Car No. 175
5/1962
Motor: 1600 CC
From time to time, I receive phone calls from people claiming that they have so-called barn finds. Most of them are not real barn finds.
In this case I received a contact regarding a Porsche 356 B Karmann so-called hardtop version from 1962 about this car in a barn on the south part of the island Funen, Denmark. When I saw the pictures of the car I was truly amazed by its story: It has simply been in a barn for so many years. The owner always had the wish to restore the car but never got to get the job done. He had bought the car from new – sold from the Danish Porsche importer Scandinavian Motorcompany. Now he was old and sick and no longer capable to do anything to the car. I bought it and brought it back to our showroom and kept it as it was because this tells such a great story of being kept for more than 40 years in a barn surrounded by chickens using it as a luxurious henhouse.
The Porsche factory had produced too many Porsche Cabrio bodies of the so-called B model. For that reason, they decided to weld on a hardtop and simply call it a 356 B hardtop Coupé.
Part of the Coupé design advantages was that it was looking beautiful from both the side and the back of the car.
The welded-on hardtop was somehow destroying this smooth designed line of the vehicle and for that reason the hardtop Coupé never became popular. In certain countries such as Denmark Porsche importers were kindly asked (read: forced) to purchase a smaller quantity of the hardtop Coupés. This quantity was calculated proportionate to how many 356 Coupés and Cabrios they had sold during the last years. Demark was a small market and only two specimens were imported. Can you believe the coincidence – I have ended up owning both with the original Danish registration.
