Son of Ferdinand, the founder of Porsche. Remained with the company directly until 1972, when he retired. Porsche Senior was racing on the very day Ferry was born, whilst also working as chief designer at Austro-Daimler. Porsche's full name was Ferdinand Anton Ernst. Porsche grew up in a racing environment and lived in America for a while; he learnt to drive in 1919, when only 10, and raced his first race car aged only twelve. Porsche then became an apprentice at Daimler in the design department. In 1928, Ferry joined the Bosch Company in Stuttgart, before joining his father in the new company setup in 1931. Porsche had many roles in the business, including testing, management of engineers and management of customer relations. The company benefited from the links to the Nazi's, producing a number of cars. This led to father and son both getting arrested for collusion, but Porsche was released quite early on. Porsche then took over the company, working with the Cisitalia project and the Porsche 356, after his father died in 1951. Ferry then developed the business into a multi-billion pound success story. He appeared at many historic events, but was quite poorly at the celebration of the 30 years of the Porsche 911 which took place at Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg and died soon afterwards.

Biography last updated 26 May 2017