Carpokes

Ferdinand Porsche was designing cars from about 1899 and by the time the current company was established in 1948 he was old and unwell. Most of his career was designing cars for other organizations.

A few years ago I went to see Ernst Piëch, his grandson who has a fascinating museum called Fahr (T) Raum and whic specializes in the numerous cars designed by Porsche long before the company was established.

There was a hybrid called the Lohner-Porsche in about 1900; they are vanishingly rare but Ernst has one:

Porsche designed all sorts off racing car of course. Ernst ( shown here ) shed the the Prinz Heinrich Austro_Daimler which Porsche drove to victory in the prestigious race......
There are lots of Mercedes and other brands, though no SSK Benzes or Auto Union racers with Porsche designs:
..and of course VWs, like this staff car from 1942:

There is a partially complete Lohner car the he designed in the Porsche Museum..obviously earlier than Ernst's car:

However I have always felt that the first modern Porsche was not the 1948 car but the 1939 VW Typ 64 that was designed by Porsche for the Berlin-Rome race that ultimately did not happen. If you look at it you can see the 356 DNA. It is in the Museum Prototyp in Hamburg,a brilliant place. They lt me take my 991RS inside for some pics...........

Awesome @RDMcG, thanks for posting these

I was reading a British Classic Car magazine this week which had a long article on an Austro-Daimler; the excerpt referring of Ferdinand Porsche below does show what a giant he was in the development of early sporting cars, and refers to some of the cars I posted above:

I saw one of the Rome-Berlin cars in the 90's at Monterey....the DNA for the 356 was very much on display. I heard that one of these cars, was discovered in a German's garage by occupying US Army dudes, who got it running and drove it to death....not knowing WHAT...they had.....

Yep, they cut the roof off and used it for target practice as I recall. However there are various stories on the third cat as I also heard it was destroyed in a bombing.

The car you saw was probably T2222 which has the most original body but not the original engine. The one I phtotographed in Hamburg has all the original running gear, chassis and engine, but the body had to be recreated from scratch...
Here is T2222 being raced in 1948

It is hard to imagine how revolutionary the typ 64 looked at the time. This pic was taken in 1941:

The Hamburg car was crashed in Austria and then dismantled, for racing car specials, but the components survived and are back in the Hamburg car: