Porsche: Midengined Sports Cars!

Here's a nice article about Porsche, showing most of the models. Nice gallery as well:

Ferdinand Porsche and his son Ferry were both brilliant engineers. They knew perfectly well that the best place for a sports car's engine was in the middle of the chassis, where its mass wouldn't adversely affect handling. So as they designed the 356, the Porsche sports car that launched their eponymous company, during the late 1940s, they did the rational thing and put its VW-based, air-cooled four-cylinder engine amidships where it belonged. But by the time the 356 went into production, its engine had migrated to the rear.

That first Porsche, the tube-framed 1948 356-001 or "Gmünd Roadster" after the Austrian town in which it was built, was something of a developmental dead end as far as the production 356 itself was concerned. Midengine cars have virtually always been in the forefront of Porsche history — in racing. Cars like the 904 Carrera GTS, the 906, 907, 917, 936, 956 and 962 built the Porsche racing legend around the world with their engines firmly planted within their wheelbases.

550 Spyder: 1953-1956
Porsche wasn't yet firmly established as a full-fledged automaker during the early 1950s but it was already a well-respected engineering firm with dozens of consulting and design contracts. So Porsche's project number 549 was a design for a new truck transmission for Fuller Manufacturing in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and number 551 was a three-speed transmission for DKW. But right between them, project 550 was something Porsche was building for itself: a tiny midengine car calculated to win sports car races.

Back in that unregulated era, what ran on racetracks could easily run on the roads, so while most 550s wound up in some sort of competition, many were also legally driven on public highways.