NINE-SEVENTEEN. It somehow sounds right, doesn’t it? But then everything about Porsche’s first outright winner of the Le Mans 24 Hours was right: the way it performed, the way it looked, and even the colors in which it raced. That the Porsche 917 was a thing of beauty, wrapped in so many iconic color schemes, is just as essential in the legend of the car as the successes achieved and the records set during its short, spectacular career at world championship level.

So successful was the 917 that it resulted in a change of rules that legislated it out of the championship for which it was built after just three seasons, only adding to the mystique that surrounds it.

Yet equally important in the status of the 917 coupe in motorsport folklore are the heroics performed behind by the drivers sitting behind its spindly steering wheel, their feet jutting ahead of the front wheels.

Then there are the wonderful tales of the development of an ever-evolving, cutting-edge racing machine that was, perhaps a little unfairly, dubbed the “widow maker” in its earliest iteration.

The Porsche 917 even takes center stage in a Hollywood movie. For many, the star of the 1971 film Le Mans is not Steve McQueen, but the car that his character, Michael Delaney, drives. It is, of course, a rasping, bellowing Gulf-liveried Porsche 917, its menacing presence evocatively captured for the big screen.

If a Gulf-liveried 917K is the image conjured in the mind of a casual racing fan by mention of the car’s name, the debate among aficionados is which single moment from the 917’s short, sharp Sportscar World Championship career (from 1969 to ’71) epitomizes this brutal, but beautiful machine?

Perhaps it’s Pedro Rodriguez on opposite lock in the rain at the 1970 BOAC 1000 at Brands Hatch? Or, same season, the Mexican side by side with his teammate and rival Jo Siffert on the blast toward the still damp Eau Rouge at the start of the Spa 1,000Km?

Another memorable image (BELOW) is the famous shot of 25 917s neatly lined up at Porsche’s Zuffenhausen factory in Stuttgart ready for inspection by the men in blue blazers from the Commission Sportive Internationale, the then-sporting arm of the FIA.

The need to build 25 cars was at the heart of the 917’s conception by Ferdinand Piech, boss of the development and test department under which motorsport fell at Porsche.

The marque had been increasingly successful on the international sports car scene, with a line of cars running from the 906 and 910, through the 907 and 908, with six- and then eight-cylinder engines. But a rule change in the Group 4 category was the impetus required for Porsche to step up from competing for class honors and go for overall honors in the International Championship of Makes for the first time.

And so the idea of the 917, powered by a flat-12, air-cooled powerplant was born.

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The homologation minimum for Group 4 had initially been 50 cars when new rules were introduced for 1968, but with few takers and an eye on encouraging small constructors to build cars, that was then halved. But attracting a major manufacturer like Porsche wasn’t exactly what it had in mind, which maybe explains why the CSI officials turned tail when they first pitched up at Zuffenhausen. Only a handful of the 917s were fully assembled and the rest were present in component form only…which explains the return visit and that iconic photograph.

The 917 had finally passed muster with the CSI, but it didn’t meet with the approval of Porsche’s roster of factory drivers when the race season got underway in 1969. Piech’s idea was a low-drag machine that would fly down the 3.7-mile Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans, but that made for a disconcertingly unstable ride. Porsche factory drivers Siffert and Brian Redman rejected their 917 at the Spa 1,000Km in favor of a 908 Coupe and duly won the race.

Porsche’s stars also wanted nothing to do with the 917L for the 1,000km race on the daunting Nurburgring-Nordschleife, which is why the German manufacturer brought in Frank Gardner and David Piper to drive a sole 12-cylinder car.

Porsche again split its challenge between the 908 and the 917 at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Redman and Siffert chose the 908, but Vic Elford wanted to race the 917, despite all of its vices.

“It was a nasty little monster,” he recalls, “but I loved it because it was so fast. My philosophy on winning Le Mans – which unfortunately I never managed to achieve – was the same as Piech’s. I wanted to be driving the fastest car in a straight line, so that the last thing I needed to do was actually race. I wanted the highest top speed, so I could drive past everyone on the straight.”

Porsche could have won that year. Hans Hermann and Gerard Larrousse famously missed out on victory in their 908 by the narrowest of margins, but Rolf Stommelen had qualified on pole in one 917, while Elford and teammate Richard Attwood led into the 22nd hour in the other factory car.

“That first one was evil,” continues Elford. “It was aerodynamically unstable. You have to remember that aerodynamics at that time were in their infancy.”

Just how little was known about aerodynamics is illustrated by the story of the test at which the instability issues that dogged the 917 right through its debut season were finally addressed.

John Wyer’s British-based JW Automotive team had been sounded out as a potential Porsche factory team for 1970 even before it had beaten the 908 at Le Mans with its aging Ford GT40 driven by Jacky Ickx and Jackie Oliver.

