Coys Auction - The Festival Auction
Incorporating The Excellence of Porsche
Brands Hatch
Kent

Sunday 25th May 2008

Collectors'' Items: 2.30pm
Motor Cars: 4.30pm

Although not a producer of sports cars until 1948, Dr Ferdinand Porsche had by then been building tractors for 34 years. His first was supplied to the Austrian army to haul its Skoda-built 13.5mm guns and the first farm tractor came the following year, in 1915, controlled remotely by a person walking behind it rather than sitting on it. It was while at Daimler-Benz, to which he had moved in 1923, that Porsche commenced work on diesel engines. Eight years later he formed his own company and in 1934 produced three petrol-engined prototype tractors before, over 1937/1938, developing the Volkspflug *or* People''s Plough, commissioned by the German government. Porsche also developed a unique, air-cooled diesel engine with outputs ranging from 14hp to 55hp and by the 1950s