Born in Thum in the Erzgebirge mountains of Saxony, Barth grew up in a racing household shaped by his father Edgar's career at the top of European motorsport. Rather than moving directly into racing, Jürgen trained and worked as an engineer — an experience that gave him a mechanical understanding of racing cars that later distinguished him as a factory driver capable of precise technical feedback. He eventually made the transition to competition and built a career primarily in sports car and endurance racing.
Barth became one of Porsche's trusted endurance drivers and achieved his defining result at the 1977 Le Mans 24 Hours, sharing a Porsche 936 with Jacky Ickx and Hurley Haywood to take overall victory. The circumstances of that win have become part of Le Mans lore: Barth was seriously ill during the race and was only able to drive for limited periods, leaving Ickx and Haywood to cover the bulk of the distance while Barth completed enough stints to qualify as a co-winner. The 936 was Porsche's purpose-built flat-six prototype, and the 1977 result was one of several Le Mans victories the model accumulated in that era.
Three years later, in 1980, Barth won the 1000 km Nürburgring alongside Rolf Stommelen, adding a major German endurance classic to his record. The Nürburgring race was one of the world's most demanding endurance events, held on a circuit notorious for its length and technical complexity, and the win further confirmed Barth's place among the leading sports car drivers of the period.
After retiring from active competition, Barth channelled his expertise into two lasting contributions to motorsport. He co-authored Das große Buch der Porschetypen with Lothar Boschen — first published in 1977 — a comprehensive reference work cataloguing every Porsche model type and covering the marque's motorsport history in depth. The book became a standard resource for Porsche historians and enthusiasts. A later expanded edition, Das neue große Buch der Porsche-Typen, co-authored with Gustav Büsing and published in 2005, updated the original volume to cover subsequent decades of Porsche development.
Barth also played a foundational role in the creation of the BPR Global GT Series, the privately organized GT racing championship established in the early 1990s that directly preceded the FIA GT Championship. The BPR series revived international GT racing at a time when the category had diminished from its late-1970s heights, and the model it established — factory-supported production-based GT cars competing at circuits across Europe — shaped the structure of GT racing for the decades that followed.
Barth represents a rare combination of competitive achievement and intellectual contribution to motorsport history. His 1977 Le Mans victory, achieved under considerable physical duress and in cooperation with two of the era's strongest endurance co-drivers, remains one of the memorable results in the race's postwar history. His organizational contribution to the BPR series helped rebuild a category that now occupies a central place in international motorsport. And his written work on Porsche's model lineage has provided generations of researchers and enthusiasts with a foundational reference that has not been superseded.
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