What does the word “Targa” mean to you?
If you ask Leslie Kendall, chief historian at the Petersen Automotive Museum, he’d guess most drivers today associate it with a specific type of vehicle: “People look at a car with a designed-in roll bar and they’ll say, ‘Oh, that must be the Targa version.’”
You can thank Porsche for that modern definition. The German automaker unveiled the Targa body style in 1965 at the International Motor Show in its home country — an open-top car with a removable roof panel, soft plastic rear window and fixed roll bar behind the driver — a response to the U.S. potentially implementing, as Kendall says, “very, very strict” roll-over laws. In the end, those laws never panned out, but the Targa remains a staple of the Porsche buying experience today.
The history behind the Targa name, however, goes back long before the automotive safety requirements of the ‘60s. In some respects, its story is the antithesis of them: a tale of a madcap race up and down the mountains of Sicily, where the question wasn’t who would win, but, as Kendall puts it, “Who’s going to survive?”
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