---
title: Nobody’s Perfect · HICONIUM
description: "In June 1983 Porsche filled nine of the first ten places at Le Mans, then bought a page to apologise for the gap. Our man for Porsche on the greatest advertisement ever set in results, and what a line like that is worth."
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---

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![Art plate: a Porsche 956 at speed down the Mulsanne straight at night, headlights carving one cone of light](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/art/mulsanne-956-night.jpg.w1920.q75.webp)

The Journal · Porsche

# Nobody’s Perfect

In June 1983 Porsche filled nine of the first ten places at Le Mans, then bought a page to apologise for the gap. Our man for Porsche on the greatest advertisement ever set in results, and what a line like that is worth.

[Victor Max August Haehling von Lanzenauer Our man for Porsche · July 6, 2026 · 5 min](https://hiconium.com/journal/authors/victor-haehling-von-lanzenauer)

At four o’clock on the afternoon of 19 June 1983, Al Holbert crossed the line at Le Mans in a Porsche 956 that was trying, with some determination, to die under him. The left door had gone missing on the Mulsanne hours earlier. On a 956 the door is not a courtesy: it is aerodynamics, the leading edge of the duct that feeds cooling air to the engine, and the motor had been quietly cooking itself ever since. In the Ford chicane, on the last lap of a 5’000-kilometre race, it seized. Holbert dropped the car into first gear, stood on the throttle, broke the engine loose the way you break loose a rusted bolt, and rolled home. Sixty-four seconds later came the sister car of Derek Bell and Jacky Ickx, closing fast and out of time. After twenty-four hours of racing, the margin was shorter than a pit stop.

Porsche had filled the first eight places, and the tenth. Ninth, and this is the important number, went to somebody else. A few weeks later the company bought a page and apologised.

![The 1983 Porsche advertisement: the headline Nobody's perfect over the Le Mans top-ten results, Porsche in every place but ninth](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/nobodys-perfect/nobodys-perfect-ad-1983.jpg.w1920.q75.webp)

The apology, as printed. Advertisement © Porsche, reproduced as a document of record.

Look at what is on the page, and at what is not. No car. No photograph. No metallic paint catching a studio sun. A results table, set like a notice in the births and deaths column: 1st Porsche, 2nd Porsche, 3rd Porsche, on and on, the same word ten deep with one interruption. Above it, at the size other companies reserve for triumph, two words of surrender. The small print underneath does the arithmetic with a straight face: no tougher race than Le Mans, 3’000 punishing miles in twenty-four hours, the first five places last year, the first eight this year. Then the sentence that made the whole thing immortal: there’s always room for improvement. Even at Porsche.

The hero of the page is ninth place. The Sauber C7 of Diego Montoya, Tony Garcia and Albert Naon, a BMW engine in a Swiss chassis, finished 32 laps behind the winner: half a Grand Prix of deficit, and the making of the advertisement. Without it the page is a list, the same word ten times, dominance of the sort that numbs. With it the list becomes a story with a flaw in it, and the flaw is load-bearing. Porsche needed that Sauber the way a cathedral needs its gargoyle: the imperfection that tells you the scale of everything around it. No agency has ever stepped forward to claim the line; the credit has always sat with Porsche’s own people. I find that fitting. The factory that built the result also set the type.

> Only the untouchable can afford an apology.

![Art plate: a Porsche 956 in an open pit garage at night, left door missing, two mechanics under one work lamp](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/art/pit-door-956.jpg.w2048.q75.webp)

The flaw the page never mentions: the winning car, and the hole where its door had been.

Here is what I love most about it: the advertisement confesses to the wrong imperfection. Ninth place was never Porsche’s fault; the door was. The winning car crossed the line broken, its engine one chicane from seizure, its flank open to the wind, and sixty-four seconds in hand after a day and a night. The page says nothing about any of this. It admits the flaw that belonged to somebody else and keeps its own in the garage: which is, when you think about it, how confidence has always dressed. The family that taught me these cars also taught me the phrase for it: never explain, never complain. Stuttgart, for one page in 1983, managed both at once and made it look like neither.

The line has a bloodline, of course. The self-deprecating car advertisement was born in 1959, when Doyle Dane Bernbach put Think small under a tiny Volkswagen, and grew up a year later when the same agency printed Lemon. under a Beetle that had failed inspection. Porsche crossed America in those years under the roof of Volkswagen’s Porsche + Audi division: read the foot of the page and the family name is right there. And the grammar bred on. In 1995 Goodby Silverstein set a 911 Turbo over three words, Kills bugs fast, and collected three awards for it the following year. Same trick, same nerve: state the performance as if it were a household fact, and let the reader do the boasting for you.

What is a line like that worth? The market has answered twice. The imperfect car itself, chassis 956-003, door and all, crossed a stage at Pebble Beach in August 2015 and made $10’120’000: a record, at the time, for any Porsche sold at auction, and it stood until the house’s 917 file grew a new final page two years later. And the advertisement became the only thing an advertisement is never supposed to become: a product. Porsche has been reprinting its apology for forty years now, as posters, as enamel signs, sold under its own crest. The confession outsold the boast. It always does.

[Also by our man for Porsche The Same Car, Since 1948 Seventy-eight years of one silhouette, and what refusing to change is worth.](https://hiconium.com/journal/the-same-car-since-1948)

Next year, who knows?, the small print asks, and the answer turned out to be: everybody. Porsche won the next four Le Mans as well, seven in a row before anyone else was allowed back onto the top step. There was no room for improvement after all. The headline had been the only modest word on the page, and even that was wrong by exactly one place.

There is a print of it in our workshop, above the bench, where other families keep a calendar. Nobody remembers who hung it. The paper has gone the colour of weak tea. The line has not aged a day.