The mid-week long read: homecoming heroes
Reuniting four veterans of the Targa Florio with the cars and course that made them legend
At 88 years of age, not everyone can still change their shoes standing up. But with one hand propped on a bale of straw, Herbert Linge pulls the old loafer from his right foot and slips on an unworn vintage racing shoe. Then comes the left. These are very special shoes – made by his old friend Francesco “Ciccio” Liberto. The traditional shoemaker from nearby Cefalù knows almost all of Linge’s contemporaries, many of whom sought him out over the decades for his tailor-made, ultra-soft, leather race boots.
Linge himself has owned three pairs, two of them worn out by the countless hours of three-pedal endurance racing, and one pair preserved for posterity. So far he has worn these just once – while shooting Steve McQueen’s epic “Le Mans”. Today, it seems, is a day of similar importance to the Porsche stalwart. He is driving an original section of the Targa Florio, for years the wildest and most dangerous road race in the world. And he is doing it in consummate period style behind the wheel of a 718 RS 60 Spyder.
Herbert Linge
He is not the only one feeling a sense of occasion. Alongside Linge stand Gijs van Lennep Günter Steckkönig and Vic Elford, all former Targa Florio legends in their own right, brought together by the Porsche Museum for the 60th anniversary of the team’s first Targa victory, back in 1956, when Umberto Maglioli’s 550 A Spyder came in almost 13 minutes ahead of its closest rival.
It’s the perfect opportunity to reunite these icons of Porsche’s racing past with some similarly iconic cars, to breathe the heady Sicilian blend of petrol, olive trees and pizza.
Linge is Porsche through and through. Actually born in Weissach, he became Porsche employee number 13 (apprentice mechanic), as his company ID still shows today. He remained loyal to the company, occupying various positions, founding the ONS safety crew and becoming its technical director. Up until he 1993, he still managed the Carrera Cup.
From 1954 to 1970, he raced. In 1954, he drove the Porsche 550 Spyder in the Mille Miglia, winning his class and coming sixth overall, won the Liège-Rome-Liège Rally in a 356 SL, came second in the Tour de France in the 550 Spyder and took fourth place in the Carrera Panamericana in the same car. 1961 saw him racing in the Targa Florio for the first time in the 356 B Carrera GTL Abarth. In 1963, he came third overall here (and first in his class) in the famous “Dreikantschaber” (“triangular scraper”) 356 B Carrera GT. The following year he came in fourth overall at Le Mans in the Porsche 904, and repeated the achievement in 1965. Overall, Linge secured a phenomenal 90 class victories for Porsche.
“The first time I was here was in 1959,” Linge shouts over the increasing pitch of the 718 RS 60 Spyder he is in today, “and the cars proved to be extremely reliable from the outset.” In ten races, Linge was never able to get a win and came in second “only” twice. “But I always came in!” he wryly observes. Many on the notorious Targa did not.
If Linge has remained remarkably humble, Günter Steckkönig seems all the more so. Behind the wheel of the Porsche 356 B 1600 Carrera GTL Abarth, his lean, athletic arms manage this priceless curio with supreme confidence. The engine behind him screams to its redline, conversation only possible on the approach when he has to slow for traffic.
Steckkönig’s life at Porsche began in 1953. Originally from the town of Degerloch, he was one of the firm’s first eight apprentices. For 30 years he worked as a test driver, introduced Formula Vee together with Huschke von Hanstein and drove almost all the racing cars that Porsche produced.
In 1968, he received his first racing assignment – and in return delivered second place in the Marathon de la Rout on the Nürburgring in the Porsche 911 GTS. In 1970 he won the GT class at the Österreich-Ring in the 914/6 and in 1976, he came in seventh at Le Mans in the 908/03. He competed in the Targa Florio three times: in 1971 in the Porsche 914/6 GT, in 1972 in a 911 S (class winner and sixth overall despite an accident) and in 1973 in a Carrera RSR. “The spectators were always particularly friendly here,” he shouts above the engine on a seamless downshift. “Extremely enthusiastic even – you didn’t get that anywhere else.”
