1960 Porsche 718

 I took this photograph at Tom Wheatcroft's Donington Park Museum in May 1989.

It's a 1960 Porsche 718/2, chassis 202, formerly campaigned by Dutch driver Carel Godin de Beaufort and is finished in the orange Dutch racing colours. A book printed in 1974 giving details of many of the cars in the collection says this about the Porsche (which is now in the Porsche Prototyp Museum in Hamburg):

The Porsche 718

Germany's Challenger

French driver Jean Behra began Porsche's single-seater venture into Formula 2 in 1958. He had a central-seat version of the RSK sports car built up and it proved very successful. For 1959 the Stuttgart works produced 'proper' singe-seater cars, with similar air-cooled flat-four engines and trailing-link torsion bar front suspension, and when the 1½ litre Formula 1 came into operation in 1961 they were well prepared to enter Grand Prix racing for the first time.

Dan Gurney and Jo Bonnier drove the cars, which proved quite competitive, and when the new eight-cylinder was introduced for 1962 the old cars were sold. Two of them went to the giant Dutchman, Count Carel Godin de Beaufort, and he enjoyed himself hugely as one of that rare breed of private owner-drivers in Formula 1. He suffered a fatal accident in one of the obsolete old Porsches during practice for the 1964 German Grand Prix at Nürburgring. He was, as ever, trying as hard as he could to reach a qualifying time, and the loss of this jovial, larger than life character took some much-needed colour from the Grand Prix scene.

PORSCHE 718

Engine: 180° 4-Cyls; 2VPC; 2OHC; Air-cooled; 85mm x 66mm, 1498cc; c. 155bhp/7500rpm.

Chassis: Tubular spaceframe.

Suspension: IFS by trailing arms and TBs/IRS by wishbones and CSp.

Brakes: Discs.

On 25 February 2019 I showed a photograph of Carel Godin de Beaufort driving the second of the two Porsche 718/2 cars that he bought, chassis 201, at Aintree during practice for the 1962 British Grand Prix.