Against all the others – Volume 2 : 1969

The year Porsche changed racing

There are books you read, books you admire, and books that make you clear a space on the coffee table because you know you are going to keep coming back to them. Randy Leffingwell’s Against All The Others: Porsche’s Racing History, Volume 2 – 1969 is very much the latter.

After the first volume, covering the pivotal 1968 season, I was curious about where Leffingwell could possibly take the story next. After all, 1969 is the Porsche racing year for many enthusiasts. The 917 arrives. Ferrari is waiting. Le Mans is the target. Porsche is getting dangerously serious about winning the World Championship.

And yet, after spending time with this book, I think the biggest surprise is that the Porsche 917 is not even the whole story. That is precisely what makes this second volume so good.

1969 wasn’t just about the 917

If you come to this book expecting 536 pages of Porsche 917 worship, you might initially wonder what Leffingwell is doing. Then you start reading. The 917 is obviously the star. How could it not be? But Leffingwell tells the story of the car before the mythology took over.

And that is fascinating. We all know what the 917 eventually became. We know about Le Mans. We know about the victories. We know the photographs of the Martini cars, the Gulf cars, the enormous flat-twelve engine and that unforgettable shape. But in 1969, the 917 was not yet that car. It was fast. Terrifyingly fast.

It was also, to put it politely, a handful. Some of the early testing reports are almost comical when you know what the 917 would eventually achieve. Poor directional stability, ineffective brakes, visibility problems, overheating, windscreen issues and engines that didn’t always want to restart after a pit stop.

This was Porsche’s future. And the future clearly needed some work. That is one of my favourite aspects of the book. Leffingwell doesn’t rewrite history with the benefit of hindsight. He lets us experience the 917 as it was experienced by the people who had to drive and develop it.

In other words: before it became a legend, it was a problem.A very, very fast problem.

The wonderful thing about Leffingwell’s approach

What makes this series different from the countless Porsche histories already sitting on our bookshelves is the way Leffingwell approaches the subject. He isn’t simply listing races and results. He is reconstructing a year. That distinction matters.

Porsche’s racing programme in 1969 was an enormous, complicated machine. The company was developing the 917 while continuing to race and improve the 908. The 911 was becoming an increasingly formidable competition car in its own right. There were rallies, hillclimbs, GT races and sports-car races happening all over the world.

And somehow, all of these threads have to coexist. Leffingwell manages to make sense of it. The result is a much more interesting picture of Porsche Motorsport than the usual “car → race → result → next car” approach. You begin to understand that Porsche’s success wasn’t the result of one brilliant car or one brilliant engineer.

It was a system. Engineers, drivers, mechanics, management, testing, money, regulations, rivals and an almost obsessive desire to improve all came together. And sometimes they collided spectacularly.

The people make the difference

For me, this is where Volume 2 really comes alive. Leffingwell has included 119 individual racing and testing reports from drivers, engineers, mechanics, managers and observers. That sounds like a statistic until you start reading them. Then you realise what it means.

Instead of simply being told that a car was difficult to drive, you get a sense of what it was actually like to sit in it. Instead of simply reading that Porsche was testing a new development, you get the human story surrounding the decision. And that makes a huge difference. The cars stop being museum pieces.They become machines that people had to live with. You can almost smell the fuel and hot brakes.

And then there is the photography

Let’s be honest: Porsche books are allowed to be beautiful. In fact, I expect them to be. But Leffingwell understands that photographs in a racing history shouldn’t simply be there because the page needs filling. The best photographs tell part of the story.

A mechanic leaning over a car. A driver preparing to go out. A prototype that looks slightly different from the one we remember. A 917 sitting in the paddock looking almost absurdly large and purposeful. These details matter. The 410 photographs and illustrations aren’t merely decoration; they help reconstruct the period.

And the captions deserve particular praise. They often contain enough information to make you stop reading the main text and study the photograph again. I found myself doing that repeatedly.

But here’s the catch…

This isn’t a book you casually read in an evening. And I’m not entirely sure you should try.Five hundred and thirty-six pages about one year is a fairly outrageous proposition. It is also one of the things I love about it.

There are moments when the amount of detail is almost overwhelming. Race reports lead into testing reports, which lead into technical developments, which lead into another race, another driver, another variation of the car…

If you want a quick Porsche history, this is absolutely not the book for you. If you want to understand what actually happened, however, that level of detail is the whole point. Personally, I would rather have too much information than another beautifully photographed Porsche book that tells me things I already know.

Conclusion

There are plenty of Porsche books that I would happily recommend. There are considerably fewer that I would tell you to buy before they disappear. This is one of them.

Against All The Others – Volume 2: 1969 is not a book for someone who simply likes looking at photographs of old Porsches. It is for someone who wants to know why those Porsches became important.

It is for the person who has already seen a thousand photographs of a 917 and still wants to know what it was actually like to develop, test and race one. It is for the Porsche obsessive who knows the names of the cars but wants to know the names of the people.

And perhaps most importantly, it is for anyone who understands that the greatest racing stories aren’t really about the cars. They’re about the people who refused to accept that the car they had today was good enough for tomorrow.

If Volume 1 was the beginning of the story, Volume 2 is where it starts to get seriously addictive. For me, this is an essential addition to any serious Porsche library.