Andreas Preuninger: the man who makes Porsches perform

“I think I was three. No, wait, maybe less.” That’s Andreas Preuninger’s response to the question “when did you first become obsessed with cars?”

His answer goes some way towards explaining why they call Preuninger ‘Mr GT3’, but it’s not the full explanation. All his life, the company’s high-performance car manager has been steeped not just in any old cars, but in Porsches.

“I came from a Porsche family and my bedroom walls were covered in pictures of Porsches,” he reveals. “Actually, one Porsche: a 1973 911 2.7 Carrera RS. White with blue decals. When I was a kid, that was my car,” he says with a steely gaze.

To pick up more clues, just turn up the magnification on the microscope. “My father worked in a business supplying wind tunnel components, and Porsche was a client,” he says. “I went with him on a business trip to Weissach when I was 20 years old, and that was that.

“It suddenly became completely clear to me: this was the place I needed to work.”

He’d been studying automotive engineering at university, but that was the catalytic moment for Preuninger. Even so, it wasn’t a simple case of walking into a job. “Back in the mid-1990s, Porsche was not the company it is today,” he says. “It was more interested in reducing staff numbers than increasing them.”

So he did the next best thing and got a job with one of Porsche’s suppliers, though it seems that most of his spare time was spent working out how to make the big jump – and persevering. “I sent in my CV 11 or 12 times before finally they gave me a job,” he says. Not in Porsche’s Motorsport operation at Weissach, but on the engineering consultancy side, managing relations between Porsche, Volkswagen and Audi.

“The Motorsport department was run by Hartmut Kristen at the time, so I kept on ringing him and he kept telling me there was no job.

“In the end, we were introduced by a mutual friend at a party, had a few beers and it all kind of worked out from there.”

After his arrival in Weissach in 2000, when it was a one-car department, the fast GT family has boomed. Preuninger has been at the helm of the entire GT3 series, the GT3 RSs, the GT2 RS, the 911 R and Cayman GT4. In short, every iconic 21st century Porsche bar the 918 Spyder. The 1999 GT3 is the only GT-series car he didn’t oversee.

The cars themselves have evolved hugely beyond the base models. “When I arrived, a GT car might have one hundred components that were not common to a Carrera. Now that number is maybe 1000. To do a new GT car is as big a programme as a new 911 Turbo, maybe even bigger.”

The secret of his success isn’t just the creation of quick and desirable cars. It’s about authenticity. Under Preuninger’s watch, GT models have to spring from cars that are involved in race programmes. So, the Boxster Spyder will have input from his team, but it won’t be a GT car.

Preninger accepts that he has a head start with the base cars. “There are some good fast cars made by companies like Audi and BMW, but we are lucky,” he says. “Where they have to start with a car designed to take the kids to school, we start with a car designed as a proper sports car.