stratfordshark wrote:
I'm also sad that Porsche is to lose its independence.
But it's also true that Porsche is historically intertwined with VW, so in that sense events have a pleasing closure to them!
Many commentators on the Porsche/VW saga - even Porsche owners - seemed wholly ignorant of the fact that this was a feud within a family, not between two rival families in Porsche and Piech!
Yes Wiedeking's pay-off was shockingly excessive. But the same people who condemned it were only a few months earlier lauding his and Wolfgang Harter's shrewdness in engineering what was at the time seen as a brilliant financial coup. The credit crunch which made it impossible to service the debt was outside of their control.
Wiedeking was also responsible for saving Porsche as a company with the development of Boxster and the water-cooled 911s. You could say that having saved the company and then overseen its demise things are about even.
Ferdinand Piech himself was author of the most glorious chapters in Porsche's Le Mans successes, so if anyone should now have control of the company he would have a stronger claim than most.
He did great things at Audi too and took them to Rally success.
I loved the stories of him scouring the autobahns hunting for 930's on the Autobahn is his Sport Quattro engined 924.
Ferdinand Piech is a man we can all admire.
Live and breathe the Marque,
Stephen