Re: Print The Legend
Recent revelations from the controversial ‘Autoleaks’ website have highlighted previously suppressed tracts from Dr Herdinband Perke’s journals. These highly revealing diaries reveal a very different personality to the one portrayed by the automotive press. Far from being a dour and serious engineer, Dr Perke was in fact portrayed as an inveterate practical joker who displayed a highly developed sense of humour.
Chief amongst his victims was fellow engineering genius Hens Laddwinker who became so paranoid of Dr. Perke’s hilarious pranks, he was said to have developed a nervous twitch. It is revealed that this tick became so acute, it later manifested itself in the high speed handling of Laddwinker’s Teetera designs to detrimental and as it would appear, lasting effect.
The journals also reveal Perke as a great proponent of front wheel drive, having created several designs for the Lohrnerr company earlier in the century. A vocal enthusiast for the work of Zitron and Harsh in refining the front-drive concept, he elected to follow their lead in a design for a small car. His design, featured it’s air-cooled horizontally opposed engine overhanging the front wheels for a low centre of gravity.
Dr Perke, ever the pragmatist, designed the car using a special code to deter plagiarists, and with this in mind he elected to incorporate some of Laddwinker’s thinking into the rear suspension. In order to hide the fact that he was working on a front-wheel-drive design, he then reversed the blueprints making it appear that he was in fact pursuing the then popular rear-engine format.
Perke was subsequently commissioned by Hitler to design the vaunted ‘KLF-Wagen‘. From his secret journals, Dr Perke, it appears, found Hitler and his cronies somewhat distasteful and elected to play his most elaborate practical joke yet. He submitted his already completed design for the people’s car in reverse-code and neglected to inform anyone of the fact. Thus, the tail-happy car would embody Laddwinker’s twitch and in so doing, he hoped, the Fuhrer would be made to look foolish.
However the War intervened and progress with the KLF-Wagen stalled as hostilities intensified. Dr Perke had other work by then and certainly, it was not the time to be bothering the Fuhrer with petty matters, especially as Dr Perke had by now realised just how nasty his temper could be.
As the war drew to it’s close, it is alleged Dr Perke by now incarcerated and in poor health, thought it best to remain tight-lipped about the whole KLF-Wagen fiasco. His son Fiery, unaware of his father’s true intentions, pressed ahead with a series of rear-engined designs, all of which displayed the notorious Laddwinker twitch. Dr Perke died taking with him his secret. But now, with rumours and allegations flying, the future of Perke AG appears in the balance as 70 years of sporting glory and unmitigated commercial success unravels in the suggestion that it was all a terrible mistake...
