“There’s a big difference between hoarding and archiving,” Dieter Landenberger tells me. “My job is information management. I’m not a collector, and you won’t find anything Porsche-related in my home. This is about factual research.”

Dieter is the Porsche Museum’s principal archivist. I’ve known him a fair few years now, and visited the museum – a stunning modernist building designed by Viennese architects Delugan Meissi – maybe half a dozen times since it opened in January 2009. I’m not lying when I say it’s probably my favourite place on the planet.

But until now we’ve not been allowed into the actual archive itself. It’s home to more than 50,000 items, which taken together provide a staggering overview of Porsche’s work and history. Company founder Ferdinand Porsche was quite the pioneer, a man with exceptionally far-sighted engineering skills and ideas, whose genius took him from an electric vehicle conceived and built in the late 1890s, to the epic and all-conquering Auto Union racing cars of the 1930s, not to mention some funny looking thing called the VW Beetle, commissioned by history’s most notorious madman and despot. And all that before he’d even built his first sports car. Apparently that turned out pretty well.

We had a day to rummage through the priceless, meticulously ordered, carefully temperature-controlled Porsche archive. It helped bring some of the characters and cars in this incredible story back to life. Enjoy.