Porsche Spyder 550 the Giant Killer -1953 to 1956

A German Formula One driver once drove a Porsche 550 Spyder underneath a closed railway crossing gate during a race, without slowing down. That is how low the car sat, and part of why a 1,498cc four-cylinder could humiliate machinery with twice the displacement. Then James Dean bought chassis number 55, had a name painted on the trunk lid, and turned a race car into something else entirely. Read on for the whole story.

During a race in the mid-1950s, a German Formula One driver found a closed railway crossing gate lowered across the circuit ahead of him. He did not stop. He drove underneath it. The car that made that possible was built so aggressively low to the ground, in pursuit of cornering ability, that it turned an insurmountable obstacle into a minor inconvenience — and that same obsession with staying flat and staying light is why a car with a 1,498cc four-cylinder engine earned the nickname giant killer while beating machinery with double the displacement. Within two years it would also become the most famous Porsche ever built, for reasons that had nothing to do with racing at all.

Paris, 1953, and a Car Built Impossibly Low

The public first saw the Porsche 550 Spyder at the Paris Motor Show in 1953, with production beginning shortly after. Everything about it was subordinated to cornering: the extreme low build, the mid-mounted engine, the minimal bodywork. This was not a road car adapted for competition. It was a competition car that could be registered, which is a completely different starting point and produces a completely different object. By 1955 the giant killer nickname had stuck, and it had been earned against opposition that should on paper have been untouchable.

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The 550A and Porsche’s First Major Victory

The development that turned reputation into silverware was the 550A, which brought a lighter, more rigid space-frame chassis. That car gave Porsche its first major win, at the Targa Florio in 1956 — a race across Sicilian public roads that punished fragile cars and rewarded exactly the combination of low weight, agility and durability the 550A had been built around. For a company that was barely a decade old and still fundamentally an engineering consultancy that happened to sell cars, winning the Targa was a statement of arrival.

What the Spyder Left Behind: The 718 and the Boxster

The 550’s genetic contribution outlived it by decades. Its immediate successor, the Porsche 718, went on to considerable success on the sports car circuits through the late fifties and into the sixties. Much later, when Porsche released the Boxster in 1996, it borrowed a great many design characteristics from the 550 Spyder — the proportions, the mid-engine layout, the deliberately compact roadster form — closely enough that a fair number of people considered it a resurrection of the giant killer. That is an unusually long shadow for a car built in tiny numbers over three model years.

Chassis 55 and a Trade-In Nobody Talked About

Which brings us to chassis number 55, one of the first 90 units built, and the reason most people know the 550 exists. In September 1955, while finishing work on the film Giant, James Dean quietly traded in his Porsche 356 for a new 550 Spyder with red leather bucket seats. The one he chose had red trunk stripes applied at the factory in Stuttgart. Dean took the roadster to George Barris’s shop, where pinstriper Dean Jeffries painted the number 130 on the hood, the trunk lid and the sides. Its VIN was 550-0055. Then he had the painter script two words on the trunk lid that would follow the car into legend.

Why the Car Was Named After an Insult

The name Little Bastard was not Dean’s invention, and it was not a compliment. A Warner Brothers studio stunt driver, fellow racer and friend had given him the nickname jokingly, because Dean was a continuous problem for the studio — the latest example being that he had been living on studio grounds in a trailer he had used during filming months earlier and simply never left, despite repeated requests to vacate. Management picked up the moniker and it stuck. Dean putting it on the trunk lid in script was an act of open contempt aimed at his employers, which is worth remembering: his racing contract explicitly forbade him from competing, and he was heading to a road race in Salinas on October 1st and 2nd anyway.

September 30, 1955: Route 46 at Cholame Junction

He left for Salinas on September 30, 1955. On California route 46/41 at Cholame Junction, Dean’s 550 collided with a 1950 Ford Custom. He died at the scene. He was 24 and had not finished Giant. The car and the driver together became one of the most heavily mythologized pairings in American culture, and the 550 Spyder — a purpose-built racing machine that a few dozen wealthy privateers had bought to go competing — was permanently recast as something closer to a relic.

1,498cc, Mid-Mounted, and Enough to Beat Giants

The machinery underneath the mythology deserves its own attention. The 550 is powered by a 1,498cc flat-four, mid-mounted, producing 110 bhp and roughly 120 Nm of torque at 6,200 rpm. With the factory four-speed manual it would run zero to 97 km/h — 60 mph — in 8.2 seconds and cover the standing quarter-mile in 16.1 seconds. Those numbers look modest against a big-block American car of a decade later, and that is exactly the point: the 550 was never trying to win a drag race. It was built to carry speed through corners and to keep doing it for hours, which is why it beat cars that would have destroyed it in a straight line.

The Most Reproduced Shape in Classic Motoring

Of all the classic cars ever produced, the 550 Spyder is among the most frequently reproduced. Replicas exist in everything from fiberglass to aluminum, and some are built close to exact original specification by people who care very much about getting the details right. That volume of reproduction is a double-edged compliment — it means the shape is beloved enough that thousands of people want one, and it means provenance matters enormously when a genuine car surfaces. The originals were built in numbers small enough to count. Everything else is admiration.

Why the Giant Killer Nickname Still Holds Up

Strip away the James Dean story entirely and the giant killer name still holds up on the engineering alone. A 1,498cc flat-four producing 110 bhp works out to roughly 73 horsepower per liter from a four-cam, twin-plug, dry-sump, roller-bearing racing engine — a specific output that most volume manufacturers would not approach for another twenty years. Put that engine amidships in a chassis with almost no mass and a center of gravity low enough to clear a railway gate, and the arithmetic that let Porsche beat larger, more powerful and far better funded competition stops looking like a fluke. The 550 won because every one of its numbers was pointed in the same direction. That is a lesson the company kept applying long after the last Spyder left Stuttgart, and it is why the shape still turns heads seventy years later.

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