The loophole Porsche racecar Ferrari couldn't touch!

if you can imagine this like 200 miles an hour the car is wandering from one side of the road or the other and these guys with their balls of steel are like yeah it's a little disturbing [Music] sometimes a race car comes along that upsets the apple cart that changes the paradigm for racing and this happens once in a generation and probably one of the greatest cars that ever did that is the porsche 917. now most people know the 917 from the movie le mans with steve mcqueen looking jaunty and his little gulf colored cars and there's a whole lot more to the story than just that one movie the car only had a two and a half year racing career and yet it's still remembered today and it is worship today decades later because of what it accomplished in that short amount of time you have to go back to the beginning to understand how special the 917 was in its origin in 1967 at the after lamar the fia changed the rules saying that it was time to put an end to the 7 liter gt40s that had come out and they were going to restrict engine size coming up in the next couple years so prototypes were going to be three liters sports cars were going to be five liters now the ford ferrari wars that have been going on we're about to end ford in 67 was like we've done it we made our point we've spent millions of dollars to pull off this stunt and they handed their whole gt40 program over to john weir in england sponsored by gulf and porsha stepped in to now begin the porsche ferrari wars and they had already been moving their way up slowly through the ranks of le mans they had never won a world championship they had never won lamar but they had won so much for such a small company they had done a tremendous amount in racing and they had built the 906 then the 910 and 907 the 908 was now their front-running car and it was a three-liter and it fit perfectly into that prototype level but they porsha sat back and was like what about this five-liter sports car thing there's a hole in the rules here we can exploit and they waited almost a full year to make a decision about that and they really thought about it and then they're like let's do it this is our opportunity to win everything this is the path to victory at le mans and they started building what would be known as the 917. now the beginning of it was the engine they wanted to build uh that five liter rule and they never built an engine that big they had flat sixes and they had flat eights and they made the decision to make a flat 12. now they had never built this before and it was june of 1968 where they gave them the green flag to start building this car and they had to build it quick from scratch everything they took two of their well well-known and well-practiced cylinders and put them together in the center so and i'll get a little geeky here because this is all tech stuff but i love it so like how do you get the power when you put the butt ends of an engine together you could put a flywheel on one end of the crankshaft somewhere but the crank is so long you would just start getting vibrations in it and it would just shake the engine apart so what they decided was to take the power off the center of the crankshaft where that vibration would begin there's a gear that goes up and that powers the fan the cooling fan the cooling fan for our 917 and runs some of the ancillaries and then the other one goes down and powers the transmission and because it's such a package the clutch on a 917 is only seven inches they built the engine it came out at four and a half liters their predictions were that hopefully it would make over 500 horsepower which for a porsche at that time was a moon shot it ended up making 550 horsepower in the four and a half liter form they were onto something they're like okay we've got the heart of the car now now we need the car up to that point porsche had built space frame chassis out of aluminum and this was a very old technology this is stuff from the 50s but it was something that they knew and they were building quickly the cars race cars now were transitioning into what were called monocoque and that was aluminum panels built in boxes and they would create the structure of the car then you just bolted things on the end of the boxes they were lighter they were stronger they were the new technology but porsha at heart was a conservative company it was an interesting juxtaposition because fairy porsche was from the old school and ferdinand peach was from the new school and they would butt up against each other all the time you know fernands wanted to build the latest fastest stuff and they kept each other in check so they're like we know this space frame so they built it out of aluminum they built the chassis out of different sized tubes depending on where there was load on it so some of them are thicker some of them are thinner but they built the entire chassis as one air chamber so they would they'd drill into the tube weld the tube on then drill into the tube and so the whole thing was one chamber the reason for that was so that you could pressurize the frame and if pressure was lost you had a crack in an aluminum frame that was quite possible the stories come they're like they pressurized it with nitrogen and it made it lighter and they they put helium in there and all kinds of crate it was it's simple it's just engineering they just pressurized it the mechanics would check it was a little schrader valve on either side and you just put your thing on there oh it's got pressure it doesn't it's not cracked it was that simple it was a thing mysterious about it the other thing about the frame was that it had and this is what they did with earlier cars they would channel oil through the chassis and the early 917s had a chamber that would move it through unfortunately all that hot oil would turn the pedals and everything into a furnace and almost burn the drivers but it was efficient right their goal and peach's idea of a race car was not about the driver this is way before driver safety and anybody gave a bit about the driver the car was supposed to be as low drag as possible they took it to a wind tunnel and they made a body for this amazing chassis the chassis when it was complete 105 104 pounds you can just pick it up i've picked up a 917 chassis it's pretty cool they made a fiberglass body for it that was bonded to the aluminum that made it even stronger and the car as we know became it was beautiful but most people think of the golf car from the 70s the original car in 1969 what they finished it looked a lot more like the 908 long tails again it was about minimum drag and anything that they wanted to add to a knack a duct or a duct or add a hole in it to bring fresh air to the driver verboten they wanted to keep it as smooth and fast as possible what they ended up building was an undrivable car they built a car that is now moving into a realm that nobody had been before aerodynamically so the top speed of a 908 long tail that time was like 185 miles an hour and later on the 908s would move up