When J.W. carried out an evaluation test at Austria’s Osterreichring in October ’69, engineering manager John Horsman noticed that the front of the car was plastered with flies, whereas the tail remained clean, meaning the airflow was separating. The team set to work modifying the rear bodywork using aluminum sheeting, pop rivets and duct tape. What emerged was an approximation of the classic 917 shape, the kurz or kurzheck (short-tail).

It was the 917K that gave Porsche the first of its tally of 16 outright Le Mans victories in 1970, although not to one of the favored cars. Attwood and Hermann (LEFT) won in horrendous conditions aboard a Porsche Salzburg-entered machine using a 4.5-liter engine, rather than the new 4.9 developed for the ’70 season.

Elford was racing another variant of the 917 that year, the 917LH. The langheck had been developed to send the car, as was Piech’s want, ever faster down the Mulsanne. Wyer rejected the langheck, but Elford was again happy to put his faith in a low-downforce machine.

“The short tail K was very easy to drive, but the langheck was a bit less comfortable,” he explains. “You could twitch the short-tail car around a bit in the corner, but with the long-tail version you had to be absolutely precise and committed. Once you turned in, you couldn’t change your mind.”

Porsche would subsequently try to combine the best attributes of the K and the LH. The result was the 917/20 that raced at Le Mans in 1971 with Reinhold Joest and Willi Kauhsen. That car is not remembered for its achievements on the track – it qualified only seventh and failed to finish – but for its livery. The car was dubbed the “Pink Pig” and had names of the cuts of meat written on its bodywork.

The “Pink Pig” (RIGHT) wasn’t the only great 917 livery. The car did much to ensure that Gulf Oil blue with an orange stripe entered motor racing psyche. Ditto Martini Racing stripes. And don’t forget the psychedelic swirls of the 917LH driven by Kauhsen and Larrousse at Le Mans in ’70.

But most of all we shouldn’t forget the exploits of the drivers who raced the 917. Would the car be remembered in the way it is today without Rodriguez’s wet-weather masterclass at Brands in 1970, or without he and Siffert pushing themselves to ever faster lap times at Spa a year later (see next page), or Jackie Oliver’s fastest ever lap of Le Mans at a cool 155.626mph average during the 1971 test weekend?

The answer is, perhaps not. But the legend that is the 917 is much, much more than the sum of its successes on the racetrack. It truly is an icon.

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1971 Spa 1000Km: 154.77mph. AVERAGE…

A whitewash. There’s no other word for it. The John Wyer-run J.W. Automotive Engineering Porsche 917Ks dominated the Spa 1,000km in May 1971, with no one else getting even a look in. And it was Pedro Rodriguez whose star shone the brightest of the quartet of drivers in the blue-and-orange coupes that day.

Right from the start, Rodriguez in the No. 21 917K (chassis 917-015, the star of our photo shoot on the preceding pages) and teammate Jo Siffert in the No. 20 raced away from the opposition, the rival Martini Racing 917s and a Ferrari 312P shared by Jacky Ickx and Clay Regazzoni. Ickx was 30sec behind the J.W. duo after just five laps.

The end result was a four-lap victory for the two Porsches, a new lap record for the old and fearsome 8.76-mile Spa-Francorchamps track, and the fastest ever race speed for a world championship sports car race – an astonishing 154.77mph average that remains unbeaten to this day.

Jackie Oliver believes that his teammate, Rodriguez, was the catalyst for the amazing performance of the two Porsches that day, even if fastest lap of the race ended up in the possession of Siffert with a 3m14.6s/162.08mph flier that was quicker than either car had gone in qualifying.

“The performance that day was, I believe, very much led by Pedro; I think he drew Siffert along,” recalls Oliver. “There were some tracks were Pedro outshone me, and Spa was one. There were some tracks where I held my head up, like Le Mans and Brands Hatch. The old Spa was a daunting place and deserved a bit of respect, but we all know how brave Pedro was. The high-speed corners definitely suited him.”

The dominance of the J.W. Porsches was such that Rodriguez and Siffert were being shown a board reading “EZ” for easy before either handed over to their respective teammates, Oliver and Derek Bell. Oliver doesn’t remember similar instructions for himself and Bell until the closing minutes of the race.

Bell had lost time to Oliver in traffic after taking over from Siffert, but was back with him by the time they made their final fuel stops.

“The board came out for us to maintain station over the final few laps,” explains Oliver. “He kept his distance for a while, but on the final lap it was a bit fraught on my part. I wasn’t sure if Derek was going to honor our instructions. If you look at any photographs, it was a pretty tight finish.”

This story originally appeared in the August 2014 issue of RACER magazine – The Great Cars III Issue. Click here to purchase the issue.

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