That final outing, it turns out, he was lucky to start at all. He’d travelled in the spare parts plane, sat between engines and transmissions, only to learn on landing that his co-pilot had crashed the race car in free practise. “But I categorically wanted to drive,” he recalls. “The sports boss Norbert Singer suggested the “Muletto” – the training car – for the race. So I got in the training RSR and familiarised myself with it during the race...”
He came in an impressive sixth overall, but it was after race that Steckkönig would make Porsche history. Tasked with driving the mule back to Stuttgart, he only established when they had made mainland Italy that it had developed an electrical fault and would be almost impossible to restart. With that hanging over him, Steckkönig would drive one of the most powerful and intimidating road-legal racecars of its day the entire way from southern Italy to Weissach without once turning off the engine.
Next up the road today is another part of the Porsche family furniture, Gijs van Lennep, who won here in 1973. His racing career began in 1965 in Formula Vee, but within a year he was class winner at the Nurburgring 1000 km in a 906 KH. In 1970 he secured the Porsche Cup and one year later, he took victory at Le Mans in the 917 KH. His ’73 Targa win was behind the wheel of the 911 Carrera RSR, sister car to the very one he is pushing hard today.
Gijs van Lennep
Van Lennep’s confidence in himself and his car has not waned one iota in the intervening years. He powers around these tight, closed roads without the faintest hesitation, exploring the limits of power and grip in a museum piece that dominated not just the GT class in period, but the top tier prototypes as well.
Porsche developed the RSR as a GT racer on the platform of the Carrera RS 2.7. With 300bhp and a weight of just 900kg, the RSR was a tour de force, taking outright wins not only on the Targa, but also at the 24 Hours of Daytona.
How was it possible back then for a GT car to overcome the competition? “Quite simple,” he explains, “because the others made mistakes. Merzario had an engine failure; Ickx didn’t know the route well enough and crashed. After three laps, we were already in the lead and just carried on driving with precision. In a road race like the Targa Florio if you make just one little mistake, that can be it...”
A man who can testify to the perils of the Targa is Vic Elford. English by birth, resident of Florida, he is nevertheless an adopted hero of Sicily, besieged by autograph hunters wherever he stops around the island. ‘Quick Vic’ is pedaling a 2.7 RS Touring, a car he is fairly familiar with after a rich history of road rallying in various 911 S. Elford became a works driver in 1966, placing third in the Tour de Corse that year and winning the Stuttgart–Lyon–Charbonnières Rally in the next.
Vic Elford
In 1967 he would win the European Rally Championship in a 911, and the Targa Florio in a Porsche 907 KH the following year. Success came thick and fast for Elford after that, bagging the 24 Hours of Daytona in the long-tail 907 and Nürburgring 1000KM in the 908. Victory at the Monte and a second-place finish at the Targa would also follow in the 911 T, but it is that victory in ’68 that made a legend of ‘Quick Vic.’
“The Targa Florio was always my favourite race,” recalls Elford, the man who set fastest laps in each year here between 1968 and 1972. “Just after the start, I lost a wheel here between Cefalù and Cerda. The spectators came jumping down from the wall and lifted up my light car so that I could fit the spare wheel. Just imagine it: A Brit in a German car...” That didn’t bother the spectators a few bends further down the road either: “That’s where I lost the next wheel. Again the people lifted up the car, and because I didn’t have another spare wheel, one fan unscrewed the wheel from his own private car and lent it to me.”
Thanks to this impartial offering, Vic was back in the race and managed to pit for a proper race wheel and new spare soon after. Some 18 minutes adrift of the lead car, Elford forged on and, thanks to his famous photographic recall of the Targa’s 72km loop and a fearsome turn of speed that would seldom be seen again on these slippery, dangerous roads, won it against all the odds. In the process also he beat the previous lap record by almost a minute, averaging a scarcely credible 119.8 kmh.
There is something very special about the Targa, and the industrious, resilient men who drove it. They are a close-knit family, local legends now, beloved by Sicily’s natives young and old. The shoes on Elford’s feet that day in 1968 were, of course, like Linge’s this morning, bespoke Ciccios, purchased just down the road from here in Cefalù. In every sense, part of the scenery.
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