AI-generatedPeople · Engineer · 1929–2020
Hans
the engine architect
The engine room
Mezger joined Porsche’s calculation department on 1 October 1956 and never worked anywhere else. From that desk came the air-cooled 901/911 flat-six, the 917 and its flat-twelve, and the TAG-Porsche Formula One turbo — engineering first proven in competition, then handed to the road.
His signature never sat on a body panel. It sat in cam profiles he calculated with his own formula, in cooling fins turned toward the airstream, in the symmetry of horizontally opposed banks. The three files below hold the cars in our register that carry his engines — which is to say, the ones you identify with your eyes closed.
The register
The drawing board
After working on the Type 547 four-cam engine he wrote his own calculation method for cam profiles — mathematics first, hardware after.
The 901/911 flat-six: horizontally opposed, cooled by air. Every 911 for three decades carried its architecture.
From 1965 he led Porsche’s race-car-design department — the room where the competition programmes were drawn.
For the 917 he was given the whole car and answered with the air-cooled twelve — Le Mans and two world championships followed.
What the 917/10 and 917/30 learned in Can-Am he helped carry into the 1974 911 Turbo — race boost made road manners.
Design and project lead on the 1.5-litre, 80-degree TAG-Porsche V6: twenty-five Grand Prix wins and the constructors’ titles of 1984 and 1985.
Drawn · H. Mezger, Zuffenhausen
Dept · Calculation, then race design
In service · 1956–1993/94
The archive
Press photographs from six decades at Porsche — choose a print and it pushes the others aside.
The first Type 753 Formula One engine, 1960. Porsche AG.
Beyond the register
The eight-cylinder Formula One engine and the car it raced in.
The air-cooled flat-six, drawn for the car that never left production.
A hillclimb one-off in the years the race department formed.
The 906’s successor on the hills and in the championship.
The long-distance prototypes that led the line to the 917.
A two-litre four-cylinder for the mid-engined volume car.
The Can-Am turbocars — the boost programme that changed the road 911.
Six-cylinder turbo race engines for the silhouette and sports-car eras.
A four-cylinder engine drawn for Milwaukee, not Zuffenhausen.
The power unit behind Porsche’s longest-running prototype dynasty.
The Formula One turbo built to McLaren’s order and Mezger’s drawings.
A twelve-cylinder Formula One engine to close the record.
The house
One employer for an entire working life. Hired into the calculation department in 1956, leading race-car design from 1965, retired in the mid-nineties — the Porsche records themselves disagree on whether 1993 or 1994 closed the file. Nearly forty years at one address, and an engine note that outlived the tenure.
Calculation department to race design, 1956–1993/94
In his words
“At Le Mans in 1969 we were a whole lot faster than the competition with the 917.”
Hans Mezger · on the 917’s first Le Mans
