Weissach, or Notes on Tech Romanticism

In the months after our first child was born, trips into central London were rare. When I did walk to Maida Vale tube station, I almost always passed a black Porsche.

It was a cut above the average Porsche, as the polished “GT3” stickering on the back of the car made clear. Yet I never quite warmed to it, with its dated exterior, a spoiler that looked like a partially folded piece of paper, and its strange droopy headlights, which looked like they’d half melted and congealed where the bonnet met the bumper.

I would walk past quickly each time, trying to not meet the car’s gaze.

I’d never been a Porsche person. Back in 2007, I’d been tearing around digital street circuits in Ferraris, Aston Martins and Paganis, in a game called Project Gotham Racing 4 for the Xbox 360. But there were no Porsches.

A commercial rights dispute between the game’s developers, Bizarre Creations, and Porsche’s legal team meant the company’s cars were left out entirely. My still-elastic car brain skipped them entirely.

That indifference stuck. Through my twenties and beyond, Porsches barely registered — until two years ago, when I stumbled across a series on YouTube, featuring Michael Fassbender.

It turned out Fassbender had been living the wrong life. What he’d always wanted to do—ever since his dad let him drive up and down a stretch of road outside the Hotel Europe in Killarney, where he worked as a chef—was become a racing driver.

In 2018, Porsche learned of Fassbender’s secret obsession and signed him to one of their partner teams, Proton Competition. The goal: make him good enough to credibly compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the most prestigious endurance race in the world. And film the process.

From 2019 to 2023, Fassbender's years followed a strict format: April to October, he raced in one of Europe’s premier endurance series, mostly the European Le Mans Series, as part of a team of three drivers.

He drove in a Porsche supplied-GT car. Not a single-seater like you see in Formula 1, but a car that would, nonetheless, kill most of us if we attempted to drive it: a yassified version of the sports cars you might see parked up on the pavements of Mayfair. The rest of the year, he shot films.

The scale of Fassbender’s challenge is best understood when you compare him to his teammate, Richard Lietz. A five-time Le Mans class winner, multiple World Endurance Championship title-holder, and long-time Porsche factory driver, Lietz is one of the fifty best drivers on Earth.

Wearing a Swiss accountant’s glasses, he laps Spa at 200kmh as casually as I drive the Westway. As one of the other drivers puts it: “We can all be better—apart from Richie.”

If you had to summarise the series in one word, it would be existential. Fassbender comes across as a Byronic figure, locked in a quest to master his obsession in a way that would make even the most ardent Romantic poet proud.

What begins as a glossy lifestyle vlog, with B-roll of the forests of Spa, the surf of Portimão, and the mountains of Styria quickly veers off course. What we get instead is a four-season YouTube version of Fitzcarraldo, where the highs last for thirty seconds, and the many lows seem to stretch on forever.

The easiest lows to stomach are when the team is outraced by their main competitor, the all-women Iron Dames. Michael clings on as Rahel Frey or Sarah Bovy mercilessly hunt him down.

The hardest are the crashes. In those moments Fassbender is his own worst critic, brooding over imagined mistakes for hours, alone, in halogen-lit rooms. In these times no one, bar Lietz, can really get through to him.

Michael makes it to Le Mans eventually. The first time he crashes badly whilst practicing before the race, leading to an almost total mental collapse. The team finishes 16th.

A year later he returns (“I felt like I had to go back”), and in true Romantic style, masters the track and drives heroically well in impossible conditions. Three laps from the end of a three hour stint, he crashes into the barrier, writing the car off, and ending the team’s race.

One of the major surprises I had, whilst watching, was that the series does not mythologise the car itself. For the racing team, cars are fungible objects. Used and abused: each piece of the car - from splitter to exhaust - is designed to be smashed up, removed, and added on quickly.

These are not the polished cars of the Porsche showroom in Swindon, but mercurial workhorses, driven to their limits, before, inevitably, ending up in a wall.

And yet, as I watched, a concerning development occurred. The Porsches I passed day to day started to look different. No longer like Mini Coopers that had been stretched on a rack.

Even my old nemesis, the GT3 on Randolph Avenue, started to look really quite attractive. I began to slow down as I walked past it. Once, I even stopped to take a photo.

Fassbender’s Romanticism, it turned out, was infectious.

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Romanticism about technology, at first glance, seems like a contradiction in terms. The story of the poets of the late 18th century is one of retreating to nature: a rejection of the dark and satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution. The lone poet gazing at the alps.

That’s if you believe the wave of writers who are now calling for a new Romanticism (for an excellent summary, see here) to act as a bulwark against the unedifying excesses of the coming AI-age.

In this world, Fassbender and Lietz are simply getting carried away in a fantasy in order to justify the thousands of tonnes of CO2 their hobby produces. To be truly Romantic is to cast off technology. Entirely.

