PORSCHE 917/20, 1971

The 917 is the greatest racing car of alltime, right? Perhaps, and it’s certainly a testament to the monomania of its primary architect, the late Ferdinand Piëch. But it wasn’t a hit out of the box, as Richard Attwood – who took Porsche’s maiden Le Mans win in a 917 in 1970 – told me in a recollection peppered with expletives. Let’s just say it suffered from interesting high-speed handling foibles. So it had to evolve. The hunt for more downforce and reduced drag led Porsche to Parisian aero specialist SERA, whose main man Robert Choulet had helped envision the 917 langheck (long tail). Now the results were even more outlandish. The 917/20 looked over-bodied, plump, indeed porcine. At least that’s what Porsche designer Anatole Lapine declared when he first saw it. Its heavily modified body was so wide it didn’t even fit in regular Porsche transporters, and had to be moved around in an old military truck. When it appeared at the Le Mans pre-race test in April1971, Count Gregorio Rossi– heir to the Martinidrinks fortune, and key sponsor – decided in a fit of pique that the car was too ugly to race in the famous Martinilivery, never mind that it was clearly very effective. And it’s at this point that the waspish Lapine went allout on his pig comparison, painted it pink, and marked out the body like a butcher would annotate a pig’s body. The so-called ‘Trufflehunter of Zuffenhausen’ ran as high as third in that June’s Le Mans 24 hours, with Reinhold Joest and WilliKauhsen driving, untilJoest suffered a brake failure at the 12-hour mark and crashed on the approach to Arnage. Just remember: a racing car is always pretty if it’s fast.