towards 200 miles an hour the 917 was capable out of the box of over 220 miles an hour and you gotta remember that as you go up in speed air becomes exponentially more dense and changes the way it moves over a car they finish the car and they finish it and this is amazing and this is like this was the time of going to the moon right we were building a machine that could get us on the moon that kind of mentality was was global from the day they said we're going to build a 917 to the day they had one they had 25 of them lined up was 10 months 10 months to build a functional race car from scratch like and they were two days early in fact their goal there was obviously some issues it's a fresh race car it came out i believe was march 1969 when it showed up the geneva auto show when they first showed the first finished version of it and people freaked out it was like what the heck is that you might as well brought a ufo so the world saw this spaceship of a car ferrari saw something completely different they saw a huge threat and they didn't have a group five sports car so luckily ferrari had just sold their road-going division to fiat and they had the money to build a sports car now what what's a sports car so a prototype is something that you build special it's a special car it can be one of one a sports car at that point uh they were asking for 50 examples to be made that would be lowered down to 25 eventually but a sports car had to have a few things a few elements to it and these looked like prototypes they were technically supposed to be road-going vehicles so the 917 has a turnkey ignition if you see the key they even drilled little holes in it to make it lighter it's supposed to have a passenger seat because there's a two-seater so they put a little vestibule little seat in there next to the guy it had to have a spare tire so porsche got together i believe bfgoodrich to make one of the first space saver spares to slip into the back of the thing my favorite part it had to have room for luggage so in the back of it if you see the 917 tail up there's two fiberglass trays in there and that technically was put in for luggage capacity it's not the tray where the mechanics put their tools although it became that that's where the luggage goes had to have tail lights and turn signals and all kinds of things so they made it they did all of that we basically dressed a prototype up with sports car trappings and a few people in the future did actually make their 917s road going after they were sold as old race cars ferrari's caught with their pants down and they've started the creation of the 512. porsche is months ahead porsche says okay it's time to get the cars going up to that point homologation included building a certain amount of cars and if you could prove that you had 18 cars being built or seven cars of parts you know they'd go okay you got the trappings of 25 cars the fia was like we want to see 25 cars lined up on this date and porsche pulled it off and the photograph this is another weird myth you'll see the photograph and it's 25 917's all lined up and you see like the fia inspectors kind of going like and the weird rumors were like oh they were just you know bodies sitting on truck chassis and they cheated and all this they built the cars they talked to the mechanics they busted their they actually finished two days before the fia showed up they did admit that one of them the suspension pieces weren't correct they just needed it on its wheels but other than that they put gas in all the cars and they offered they're like which one would you like to drive so they just called the bluff and they pulled it off so you got the car it's homologated let's go racing that's a whole other story because the car did not drive well they had put it in the wind tunnel in a miniature form and they had done all the math in the world but their goal was to build a low drag car that was going to win le mans they had made other plans for the shorter tracks in fact most people don't know this the original 917 had two tails that were available it had a longer tail and a shorter tail they thought about it they were like longer tail before the long circuits and the shorter tail for the shorter circuits and had different wings on the back but most of us have seen the weird crazy shark like long tail early 917s and it was awful people call a little widowmaker there were stories of it going down like testing it down the molson strait that the car would need the entire width of the mulsanne straight because it would just wander from one if you can imagine this like 200 miles an hour the car is wandering from one side of the road or the other and these guys with their balls of steel are like yeah it's it's a little disturbing like if you really disturb one of these guys there is something insanely wrong with the car and the porsche drivers didn't want to drive it and that's another one of the weird myths they're like well they didn't want to drive it because it was a terrifying car no a race car driver wants to drive the best car for the race and for most of those races at the time the 908 was the best car it was that car had reached its peak of development it had gone through its growing stage the 908 was a great car in 1969 and they would end up winning the first time the world championship with the 908. so the porsche drivers drove that they were trying to convince people and find drivers if you come on out and you know they called up brian redman who wasn't a porsche driver at the time like would you come out and drive one of the 917s for us and uh joseph like would you maybe you know could you possibly come out and test this for us and it brought a lot of new drivers into the fold the joke is that they couldn't find porsche drivers so they asked bmw drivers to do it and they got people to come out and test them and drive them they started racing them and it went through its growing stages but it just it wasn't a stable car and now all of that the rear end would kind of lift its speed it would wander under braking with that car is already unstable and braking made it even worse and the 917 they had developed some amazing brakes for it it could it could outbreak the chassis like they talked about all the drivers talked about like they couldn't use all the brakes because it would get unstable under braking so it was an amazing package it just didn't work this should have been the greatest car ever and it seemed to be like an abject failure but it had potential and they had invested so much in it at this time in 1968 john ware won le mans again with a small engine dt40 and in 1969 he'd do it again and porsche's 908s were lined up to win le mans that year and he still did it so john ware and his team were the team at sebring in 1969 they approached john ware and said you know we were thinking about having you run the porsche team for 1970. and this is a really strange move when you think about it there's a german company asking a british team with an american sponsor to run their car and not everybody at porsche was comfortable