History, alas, tells a different story.

If Romanticism entails that intuition, emotion, and subjective experience matter, then there’s no reason that should be limited to only natural wonders. A machine can move us in just the same way.

Frankenstein, perhaps the Romantic movement’s most enduring technological parable, makes the point plain: whether an innovation is good or bad depends entirely on what we make of it.

As the creature says at the end of the novel: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

The same sensibility is evident in Goethe’s repeated references to puppets and homunculi. Turner’s obsession with steam trains. Hugo’s Les Miserables detour into the Parisian sewer system.

When Wordsworth wrote “earth has not anything to show more fair:" he was not talking about an Alpine vista, but of the urban infrastructure of 19th century London.

This made sense. For one thing, there was a piece of technology every Romantic could get behind: the printing press, upon which they all depended to make a living. Hazlitt puts the sentiment best:

“The gift of speech, or the communication of thought by words, is that which distinguishes man from other animals. But this faculty is limited and imperfect without the intervention of books, which render the knowledge possessed by every one in the community accessible to all. There is no doubt, then, that the press is the great organ of intellectual improvement and civilisation.”

For even the most retrograde of Romantics, however, the allure of technology went well beyond the printing press. Byron, in Don Juan, dreams of steam-engines conducting men to the moon. Novalis, writing Hymns to the Night while working as a mining engineer in Saxony, praised “the lovely harmonies of thy skilled handicraft.”

Even Keats, in On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, turned to astronomy to express the thrill of poetic discovery: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.”

What mattered to these poets was not whether something was technological or natural, but whether it brought us closer to, as Wordsworth put it, the “conjunction of reason and passion” that sits at the core of Romanticism. In other words, beauty.

Here’s Hölderlin:

“The idea that unites everyone is the idea of beauty…I am now convinced that the highest act of reason, by encompassing all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are siblings only in beauty.”

And there was one place where he believed beauty existed in greater abundance than anywhere else: the hills and forests of Swabia, the countryside in which he grew up.

“Fortunate Swabia, my mother, with a hundred streams flowing through.”

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Ferry Porsche, son of Ferdinand, was by all accounts not one for poetry. But when, in the early 1960s, he was tasked with choosing a site for a new experimental test track, he ended up just as devoted to the South German countryside as Hölderlin.

So instead of being in one of Germany’s great cities, the Porsche Development Centre – one of the great shrines of European manufacturing – is located in the forests on the outskirts of the small Swabian town of Weissach.

Since 1971, this 45-hectare high-tech pastoral campus has been where Porsche’s future takes shape. Every next-generation car is designed, developed, and driven here.

At first glance, the scientists and engineers of Weissach might seem like the opposite of Romantic poets. But their pursuit is the same: beauty.

Michael Fassbender’s RSR is one product of that pursuit. Another is its sister car, also designed, developed, and built, in Weissach. It’s the one I walk past every day on Randolph Avenue: the Porsche 911 GT3.

The category that Fassbender competes in – the GT category – was created to echo the great road races of the past. In these — the Mille Miglia, the Targa Florio— endurance, not just speed, defined excellence.

Cars in this class were traditionally required to be road-legal, production-based, and recognisably close to something a customer might buy.

By the 1990s, though, the series had become a proxy battle in the era’s supercar wars, with teams fielding not road cars but thinly veiled prototypes, built solely to satisfy the letter of the homologation rules.

Porsche decided to change tack. A Romantic would say they did so because winning came at too high a cost; a realist would say they did so because they’d stopped winning, full stop.

Either way, in 1998, Porsche abandoned the pursuit of ever more extreme prototypes and tasked engineer Roland Kussmaul with building a car that could genuinely unite race and road. The result is the car parked on Randolph Avenue

The original GT3, now known as the 996 Gen 1, was, to borrow a phrase from a current Porsche executive, something of a “parts bin exercise”.

The team took the body of a standard 911 at the time (strictly speaking the GT3 is not a separate car, but simply another version of a 911), bolted on the optional aerodynamic kit, slotted in a new engine architecture, tweaked the gearbox with a few spare synchro rings, and added suspension geometry that Kussmaul had been developing in his spare time.

The GT3 was an extraordinary achievement: the first road-legal vehicle to lap the Nürburgring in under eight minutes, and the opening chapter in what would become one of the most successful performance car franchises in history.

Five years later, Porsche returned with a second GT3. Hot-rodding was out, and in its place came a fully bespoke, track-focused machine.

Thus began a rhythm that continues to this day. Roughly every five years, Porsche updates the 911. A year or so later, the GT3 arrives.

To date, more than 40,000 have been sold worldwide, making it, by a significant margin, the most successful track-focused production car in history.

The car comes in three flavours. The first is the core GT3, developed and built in line with Kussmaul’s original vision.

