No politics for me tonight, no economics, no fretting about Income Inequality, no pleas to Save Our Public Schools. Tonight I dedicate my diary to the most awesome racing machine ever constructed. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Porsche 917.
Forty years ago this summer, the machine above, No.23, in the colors of the Austrian Porsche Salzburg team and driven by Hans Hermann and Richard Attwood, won the 24 Hours of LeMans, giving Porsche the first of 15 overall wins in the French classic.
The cars had a mid-engine layout and were powered by fuel-injected flat-12 "boxer motors" that were essentially 2 flat sixes stuck together with timing chains and fan drives in the center. In the case of No.23 the engine displaced 4.5 liters and was naturally aspirated.
Here's a close-up of the engine,
here's a neat little animation of how it works,
and this is what it sounds like.
The 917 appeared with different bodywork and paint schemes, depending on the race and the team. The most iconic version was the kurz, or short-tailed, body painted in the light blue and orange colors of the Gulf-Wyer team. This is the car that appeared in the 1971 movie
Le Mans, co-starring Steve McQueen. In this clip McQueen's 917 duels with the Ferrari 512, which the Porsche beat out for the win in 1970:
The final version was the 917/30 built for the North American Can-Am series in 1973. This car was fitted with open, or spyder, bodywork. The engine's displacement had risen to 5.4 liters, it had twin turbo-chargers and put out 1580 bhp. The car weighed only 1800 lb. and could go from 0-100 km/h, or zero-to-sixty, in only 1.9 seconds. 100 mph took only 3.9.
Enjoy this stirring video tribute to engineering excellence and racing dominance and have a happy Friday night.