Porsche has banned a former Le Mans winner from the factory and taken him to court demanding that 20 counterfeit racing cars be destroyed.
Since 2021, German police have had three men in their sights for defrauding up to 20 racing cars. Porsche says these are fakes.
But it is not until this summer that the trial against them begins. One of those taking a seat on the dock is Jürgen Barth.
In 1977, he won the legendary 24 hour race at the Le Mans circuit in France in a Porsche 936. Since then, however, he has not only spent his time writing books about racing cars.
This is written by the media Handelsblatt .
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Jürgen Barth has also helped to falsify up to 20 of them. At least Porsche thinks so. Specifically, it concerns, among other things, counterfeits of a Porsche 917. The police and the car brand believe that the fraud took place at a classic workshop in Aachen.
The cars have since been sold on for millions of euros. Now Porsche wants the court's word that the cars must be destroyed, because they are counterfeits throughout.
According to the police, they have intercepted a telephone conversation in which Jürgen Barth together with one of the co-accused denies the forgery of a Porsche 550. However, Jürgen Barth has already rejected the accusations and instead claimed that it was a 'friendly conversation'.
When the police searched Jürgen Barth's home in July 2019, they found what Handelsblatt describes as 'the world's largest collection of privately owned Porsche racing cars'.
The trial against Jürgen Barth and the two other men is expected to end with a verdict on 6 June 2024. It is therefore not yet known what will happen to the cars.
The case of the many counterfeit Porsche models is not the first time that such stories have surfaced. Counterfeit cars are big business.
This is actually also the case here at home. In September 2021, for example, a 45-year-old psychic from Slagelse was convicted of cloning several cars in the million range. Read more about it here .