The second is the RS, a hyper-aggressive track-focused version that currently holds the Nürburgring record for a naturally aspirated car.

Finally, there’s the Touring: more genteel, more discreet: rear seats; a softer ride; and no spoiler. Espresso. Double espresso. And a flat white.

To understand the magnetism of a GT3, it helps to see where it sits in the automotive hierarchy. Unlike hypercars from Pagani or Koenigsegg, it isn’t a sculpture on wheels. Nor, like a Ferrari or Lamborghini, is it built for Nobu and Nammos.

The GT3 is, first and last, a driver’s car—a tool for those who want to get as close to the road, and to the edge of their own ability, as is permitted by modern engineering.

That purity of purpose invites a particular kind of language, one that seduces even professional automotive journalists:

“Set your hand atop its microsuede-wrapped surface, you’ll feel the car’s heartbeat pulsing, the vibrations transmitted from engine to wheels through the gearbox transferring into you, buzzing up your arm and into your adrenal gland. It’s more than involving; it’s intimate.”

This intimacy isn’t accidental. It comes from a single mind: Andreas Preuninger, Kussmaul’s protégé and head of the GT programme.

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Born in Stuttgart, Preuninger’s father was a supplier to Porsche, which meant regular childhood visits to the Porsche Development Centre.

Like a Romantic gazing upon the Matterhorn, he saw the wind tunnels of Weissach and felt immediately: “that was that. It suddenly became completely clear to me: this was the place I needed to work.”

After university, he landed a job managing Porsche’s engineering consultancy—essentially packaging up the magic of Weissach and selling it to other car companies. Following the success of the first GT3, he was tapped to lead the GT programme.

Preuninger approaches his work with a sensibility even the most technophobic of the Romantic poets would applaud:

“[Building a GT3 is about] satisfying your senses and having something that really, really infuses you. The communication between the driver and the car, this is the center point of what a GT car should feel like: a GT car needs this special intimacy between man and machine, interfaces where emotion can flow in the body. That makes the driver feel like an integral part, rather than a user.”

Track performance and lap times matter, of course—but for Preuninger, “the subjective experience is paramount.” A sports car shouldn’t just perform well; it should move the driver in a visceral way.

His personal litmus test for a great car is simple: when you step out, “you have to turn around, look at it again, and pat it on the roof. Then you’ve got it right.”

Preuninger’s sensibility is reflected in how he runs his team. Designers and engineers are encouraged to drive older models, communing with GT3s of the past before shaping the new.

It’s also evident in how the car itself has evolved under his two decades of stewardship.

Take the decision to launch the RS model in 2003—a move initially met with deep scepticism by the car industry. Porsche’s own marketing team, confronted with the car’s white body, red or blue wheels, oversized spoiler, and bold side decals, described it in one word: “pornographic.”

They predicted just 195 would sell. Instead, the order book ballooned into the thousands. In the end, the tooling gave out after making just 700.

Today, each new RS model has a cult following. Allocations are fiercely sought. Car journalist Chris Harris, formerly of Top Gear, says the question he gets most from celebrities is whether he can ask Andreas to bump them up the list. Second-hand versions of the most recent model now trade for upwards of £300,000.

Equally important was the decision to keep offering a manual gearbox. Most modern supercars don’t, opting instead for lightning-fast, dual-clutch automatics. Porsche has one too: the PDK, developed at Weissach in the early 1980s.

By every metric, it's the superior choice: safer, faster, more efficient. But for those who think Romantically about cars, that’s beside the point. Back to Preuninger:

“I prefer a manual as a driver’s car. I don’t mind shifting a car even on the track, knowing exactly that the PDK is faster.”

That commitment was tested in the early 2010s, when the pace of development meant the next GT3 had to launch with the PDK as the sole option for customers.

Unsatisfied, Preuninger’s team convinced the company to greenlight an entirely new car to give them the time and budget to develop a new manual gearbox. This was the 911R, a gearbox with a car attached.

When the manual finally returned in 2016, Preuninger made a bet with Klaus Zellmer, then head of Porsche North America. Zellmer guessed fewer than 20% of buyers would go for it. The real number was 70%.

Today, just 29 new car models in the U.S. are sold with a manual gearbox. Two of those are made by Porsche. And when that number eventually falls to one, I think you can guess which will be the last one standing.

The sensibility, for Preuninger, is a way of life. His daily driver is a RAM 1500 pickup—the polar opposite of a 911 GT3. Why? “The one thing it shares with our cars? It has character.”

In his spare time, he rides motorcycles, builds RC planes, and handcrafts guitars, all in service of his role as a walking Dos Equis advert.

“I love complicated things," he says. "It's the wood of the guitar, it's the potentiometers, it's the strings, it's the pickups. it's how you set it up, what patches you need for the amplifier. You're always in search of the best tone.”

