by Tabitha Hergest

Created on: March 02, 2010   Last Updated: March 06, 2010

How do you compare an Italian playboy with a German ubergruppenfuhrer?  Are such comparisons, as Dogberry observes in Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing", odious?

Perhaps that comparison is a little unfair; after all, both the German and Italian supercar makers are aristocrats of the road, although admittedly the Italian is perhaps infinitely more desirable.  You see, each marque is a sort of metaphor for the country which gave them birth; the Italian is sexy, sassy, dripping with all the chattels of louche excitement so redolent of the Italian psyche.  If it were a student, it would be one of those irritating fellows who spends all day, every day, playing polo, but still managing to trump the most earnest swot in the class,  The German, on the other hand, is that swot.  With a ramrod up its fundament, it produces cars with beyond-the-call efficiency; engineering masterpieces lauded by cognoscenti as, well, German.  And yet, behind the bookish glasses, there is a fraulein of such dazzling pulchritude and commanding dominance that hard men have been reduced to jelly in her sight.

Yet the Porsche (note, two syllables, as in the name Portia, not one, as in the entrance to a building - it's German, after all) had humble, even sinister, beginnings.  When Dr Ferdinand Porsche was commissioned by one Adolf Hitler to design a People's Car, little did anyone think that, one Berlin bunker later, not only would his Volkswagon become a best seller in and of itself, but it would spawn such progeny as the Porsche brand proper.  The ancestry of the car is plain enough; the rear engine is not the most common of engine layouts, and although it is just about conscionable in a car like the Volkswagen, in a sports-car it can be lethal.  Going back even further than the original KdF-Wagen, the pre-war Tatra, from which the idea was lifted, had the unfortunate habit of flinging itself into a ditch every time the driver was a bit too exuberant with the throttle.  That said, the rear engined Porsche has enjoyed considerable success; the 911 model, and its variants, still being made, albeit in a much evolved form, over four decades after its introduction in 1966: then again, the rear engine did provide enormous levels of grip.  Nor is Porsche a one-trick pony; maybe some models, such as the generally work-a-day 944, have been a bit unprepossessing, but the contemporary 928 was quite exciting, even if its bulbous back end looked

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