The early 1960s saw the Porsche 356 nearing the end of its development. The air cooled flat four engine had been extended from 1.1 litres to a full 2.0 litres and the bodywork had been enlarged and reshaped to improve passenger space, but Porsche wanted something even bigger and faster. A new car with a new engine was necessary, and it arrived in 1964.

The new design retained the 356´s basic layout, mounting an air cooled, horizontally-opposed engine behind the rear axle line.
But the engine was all-new, a 130bhp six cylinder unit with a single overhead camshaft on each cylinder bank.
The suspension, however, was very different: at the front the 356´s trailing arms gave way to more compact torsion sprung struts.
At the rear the tricky swing axles were replaced by semi trailing arms.
The new car was longer so that it could offer interior space, and was given a distinctive shape by Alexander Porsche.
Porsche called its new machine the 901, until Peugeot objected. The French company had long used three-digit numbers with a central zero for its own cars, so Porsche renamed its new model the 911, and an icon was born.

Early on the 911 proved to be unstable in a straight line, and corners it generated strong initial under steer and violent lift-off over steer. And it handled differently in left and right hand corners. Some examples were worse than others, and the cause was traced to production variations which upset the suspension geometry. A quick fix was to insert a 24lb (11kg) cast iron weight into each end of the front bumper, to make the weight distribution less rear biased and to increase the polar moment of inertia, making the 911 stable in corners.

Another problem was a flat spot in the middle of the rev range. The solution was to ditch the special triple barrel Solex carbs originally fitted to 911s in favour of triple choke Weber carbs which had originally been designed for Lancia V6 engines.
Early cars were all fixed head coupes, but in 1965 Porsche introduced an open top 911 with a substantial fixed roll over hoop, a removable roof section and a drop down rear window (though this was quickly changed to a fixed, wrap around rear screen). Porsche called it a “Targa Top”, named after the Targa Florio road race which Porsche had already won on four occasions.

Throughout the decade Porsche would try to replace the 911, notably with the front engine, water cooled 928 – but the 911 kept on selling. Regular revisions kept the range fresh, including the addition of a 231bhp 3.2 litres normally aspirated engine and a full cabriolet.
But time was against the 911. More than a quarter of a century after production began it was comprehensively re-engineered as the type 964.