NORBERT SINGER - PORSCHE RENNSPORT 1970-2004

The gearbox of the 917 is supposed to survive the 24 Hours of Le Mans at healthy temperature. The cooling must not create any additional aerodynamic drag. This was the first task of Norbert Singer when he started in Porsches motor sport department in the spring of 1970. As is well known. The gearbox lasted, Porsche won the race and Norbert Singer remained loyal to the Swabians for the coming decades.

On the occasion of the legendary racing engineer's 80th birthday, his memoirs are published in this book. Originally intended as a translation of an older English title, the manuscript grew into a comprehensive and detailed autobiography. In 16 chapters, Singer describes the - in his opinion - greatest era of Porsche racing to date from the 917 via the 911 Carrera RSR to the world champion Porsche 935 - a radical interpretation of the 911, which among other things produced the lightest (735 kilos) and fastest (366 km/h) 911 in history. Singer tells how short the development time for triple Le Mans winner Porsche 936 was and about his job as project manager of the Carrera RSR Turbo, 935 and 956 race cars. He shars his memories of the CART series’ project in the 1980s and about the artistic transformation of a racing prototype into a Gran Turismo, which won Le Mans in 1994 as the Porsche 962 LM GT1. In 1996, a team under Singer's leadership put the first mid-engined 911s on the wheels, the GT1 which won Le Mans in 1998. It was the 16th success for Porsche in the world's most famous endurance race. Singer was involved in all of them as an engineer, in most of them also as a strategist and tactician in the pits. Accordingly, the descriptions of his experiences at the 24-hour marathon take up a lot of space: from the escape from his CEO to the improvised airlift for racing car parts. At the end of the 1990s, Singer devised the pioneering aerodynamics of the "LMP2000" racing spyder, which disappeared into a hangar as a secret. After retiring, Norbert Singer supported customer teams at the race tracks until 2010, before passing on his knowledge to the next generations of engineers as a university lecturer. 40 years of Porsche racing, told by Norbert Singer and written down by Wilfried Müller, who is known to motor sports enthusiasts as the author of the Peter Falk and Walter Röhrl biographies.