You're right about the Porsche guys getting rattled when the heritage of their supercars is brought up. The flat motor layout was a good enough basic design that BMW still uses a variation of it on their bikes.
The downright EVIL part of the cooling design was that the throttle cable was routed through the fan shroud and this stupid loosely press-fit tube ran through the shroud. You couldn't run the cable through from under the car and also hold the tube in place - somehow, I must have figured out a way but I remember fooling with that for a few hours one day way back. When the cable snapped on me in the middle of a major intersection, some guy in a bug stopped, ran up and handed be a coat hanger and a pair of pliers without ever saying a word.
Bailing wire was a staple of our toolkit for that car.
(It ended up being driven on the sidewalks of Newton NJ and getting stopped by a foot patrolman. I was not involved in that one for once. But the kid who bought the car was.)
A guy with a Porsceh Boxter here was bragging about how much more sophisticated his car was than mine.
And he turned extremely purple when I mentioned what Ferdinand Porsche did before making Porsche.
*chuckle*
Carb fire in teh bug.
Ever see that neato little flame fountain happen?
(Got to see it twice, both times it was put out by FLOORING THE ENGINE which seemed to suck the flame back into the carb. We'd been changing some minor maintenance needing bits..)
I seem to remember having to hold the throttle cable in place while someone else wriggled like a snake under the car.
Didn't goof with the super air scoop thing that gulped air to cool the engine, it was deemed way too much trouble to bother with at the time.
Stick a sparkplug boot on the back side of the throttle cable tube between the fan shroud and engine shroud. Problem solved.