Yes, Gordon, the second-run 4-cam engines moved the disties to that front piece. Only the early ones had them hanging off the ends of the intake cams, six bevel gears downstream from the crankshaft.
Which totally was the coolest looking place for 'em.
Yeah, but the factory had the same issue we have with 009s today: big time spark scatter.
The whole point of moving them from the cams to the crank is accuracy. Necessary in a high-compression, high revving race motor. Not so much accuracy needed to get groceries in a Beetle "People's Car"!
According to my Porsche racing guru buddy, the Spyders had distributors driven off the cams and Carreras had them on the nosepiece, as there wasn't room to fit the cam- driven ones in a 356. IIRC, he also told me all the later plain bearing motors had nosepiece-driven distributors.
I think your guru buddy is mistaken, though I have no doubt that racers adapted the crank-driven system asap.
The way I heard it, Porsche developed the front mounted distributors in order to ameliorate the spark scatter and timing adjustment issues inherent in the original design. The early cars—both 550s and 356s—originally all got the early outboard distributer treatment, as seen (barely) here.
Ed, you are correct, the Spyders had the distributors on the opposite ends, 'cause mid-engine. But both the early Speedsters and Spyders had them on the camshaft.
The factory did indeed move distributors to the crankshaft with an auxiliary housing on later engines due to spark scatter AND vibration problems. I have some books to look it up if anybody cares for references. It wasn't a plain bearing only thing either.
