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To put Porsche’s new top-dog Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid plug-in sports sedan in perspective, please leap back half a century. While building the 917 sports racer that earned Porsche its first Le Mans victories, in 1970 and 1971, development director Ferdinand Piëch ordered his engineering team to trim weight by any reasonable means. A seemingly trivial idea worth a few ounces was changing the shift knob’s material from aluminum to birch wood. In 2003, when the Carrera GT brought Porsche’s racing acumen to the street, that car’s laminated balsa-wood shift knob paid homage to the 917’s engineering discipline and competition success. READ MORE ››
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