Pssstt… We Got Ferdi Porsche on the Line

VOICE MAIL isn’t a podcast. It’s not a show. It’s just a call. Go be a fly on the wall, and listen in on an old school chat between friends, old and new.

Dial +1 (659) 212-3756 and turn that volume all the way up, because this month’s VOICE MAIL Dot Dot Dot friend was still adrenaline pumping from a busy weekend when we got him on the line. Some things you just can’t dial down…

This time I rang up Ferdi Porsche, new friend and the man heading up FAT International, the coolest brand in motorsport if you didn’t know already gang. I was in Vienna during F1 weekend where between the champagne, hardcore car spotters and 40 degree celsius heat, a proper conversation was impossible. So I called him the next day instead from Amsterdam. At this point Ferdi was already in Salzburg.

FAT just closed out an exhibition at Vienna’s storied MAK Museum where seventy-five years of Porsche in motorsport, distilled into one room was displayed, with the Dauer 962 LM (chassis no. 36 doubling as a Le Mans ‘94 winner) was present. It’s rumored these days to fetch something north of €12 million. Beside it: a 911 GT1. Grown adults circled both like pilgrims.

To most people, FAT reads like a startup with a funny name, some DTC car-culture thing. Except FAT isn’t a startup. F.A.T. was a real logistics company in the ‘80s and ‘90s, hauling fashion freight around Europe and sponsoring race cars to advertise how fast their trucks moved. One of those sponsorships won Le Mans outright in 1994.

Then the company folded and the name went quiet, waiting for someone with an unreasonable amount of nerve to pick it back up. Hi Ferdi. Two years old, if you count from when it became an actual business. Bentley thought it worth collaborating with. So did JP Morgan, AMG, and of course Porsche.

Where the old FAT moved garments, the new one moves the new gen into the motorsport world, onto frozen lakes for the FAT Ice Race, into karting circuits through the FAT Karting League, built to make talent, not trust funds, the entry fee. There’s an F4 team quietly stacked with F1 ambitions too…

I’m telling you… It’s worth a follow. And that comes from me who at 31 (32 tomorrow, hoorah!) doesn’t have a driver’s licence…

Dial in. Listen close. And yes, we’ve finally cracked international numbers for those too stingy to call a US number. Comment below, we’ll send you a link.

Tschüss…