Ultimate Cars - Racers - Porsche 917

" 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. Yeah!"

" It was a car that made heroes out of those who drive it."

" Mind-blowing piece of machinery. It looks mind-blowing. It is mind-blowing."

" The most dangerous, exhilarating car that I've ever driven."

" Just look at it. Just listen to it. How could the number 1 ultimate racer be anythin' other than the Porsche 917? It is the fastest car to win Le Mans. And its final incarnation, its 1100 brake-horsepower engine made it the most powerful road-racing car ever made. And it is quite possibly the worst mother's day present in the world."

" I have a very nice experience with the Porsche. I took my mother and the first time she was in what I call a really strong racing car and I took her out of the pit Interlagos--"

" [unk]."

" Very fast to arrive with its 300 kilometers per hour and then she didn't respond. She's just quite, she fainted. The power, the torque of 917, is just amazing. And that's what made my mother to faint."

" Like the Auto Union, 30-odd years earlier, the 917 worked from the simplest premise. To build the biggest engine that the racing bodies would allow, place it in the lightest body they could put together. Put a driver in front, wipe the fuse, and hope for the best."

" When this car came along, it just eclipsed everything else that was out there. That is 4-1/2 liter, flat-12 air-cooled engine producing 590 horsepower and a car weighing 800 kilograms. These were figures which people just haven't seen before."

" Porsche achieved these mind-boggling figures by sticking 2 6-cylinder 2.2-liter engines from the Porsche 911 together. That's right, 2 911 engines rammed together. Now, rumor has it that this Frankenstein monster of an engine was air cooled because Volkswagen had funded 2/3 of the racing project on the sole basis that the engine would use the same cooling system as their own product. I bet you didn't know that and I bet you didn't know, that as well as having a Frankenstein engine in an attempt to keep the weight low, the 917 had a balsa-wood gear knob. Anyway, the leviathan engine was then terrifyingly placed in a wafer-thin fiberglass plastic shell. Look, even the dashboard's made of it, which brought the final weight to 850 kilograms. Now, that's either insane or genius depending on whether you're a driver or an engineer, which is why all of the Porsche racing team drivers were too scared to take the car out on the track."

" It was clear from the start that this car had a level of performance that was quite beyond anything else that was out there."

" It was equally clear to anyone who is unfortunate enough to have to try and race one, but it was one of the most dangerous racing cars that have ever been produced. There are drivers who will tell you that going down, the more it sounds straight [unk] in a straight line."

" With the car doing 230 miles an hour, that's knocking on 400 kilometers per hour. You could look in the mirror and you could see the horizon behind you move as the back of the car came off the ground."

" At first, everyone thought the problem was the suspension. Then some bright spark realized the reason the 917's back end can not leave in the track, was that the tail was too long. So we picked up a saw, chopped a few inches of the rear and ei-- voila! A racing legend was born. Porsche returned to Le Mans in 1970 and did nothing less than annihilate the field, but their glory year was the legendary Le Mans of '71. This year, Ferrari had built a series of cars as a direct response to the 917's and once again, Porsche simply destroyed the competition, as well as set in a world-record for the fastest time and the most distance covered at the legendary course."

" It is fast than a Formula One car on certain tracks which for sports car was simply ridiculous and it is just the most amazing car."

" And more than 30 years on, the record still stands and it will probably never be beaten because after the '71 win, the racing board banned the 5-liter class at Le Mans. "

" It was if you like the best of the best and I don't think we have seen it's like ever since."

" The 917 feared by the opposition, loved by the crowd; the last and the greatest of the giant-road racers and our number 1 ultimate racer."