – you’re aware that this is the definitive account, but it’s not always written in an entertaining style.
Different chapters are handled by different authors, and are dedicated to detailed technical development of the 718 and 804, their race histories, and interviews with key players from the time, such as factory drivers and longtime Porsche employees, Peter Falk and Herbert Linge, and engine guru, Hans Mezger. All have since passed away – Falk only in January 2026, just a few months before I wrote this review – so we can be grateful to the authors for recording their voices for posterity. Comprehensive period photographs and illustrations come from Porsche’s own archives, supplemented occasionally from other sources.
I’ll finish with a section of the Linge interview that sums up the era:
Even a man like Herbert Linge, who was deeply rooted in the Porsche business, did not earn what would be normal nowadays for his efforts. Once, he received a set of tyres for his Simca and some for his wife’s Fiat 750. Buying a dinner for his mechanics after the race used up all the prize money that he won for a good result at Le Mans. Top-class German drivers were not sent to the races in the USA because the cold-as-ice PR genius, Huschke von Hanstein, hoped to get bigger headlines in US newspapers when Porsche’s winners bore US names, and he got them of course. Believe or not, the Porsche people – all of them – went along with all this. “There was no turnover at all,” Linge remembers. “No one quit.”
Porsche 718+804
by Jörg-Thomas Födisch, Jost Neßhöver, Michael Behrndt and Rainer Roßbach
McKlein, first edition 2009. ISBN 978 3 927458 43 7
Find it on eBay
Given Porsche’s modern status as the world’s most prolific race-car manufacturer, it’s hard to imagine a time when competition cars were a small, low-profile part of the business – when there was no dedicated racing department, and cars were developed and operated from small premises on limited resources, by production-car engineers and technicians, with inconsistent backing from management.
Indeed, as the book conveys, it was Ferry Porsche’s preference for sports cars – what the company sold to the public – that finally curtailed the single-seater program, which had begun in 1957 with the 718 Formula 2 car and culminated in the Grand Prix-winning 804 in 1962. But the lessons of the 804’s complicated, eight-cylinder, Type 753 engine fed directly into the subsequent units that would power the 911 and 907.
The book covers the years 1957-1964, from the first Formula 2 cars, through the works 804 Grand Prix machines made famous by Dan Gurney and Jo Bonnier, to the final, privateer 718/2 entries of Belgian nobleman, Carel Godin de Beaufort. I knew nothing about Beaufort beforehand, but his inspiring and ultimately tragic story was one of the book’s most memorable aspects. The tone here is often earnest – you’re aware that this is the definitive account, but it’s not always written in an entertaining style.
Different chapters are handled by different authors, and are dedicated to detailed technical development of the 718 and 804, their race histories, and interviews with key players from the time, such as factory drivers and longtime Porsche employees, Peter Falk and Herbert Linge, and engine guru, Hans Mezger. All have since passed away – Falk only in January 2026, just a few months before I wrote this review – so we can be grateful to the authors for recording their voices for posterity. Comprehensive period photographs and illustrations come from Porsche’s own archives, supplemented occasionally from other sources.
I’ll finish with a section of the Linge interview that sums up the era:
Even a man like Herbert Linge, who was deeply rooted in the Porsche business, did not earn what would be normal nowadays for his efforts. Once, he received a set of tyres for his Simca and some for his wife’s Fiat 750. Buying a dinner for his mechanics after the race used up all the prize money that he won for a good result at Le Mans. Top-class German drivers were not sent to the races in the USA because the cold-as-ice PR genius, Huschke von Hanstein, hoped to get bigger headlines in US newspapers when Porsche’s winners bore US names, and he got them of course. Believe or not, the Porsche people – all of them – went along with all this. “There was no turnover at all,” Linge remembers. “No one quit.”
Porsche 718+804
by Jörg-Thomas Födisch, Jost Neßhöver, Michael Behrndt and Rainer Roßbach
McKlein, first edition 2009. ISBN 978 3 927458 43 7
Find it on eBay