The Porsche 360 is one of the Porsche entries the open record knows by name, and by little else. That is not nothing: a name in the catalogue is where a car's story starts to be recoverable.
How it came about
The Cisitalia Grand Prix is a single-seater car for the 1.5-litre supercharged race car class, prewar called voiturette, postwar promoted to Grand Prix class (later F1), built by Italian sports car manufacturer Cisitalia and introduced in 1949. It was designed on behalf of Cisitalia by Porsche in 1946–47, and is therefore also known by its Porsche project number, Type 360.
An advanced design with a rear mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout and four-wheel-drive on top of state of the art Grand Prix technology, it proved too complex for the small Italian firm to build—leading to a lengthy development and eventually to the financial collapse of the company. Between Cisitalia's 1949 liquidation and the fact that due to lack of entries, supercharged engines, and all large F1 engines, were banned for the 1952 Formula One season that was run according to F2 rules, the car never raced in Grands Prix. The Type 360 is also noteworthy for using an early form of sequential manual transmission, and was one of the first race cars to do so.
Family and rivals
Its Porsche stablemates include the Porsche P1 and the Porsche Type 12.