Enlarge / The Porsche Museum brought plenty of its toys to Laguna Seca for Rennsport Reunion 7 in September 2023. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

MONTEREY, Calif.—Few car brands have managed to stake out the kind of mindshare occupied by Porsche. Celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, the company just held its seventh Rennsport Reunion, a car show crossed with a race meet at the Laguna Seca racetrack in Northern California. It drew a crowd of more than 90,000 Porschephiles at the end of September.

From its start in the aftermath of World War II, Porsche has concentrated on using clever engineering to make cars for people who like to drive. Much of that clever engineering was first proven at the racetrack before making the jump to something a bit more road-legal. And almost all of it was on display at Rennsport Reunion, from early engines with twin spark plugs and early experiments with aerodynamics through turbocharging, hybrids, and now extremely high-performance EVs.

The early days

The first Porsche-designed racing cars predate the family firm and date back to 1934 and the fearsome Auto Union V16. But the first factory-built Porsche racing car took five years to follow the company's first road car, which appeared in 1948. When Porsche started building 356s, customers started racing them in sprints, hill climbs, and long-distance races, complete with pleas to the factory to see if it couldn't deliver a little more power, particularly from American owners.

Enlarge / Porsche is the first automaker to expose car functions like climate and lighting via Apple's automaker toolkit for CarPlay. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

The introduction of Apple CarPlay in 2016 was a game-changer. Until then, connecting your phone to your car meant bothering with Bluetooth, and if you wanted to use a smartphone navigation app, you probably needed some kind of phone holder clipped to an air vent or suction-cupped to the dashboard. Being able to cast your phone's screen to the car's infotainment system turned out to be extremely popular, and by 2020, it was a feature that almost half of all new car buyers wanted.

This has not sat well with every automaker; in March of this year, General Motors made headlines—and generated a lot of comments—when it announced it was killing off support for casting interfaces (both CarPlay and Android Auto) from its future products. But where GM saw a threat, Porsche saw an opportunity. And now it has built a new iOS app, making use of an Automaker toolkit provided by Apple. This little-known feature is only offered to OEMs and allows them freedom beyond the restrictive user interface guidelines laid down by Apple.

Porsche's customer research found that the overwhelming majority of its customers have iPhones and prefer using them for things like navigation. "Obviously, you have to switch back and forth to control some features around media, for example, some more specific features around climate," explained Cyril Dorsaz, principal product manager at Porsche Digital. "And ultimately, we learned through customer research that this is something that our customers are not really happy with."

Enlarge / It meant spending most of the week on the road, but who would say no to a chance to drive Porsche's very first car? Not I. (credit: Tangent Vector/Porsche)

CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA, Calif.—Every few years, Porsche holds a big celebration of its racing heritage at the Laguna Seca racetrack in Monterey, California. Called Rennsport Reunion, it's a big deal, drawing a far bigger attendance than when racing series like IndyCar or IMSA visit. And attendees are a passionate crowd, prepared to wait in line for an hour or more just to visit the official merch store.

Rennsport Reunion 7 took place last week, and it was a special one, as this year is Porsche's 75th anniversary. Among the cars brought over from the company museum was the very first to ever bear the Porsche name, the prototype 356/1 roadster.

And Porsche let us drive this priceless artifact.