Porsche mourns Harald Wagner
Harald Wagner in a Porsche 928 S4 (My. 1992) in front of the castle "Schloss Solitude" near Stuttgart.
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Harald Wagner was born in Stuttgart on 28 August 1923. He would later have four younger siblings. His mother was the sister of Dorothea Porsche, née Reitz. As a 13-year-old, he got his first ride in the prototype of the VW Beetle over the Großglockner. In the driver’s seat: Great uncle Prof. Ferdinand Porsche. In the summer of 1945, Wagner fled a Russian POW camp to Öhringen in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. There he began a commercial apprenticeship at a car dealership. Eleven years later, in January 1954, he started working for Porsche as an assistant to the head of domestic sales. Just two months later, the trained salesman had attained the position of Porsche Sales Director for Germany. After 34 years, Wagner retired in 1988. He remained a special representative of the Executive Board and continued to work with the company’s VIP customers for many years.
“It's always a special moment,” Wagner once said of factory deliveries, in which customers personally took delivery of their new Porsche model in Zuffenhausen. As the Director of Sales, he was usually on hand when the special moment took place; he was, after all, the man who had introduced the practice in the first place. He was present, for example, when Gloria von Thurn und Thaxis and star director Herbert von Karajan picked up their 911 models. Wagner enjoyed the theatrical staging of the brand; he always wished for customers to have the opportunity to appreciate the exquisite craftsmanship of their cars at their birthplace.
Porsche owes not only the factory delivery concept to Wagner, but also the variant designation Targa. The first model was presented in Frankfurt at the IAA in September 1965. Not a Cabriolet, not a Coupé – the Targa was the first safety cabriolet in the world with a fixed roll-over bar to come to the market. It was a completely new concept at the time, and introduced an unprecedented driving experience. The Targa was Porsche’s answer to more stringent safety requirements for open-top vehicles – particularly on the American market. When it came time to name the new variant, those involved looked to the race circuits on which the brand had been particularly successful. They quickly homed in on the Sicilian “Targa Florio”, a meaningful race in the company’s history of motorsport triumphs. As discussions briefly centred around the name “911 Flori”, Wagner countered: “Why don’t we just say Targa?” The name soon came to define the category. That the Italian term meant “plate” and thus subliminally suggested protection, was not the decisive factor at the moment, but a nice side-effect all the same.
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English (Porsche Latin America)
S23_0238
2023/03/31
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Porsche mourns Harald Wagner