Beschreibung:

‘The immortal Porsche 917 series of flat-12 cylinder, air-cooled endurance racing cars stands absolutely at the pinnacle of sports car charisma, power and performance.’ Every enthusiast throughout the Vintage and Historic and collectors’ car world appreciates the sheer imposing stature, the significance, the brooding presence of these great turbocharged Porsche ‘Panzers’ from the early 1970s. The Porsche 917 as an overall family of competition cars has been voted repeatedly – by the readers of an entire library shelf of magazines - the greatest racing car of the 20th Century. Yet amongst that family the most powerful, and the most stupendous to drive – the most astonishing in which to experience the full meaning of Porsche power and torque and controllability – the twin-turbocharged open Spyder 917/10s are perhaps the most affordable…. The appeal of these cars seems to have been tightly focused upon a user market. This is a market for Vintage and Historic racers essentially who want to experience just what it was like to handle these great CanAm and InterSerie racing cars with their amazing dial-more-horsepower turbocharger systems. This is the market which seeks to match the muscular achievements of such contemporary Porsche Panzer commanders as Mark Donohue, George Follmer, Hurley Haywood, Jody Scheckter, Charlie Kemp, Willi Kauhsen and several heroes more. Yet although many of us mere mortals used to hang on the fence at circuits ranging from Mid-Ohio to the Norisring, and Edmonton to Imola, used to tremble to the site and pace and exhaust-muffled fury of these great cars rocketing by, many of the drivers in period would assure the race engineers and mechanics that “It’s all surprisingly controllable in fact – the throttle lag while the turbos wind-up can catch you out at first, but once you get acclimatized to it all you get used to the acceleration and you just get with the programme (Mark Donohue, 1972). If at first the 800-1,100 horsepower of these great cars proves too demanding, a simple turbo boost pressure adjustment can bring matters back within a digestible regime, and so the new owner of such a car can – with experience – find his feet by walking with a 917/10; before it demands that the driver should mentally run like an Olympic sprinter just to keep more or less in touch with it all! The immortal Porsche 917 series of flat-12 cylinder, air-cooled endurance racing cars stands absolutely at the pinnacle of sports car charisma, power and performance. Four tiers of Porsche 917 competition cars were produced by the world-famous German marque – the endurance racing World Championship of Makes short-tailed Coupes, the special-bodied aerodynamic Coupes tailored for Le Mans and its high-speed Mulsanne Straight, the turbocharged 917/10 CanAm and European Interserie Spyder model such as this stupendous example offered here, and the ineffably rare 917/30 ultimate CanAm car campaigned in period only by the works backed Sunoco-Penske team. This car’s original owner/driver, the experienced Porsche privateer Willi Kauhsen campaigned two 917/10s in the European equivalent of ‘anything goes’ Group 7 CanAm racing – the Interserie. For the 1972 season the definitive Porsche 917/10 Spyder model employed argon arc-welded aluminum-tube chassis frames with the bodywork tailored entirely to provide the most efficient combination of low aerodynamic drag and high download. At the Riverside Raceway in California, the 917/10 Spyder of 1972 was clocked at no less than 213mph along the main straight. All customer 917/10s used epoxy body panels bonded to the aluminum spaceframe chassis. Porsche fitted their own brakes using massive aluminum four-pot calipers with extensive stiffening and cooling fins and webs. Cast-iron brake rotors were adopted, no less than 1.1-inches thick, radially cooled by internal vanes and cross-drilled to improve wet-weather performance, cooling and pad life and to save weight. The standard 917/10 Turbo fuel tankage