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Today this Romantic spirit has all but vanished from the way we talk about technology. In only a few niche luxury markets does such storytelling remain a necessity. Machines may still shape our world, but rarely do they move us. The language of intuition, beauty, or feeling has been replaced by that of optimisation, disruption, and scale.

I think there are two reasons for this. The first is simple: in fields from self-driving cars to AI, the key goal is to remove the human from the loop. And the quickest way to justify that is to diminish the human in the first place.

Perhaps the best recent example of this comes in a Y-Combinator demo by a company called Optifye. They build AI-powered security cameras to monitor workers on assembly lines.

In the demo, Worker Number 17 falls behind; one of the co-founders, playing the manager, notices and challenges him. “Working all day? You haven’t hit your hourly output once.”

When Worker 17 pleads for leniency—“I’m just having a rough day”—the response is swift: “Rough day? More like a rough month.” The video lasted just hours before being taken down.

The second reason is, I think, Steve Jobs. His emotional intensity and artistic sensibility have become legendary, and almost impossible to emulate.

As Walter Isaacson’s biography makes plain, no one thought more Romantically about technology than he did. Here’s Jobs in a 2001 Japanese TV interview:

“I love the internet but right now the internet has no emotion to it. It’s just information. The bandwidth isn’t there to deliver emotion. To deliver it, you need higher bandwidth. Until then, most content is not created to inspire, but to inform. At Apple, one of the things we’ve always felt is that we want to stand at the intersection of technology and humanities. We want to bring the humanist element into these tools, and not have them just serve our intellectual side, but the other side of us as well.”

Even today, when someone finds some light-wash 501s and New Balance sneakers and appears on Bloomberg West to talk about craft, design, and emotional resonance in product-building, it sounds hollow. The form is there: but do they feel it, in the same way Jobs clearly did?

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Reading all this, it’s difficult to shake a feeling of loss.

With each passing month, this conception of technology - Romantic, intuitive, beautiful - retreats to ever stranger corners: the Weissachs of the world.

In its place comes a rationalism that, though technically impressive, fails to move us.

But if it gets the job done: what’s the problem? Am I just, as Kenneth Clark described himself in the final episode of Civilisation, nothing more than a stick in the mud?

Well, perhaps. But the continued success of Porsche’s GT3, in a sea of alternatives, suggests there’s life in the old dog yet.

As does the fact that some technologists, whether it’s the podcasters of Acquired (their episode on Porsche aired just over a year ago), or founders like Kaari Saarinen of Linear (sample blog-post: “like sushi chefs, we as founders, designers or developers, need to develop our tastes, in order to build things people can be impressed about”) appear to be listening.

Not everyone will succeed in bringing that Romantic sensibility to life - some will merely borrow its vocabulary - but at least they’re trying.

Of course, not every product needs to point toward the divine. Fund Manager Terry Smith put it best when he mocked Unilever’s attempt to give Hellmann’s mayonnaise a purpose: “spoiler alert—salads and sandwiches.”

And certainly, the day Screwfix begins sponsoring a Caspar David Friedrich retrospective will be the day tech Romanticism goes too far.

Still, you don’t need to be Andreas Preuninger, or drive his car, to have skin in the game. Because the ability to build great things depends on public consent.

And for this, it is Romanticism, not rationalism, that offers the most durable foundation.

Perhaps the clearest thinker here is Tom Cruise. Mission Impossible 7 and Top Gun: Maverick take two opposing views on technology.

In the first, it is the villain: a hyper-intelligent, rational system (unsubtly, “the entity”) that, at every turn, outsmarts humanity. In Maverick, it's an object of wonder from the very start, beginning with an experimental plane helping Cruise become the fastest man to ever live.

As the team watches on intently, he breaks the mach 10 barrier, calling out for his dead best friend, accompanied by a Hans Zimmer soundtrack.

The Darkstar takes flight despite “drone ranger” Ed Harris’ best efforts to ground it. In the scene before, we’ve already met Cruise’s character, sleeping beside a World War II–era P-51 Mustang (his own, in real life). It’s the same plane we return to in the film’s final scene.

But before that, an even older aircraft - a museum-grade F-14 - heroically saves the day, defeating two far more advanced Sukhoi Su-57s. The message is obvious, but just in case we missed it, Miles Teller’s character spells it out: “It’s not the plane. It’s the pilot.”

It’s easy to snigger, but without this, and the Andreas Preuningers of this world, all that’s left is the Y-Combinator founder berating Worker 17.

And if that’s the future on offer, I might stop criticising the techno-pessimists who want to take it all down, and find myself joining them instead. Because in the end, it’s not just about what works. It’s about what moves.

The bicycle of the mind might no longer need a rider. But the rider, I think, still needs the bicycle.

aled@ashore.io

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