with this but he could take these old cars and make them win and he only had a couple of cars he didn't have fleets of gt40s he made the cars he had work and run and win an excellent choice and of course he had seen the car in geneva and he was like that's the future yes so they finally came to an agreement and john ware gets his first chance to test the cars in late 1969 now this is only months before the first time it shows up at a race in the 1970 season at daytona and it wins this is the its first win at the last race of the year in austria it wins and i mean by the skin of its teeth it wins and even the drivers were like i don't even know how we did that they pulled it off they said they had all the data from that track from that last run so very smartly they stayed there with a couple of 917s and they brought in the 917 pa which was a car they built for can-am in the united states and it was a kind of open top car looked more like a 908 spider and i think that's actually part of the body that they started using on it but it was a 917 underneath and the drivers liked driving that so they drove it around the track and they said okay what's good about this they said very much and this is the porsche team along next to john ware kind of the handing off of what was going on now what happened at that track over those few days is what made the 917 what it we remember it they were driving it wasn't stable they couldn't figure it out they thought there was chassis flex that was everybody was guessing they kept messing with the suspension they're like the chassis is doing something chassis is doing something and they're like but the can-am car is fine like what's what's the deal there's a thing called observational engineering it doesn't really exist today with computers and everything but you can sit there and engineer something by looking at it and breaking it down in your head and john horseman who is where's right hand man the story goes is that the car came in and it was later in the day and there were bugs obviously we all have driven through bugs with our cars and smashes on the windshield and it's inevitable especially at those speeds and there were gnats all over the front of the car and as you went farther back they were less gnats until there were none and at the top of the rear spoiler there were just a couple of nets so the conclusion was there wasn't any air hitting the back of the car that it was just blowing off the car and had no downforce at the rear and porsche was already after this porsche were the ones who kind of were like they knew something was wrong they brought and this is so 24 hours of lemons i love it they brought sheets of aluminum duct tape and self-tapping screws and they were going to figure out what's wrong and right there they're like we got to do something about this rear end we got we got to raise the rear end and get into the airflow which was very similar to the can-am version of it so they cut the rear end of this car off now the ni the 917 at that point had all these crazy flappy wings all over it to try to keep it stable they're really cool actually the wings on the front and there's wings on the back and they're connected to the suspension so when the suspension lifts the wings are supposed to get up and push the car back down they go back to zero drag so they just hack all this stuff off i mean you can imagine them a sawzall they were literally taking the sheets of aluminum on the armco barrier and shaping them out there at the racetrack they build this hideous looking wedge and stick it on the back of the car and they send out brian redman and they're like go drive the car and he goes around and he comes in he's three seconds a lap faster and he's like this is a race car like that moment that bhaji transformation right no just hammering stuff out of aluminum the car was three seconds lap faster a couple more adjustments four seconds lap faster when they were done it was five seconds a lap faster you would have had oh put another 50 60 horsepower in the engine to accomplish that just out of changing the body style so what was born out of that was what's called the 917k or kurtz or kurtzek short tail and the short tail is the car that most of us know it's the golf car that we see they bring the car to daytona and daytona is the opening race this is what's going to prove that everything's worked out that this weird relationship between a british and american and germans and the car and the change is all going to work so they rent daytona and they banish all the daytona employees they don't want anybody to see what they're doing and they run daytona they run like 26 hours in there to get the car ready and you discover one of the problems with daytona is that when you're in the banking it's just 31 degrees you're looking into the banking as you're going around it they couldn't see out of it so daytona cars have another window above the main front window and that was for you looking out and seeing being able to see in front of you and they made a few other developments because daytona is a very different type of race it destroys suspensions it's really rough and they got the car ready it shows up at daytona and there's two of them what had happened in the meantime is remember i said that porsche wasn't completely the some of the porsche family wasn't completely into this whole british team thing they created another team called porsche salzburg or porsche austria which is supposed to be a privateer team owned by the peach family and there's another 917 on the grid the two gulf ware cars and porsche salzburg and they're like oh oh okay all right we'll see how that works out and 1970 daytona was the beginning of what would be two years of utter domination they would come in first and second at daytona setting records as they went they would win le mans for the first time and it was and they had started developing another long tail version the higher up called the langek the long tail so the long tail that was going to be the car that was going to win and it was actually a salzburg car one le mans that year then they win next year they do daytona again they do sebring and they do lamar and the rules change that the 917 is no longer a viable sports car they knew that which i thought was interesting they knew that in 1968 they knew going in that this car would only last three years and yet they did it anyway and it became an unbeatable icon with some of the greatest liveries of all time the hippie livery the gulf salzburg liveries just stunning cars but they didn't stop there just so you know the 917 lived on for a few more years when it went to can-am in the united states and ended up ruling 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Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,518,154

Keywords: vinwiki, car stories, porsche, 917, 917k, JOHN FICARRA, ficarra, classic, le mans, daytona, ferrari, ford, gt40, Bruce Canepa, gulf, livery, hippy, salzburg

Id: Jk4rQH-yYho

Length: 24min 7sec (1447 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 13 2022