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52 911 hero: Günter Steckkönig
Günter Steckkönig
Effectively Herbert Linge’s understudy, experimental engineer Steckkönig also became
a proper racing driver. Now 83, the man himself tells his story to Total 911
Written by Kieron Fennelly Photography courtesy Porsche Archive
Günter Steckkönig did not yet have
his trademark moustache when
he came to Zuffenhausen as a
Reutter apprentice in 1953. That
would materialise two decades later,
by which time Steckkönig was a fully fledged
Porsche experimental engineer and acknowledged
endurance racer. Reutter Karosseriewerk was
the assembler of Porsches, and the young
Steckkönig knew exactly what Porsches were as
his father used to take him to the Solitude races,
a short distance from their home in the southern
Stuttgart suburb of Degerloch.
“There were eight apprentices in the workshop
at Reutter,” he says, “and my first job was to rub
down and polish the aluminium brake drums
and the wheels and ensure the surfaces were
absolutely flat.” He was above all fascinated by the
competition cars: “The racing department was in
the same building, panelled off; we couldn’t see,
but we could hear them.” His competence and
enthusiasm would see him moved in the racing
division within a year or so. “I was the first Lehrling
(apprentice) to be promoted. I got to know Rolf
Wütherich (another talented mechanic and test
driver soon to be despatched to the US to assist
Herbert Linge) and I was involved in building
the first street-going Spyders, ten of them for a
customer in Geneva.”
In charge of the apprentices was Helmuth Bott,
a former school teacher whose Porsche charges
still hold him in the highest esteem. Steckkönig
is no exception: “He was a great man to work
for. Whatever he was doing, he always had time
for you. He believed in education and organised
training so that we continued to have formal
studies – that was important to me because it
meant I could work towards a master technician’s
certificate.” He recounts that Bott got hold of a
Beetle for him to carry out company business and
he also drove Porsche’s first VW van. He gives the
impression that Bott would increase his people’s
responsibilities in direct proportion to their ability
to cope. In Steckkönig’s case it meant that by
1957 he was working independently on customer
cars in the Reparaturwerkstatt and at Bott’s
behest, taking photographs to compile a service
manual. “In those days there was no information