You don't get anywhere by thinking inside the box.
And to progress, you generally have to push yourself a little bit.
For a car manufacturer, that generally means concepts and prototypes.
And we're here at the Porsche Heritage Centre
and I've dug out a few of the weirdos for us to have a look at.
Welcome to the freak show.
I love a weirdo.
Now, you may have noticed this one because it's kind of hard to miss,
but this is the Porsche Panamericana concept from 1989
and it's got a lot of things going on.
But funny story about this.
It was kind of hinting at the styling
for the future 993 generation of 911s, particularly around the headlights.
But it was actually a bit of a birthday present for Ferry Porsche on his 80th birthday.
Sounds cool, right?
It's got a 247bhp flat-six in the back.
It's got really bulgy wheel arches,
big tweaky suspension,
um, double three spokes, which are about as of-their-time as it's possible to get.
The interesting thing about this car was that it was conceived
as a kind of homage to that off-road race, the Carrera Panamericana.
So what you do with this car is you can jack up the suspension
and then change the wheels and suddenly it's an off-roader.
It's a bit of a dual-purpose machine.
The only thing about it was that
when it was actually given to Ferry Porsche for his birthday,
he hated it.
Which, again, is quite awkward.
One of my favourite details –
it's got bespoke tyres with the actual Porsche shield on them.
It's got an unzippable neoprene roof,
like a wetsuit,
and the zips are purple.
And the interior is kind of green and purple,
but with a marbling effect.
I'm starting to understand Ferry Porsche's reticence.
What colour is this?
Answers on a postcard, please.
Because nobody knows.
It's poiply-green.
Bizarrely, Porsche actually apparently considered
a small production run of this car, but it never actually made it.
Which is a shame, really, because it's completely mad.
Urgh! This is possibly one of the ugliest cars I think I've ever seen.
It looks like a bar of soap with wheels.
But this is actually a concept car from 1987 that was supposed to
ape what the 356 Roadsters looked like back in '54.
Can you see it?
Kind of.
Sort of.
Well, some of the Roadsters that got imported to America chopped the windscreen down
and then had this kind of tonneau cover that
covered the passenger seat to keep things all aero.
And this is that taken to an extreme.
So you've got this cutdown windscreen
and then this whole body
which just makes it look really blobby.
And then the weird thing about it is that the doors open normally,
but then this tonneau bit kind of opens up
and you slide up underneath it.
Which is awkward.
But there are advantages to driving it.
One, if you're inside, you don't have to look at the outside.
And two, there's no passenger to share your shame.
Of course, Porsche did end up doing modern speedsters.
They just didn't look as rubbish as that, thank God.
OK, this is definitely weird.
It looks like a terrible Back to the Future copy,
but this car had a point.
It's basically trying to remove all of the external-noise factors
from any car, so you can test tyres and see how noisy they were.
So this rig isn't for emissions,
it's to take away any and all exhaust noise.
And on the front, there's another sort of barrel-shaped thing
which takes away all the induction noise.
And then in the wheel arches, it's got loads of padding and weird stuff
to make sure that you couldn't hear anything but what the tyres were doing.
It's actually an experimental car that works for a living.
You want less mad, but more absolutely awesome?
Then this is the car for you.
It's a 1987 928 H50 concept.
Weird stat – until the Cayenne arrived in 2002,
all mass-production Porsches actually only had two doors.
It is quite lovely in here.
I mean, check out these leather seats.
They're like little leather armchairs and they're electric and they move.
Apart from the battery's flat, so they don't move at the moment.
But Porsche have actually done longer-wheelbase versions of cars
because they believed that an element of practicality was something good.
And there'd actually been a proper long-wheelbase four-seat 928 prototype.
But this one is special because it's not just four-seat,
it's four-door, obviously.
So you've got a kind of suicide rear-doored
shooting brake, which makes it one of, like, all of my favourite things in one car.
Plus, it's purple, obviously.
I definitely could make this work as a family car.
Obviously, I couldn't make it work as a family car but I'd try.
You could think of this as sort of, kind of, ish,
the grandparent to something like the Panamera.
But actually, if you really want to see where this was going,
we have to head over there.
Where is it?
Ah… there it is!
So Porsche was thinking all the time about something with four doors
and they came up with things like this.
Now this is a clay model of a car called the 932,
and it basically looks like what a four-door Porsche might have looked like.
This later became the 989, which looked a bit like
a proper 911, just stretched and with four doors.
But because of a slight financial crisis in Germany
and the weak Deutschmark against the dollar,
the car sort of disappeared and never appeared in anything.
But the thing that really interests me about this car
is that one.
You ready for this?
Say what?!?
What is a Mercedes W124
doing in the Porsche Heritage Centre?
It's a 500 E, obviously. Check out the arches.
Except it's not a 500 E because it's a coupé.
What this is is actually a test mule for a four-door 989 Porsche.
What Porsche needed to do was have something of a similar size
and weight as a big car, so they could test their new V8 engine.
So that's what's under there. Actually, I think I can probably show you.
So this is a Mercedes 124, W124,
with a Porsche V8 heart.
That is a proper Frankenstein.
So this engine was being tested in this big car,
and you got a little bit of Porsche mixed in with a whole lot of Mercedes.
But the best bit isn't even the engine.
Come and look inside it.
So in here, it's a proper mash-up.
It's got a manual gearbox for the V8,
Porsche seats,
it's got W124 dials –
I used to have one of these, so I kind of recognise them –
and then a Porsche steering wheel.
It's like a really weird
mixture of the two cars. But you can bet one thing.
It will be really reliable and quite, quite fast.
That's not a concept, it's a floor-cleaning machine.
Oh! Actually, there is another Merc in this collection
that's a bit of a prototype.
This is a slight sidequest,
but just come with me and look at this G wagon. Look.
See this thing here?
There's a great story behind this.
So basically,
when Porsche had decided to do the Dakar with the 959,
it needed to have some sort of support car to follow it.
Now it considered having another 959, but they were pretty crap
at delivering spares and things because they didn't have the body for it.
So Porsche got hold of a G wagon
and then put the motor
and transmission from a 928 S4 into it.
So it's got just over 300bhp.
And then it went out and competed.
Because they weren't allowed to enter support cars,
so they had to enter race cars.
So this thing was officially registered, had this V8 in it, 5-litre.
It was actually quite quick and could carry all the spares.
It actually, as a support car-slash-race car
came in sixth.
Which is amazing.
So this is another Porschedes.
And I think this is spectacular.
It's not even been restored.
So it's got broken bonnet,
all the NACA ducts are all bent. It looks brilliant.
The thing is, concept cars are very much of their time.
And prototypes invariably aren't the finished article.
That's the point.
But Porsche has kept pushing the boundaries all the way through its career.
There are loads more prototype Porsches in the world;
these are just a few that happened to be in the store when we visited.
And that's probably why Porsche makes some of the best cars in the business –
because it's willing to make mistakes and learn.
I'm all for it, to be honest.
Because as it turns out, some of the most interesting cars in the world
are the ones that don't exist.