Monday 27th April 2015

Porsche 917: Time For Tea?

Piech's 'retirement' provides an excuse to look at his legacy as an engineer

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The sudden departure of Ferdinand Piech from the Volkswagen supervisory board – and his unofficial role as the man who got to stroke the biggest white cat in the motor industry – got us thinking about some of the man’s greatest hits.

Piech and Helmuth Bott with the 917s

We didn’t have to think very far, because none was greater than the Porsche 917 – the definitive 1970s prototype racer and a car that, after a poor start, became one of the most successful competition cars of all time. It was developed under Piech’s watch as head of Porsche Motorsport, and represented a huge gamble at the time he commissioned it. To homologate the 917 for Group 4 racing the company had to build a minimum of 25 cars, with the inspectors refusing to sign off when they came to Zuffenhausen and found only three cars built and the rest in parts. Piech then ordered the full run of 25 cars be constructed and parked in line outside the factory – which certainly made for a memorable photograph – and reportedly invited the inspectors to go and have a drive in any one they liked…

917 went on to dominate at Le Mans

The 917’s debut season of 1969 wasn’t a success, with subsequent research proving its bodywork was creating high-speed aerodynamic lift. The ‘short-tail’ 917K (or ‘Kurzheck’) followed and immediately proved itself, winning Le Mans in 1970 and quickly finding a starring role in a film about the race featuring a certain Steve McQueen – what was it called again? The 917 went on to become a hugely successful sports prototype and to spawn both high-speed ‘Langheck’ and fire-breathing Can-Am variants.

This video is genially hosted by Derek Bell, a man who drove the 917 in period and who is still thrown the keys to one occasionally these days. To judge from Derek’s hair we’d say it dates from the mid 1990s. But the 917 is one of those cars that will never go out of fashion.

Watch the video here.

[Source: loveGT40 via YouTube]

[unsprung]

Don't laugh, but I was a bit teary-eyed while watching that video. There is a distinct and unmistakable culture of the engineer about both that car and the company that produced it.