Frankfurt Déjà vu

By Stuart Johnston          

The first time I visited the Frankfurt Motor Show in 1987, as a wet-around-the-ears, newly-conscripted scribe at Car Magazine, I was blown away by the sheer audacity of a company called Koenig Specials.

Pride  of place in the so-called “tuning” hall – where all sorts of outlandish modified vehicles were on display – belonged to a Koenig-massaged Ferrari Testarossa, complete with wild body kit and fatter-than-fat rubber – that was good for a claimed 800 horsepower!

Wild Willy’s Koenig Specials!

I was even more knocked out to meet Willy Koenig himself, a gruff sort of nutty-professor type, a bit rough-around-the-edges in manner and dress, whose cars had graced the covers of my most highly-regarded car magazine of the time – Road &Track from America.

Koenig Specials was based in Munich then, and had started building special versions of – gasp! – Ferraris as early as 1974.

And here, thirty years later, was a Koenig Ferrari at the 2017 Frankfurt Motor Show. What’s more, the car on display in a kind of sub-section of Hall 5, was the original Koenig road car, based on a 1974 Ferrari 365 GTB4 BB – otherwise known as “the Boxer”.

I asked the helpful PR lady in the hall  what this car was doing here, in company with all sorts of wonderful creations from the 1970s and 1980s, and she rushed away and returned with ….not Willy Koenig himself, but his son, Walter!

Turns out that Willy and Walter Koenig still run their business in Munich today, but they don’t build complete built -up cars anymore. They modify lesser versions of German luxury cars, provide parts for classic Koenig supercars built in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, and do a trade in used Koenig Specials.

Koenig raced a Ferrari 250  GT SWB

It is said that Willy Koenig decided to build his own versions of Ferraris after he was rather underwhelmed with the original 365 GTB4 “boxer” Ferrari. He initially out-sourced various engine goodies , suspension bits and body parts, but in later years, after well-healed people all over the planet  suddenly wanted Koenig-tuned cars for themselves, he built the Koenig Specials in-house in Munch.

“Nowadays we don’t do any complete cars,  especially Ferraris,” said Walter. “These new guys, they don’t want to change a single nut or bolt on their Ferraris, in case they lose some value,” he said, wrinkling up his rather prominent node in disdain.

Willy and Walter in fact raced this very first Koenig Ferrari together, as the stickers on the side of the car illustrate. Willy was in a very enthusiastic amateur racer who had won the 1962 German Hill Climb Championship in a classic Ferrari 250 GT  SWB (Short Wheel Base car). This so impressed old man Enzo Ferrari himself,  that he invited wild Willy to Maranello for a special function to honour his achievement.

Ferrari ordered his badge removed

Things between Willy Koenig and Enzo Ferrari later soured, however, when Willy began producing his own interpretations of how a Ferrari should go and look. In fact, probably tiring of seeing yet another Koenig Ferrari grace the cover of Road & Track in the 1980s, Enzo ordered Koenig to remove the famous Ferrari prancing horse badge from the noses of all Koenig-massaged Ferraris!

Looking back, is interesting that, while Koenig’s wild, wide and wonderful bodywork extensions were very much of the “love them or loathe  them” variety in the 1980s, he did in fact pre-empt Ferrari’s own cars in many ways. Koenig’s interpretation of a Ferrari 365 GTB4 BB and  the later BB 512  (built between 1973 and 1984) already sported the air-induction “strakes” that were later to be fitted to the Berlinetta Boxer’s successor, Ferrari’s  Testarossa, built  at the Maranello factoryfrom the mid-1980s.

Koenig’s weird styling pre-empted Ferrari’s in-house efforts

Then, a few short months after  the production Testarossa made its showroom debut,  the Koenig Testarossa  appeared, having eliminated the distinctive strakes, and again pre-empting Ferrari’s next move on the production F40 that appeared in 1989!

Even today, Koenig Ferraris are generally treated with disdain amongst hard-core Ferrariisti, but 30 years after I saw my first Koenig Special at the 1987 Frankfurt Show, my feeling remains the same: Good for you, Koenig, for having the brass ones to actually go out and reinterpret  a haloed  automotive icon!

Some other cars in the ‘70s Tribute Hall

*At the Tribute to the ‘70s classic car display at this year’s Frankfurt Show, the Koenig Special shared hall-space with some other wonderful icons of the period:

*The bb Porsche Turbo Targa Rainbow, was a one-off model built in 1976, that superseded Porsche by offering turbo power and suspension (as well as a beautiful colour scheme) in a Targa body style, something Porsche wasn’t prepared to do in those days.

* The Opel manta GTE “Black Magic” was a special performance version of the 1,9-litre Manta in Germany of which only 1 000 were built. Today the Manta is gaining status as a classic collectable here  in South Africa, and according to East London race driver Neil Stephen, those German single-overhead camshaft motors make “huge” horsepower with easy-to-source bits and pieces.

*The Capri 1 on display was a German model , having quad headlamps as opposed to the cars we had here in South Africa, which had a pair of rectangular lamps. The one on display in Frankfurt  had also been sustomised, with rear wheel arch extensions complete with strakes that looked as if the Koenigs had something to do with their construction!

*A classic Honda CB 750 K1, one of the original fast four-cylinder Japanese superbikes ( this one from 1971), was on show with a custom kit that included a fairing, racing seat, clip-on handlebars and four megaphone exhausts. This model was built by German bike specialists Eckert, and today this bike is valued at 45 000 Euro (about R720 000!)

* Another two-wheeled blast from the past, but looking to the future, was the bb BMW 800 Future, a boxer-twin BMW tourer with enclosing bodywork. The “future” didn’t turn out that way – many cruisers preferring the naked look these days – but hey, that’s half the fun of a classic car and bike display! Being wise after the event, and all that…

*In a future feature on the 2017 Frankfurt Motor Show, we’ll be bringing you and in-depth look at what Brabus, Germany’s most famous “tuning” company, has been up to. This is scheduled for AutoTrader in the next few days!