Daily Slideshow: 5 Things You Never Knew About the 917
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Engine Assembly Time
If you’ve ever built a VW engine or a motor for your vintage 911 you may be familiar with the term “book time.” This is the time a shop manual or set of instructions typically says it will take you to finish a job. Each flat-12 engine would typically take 160 hours to assemble to completion. This is a massive amount of time that saw painstaking attention to detail!
Cost to Build
Journalists talk endlessly about how much these cars sell for now, but how much did they actually cost to make? What is a 917 actually worth? According to sources at the time inside Porsche —mainly driver Brian Redman— the cars were allegedly in the ballpark of $80,000 to complete. Adjusted for inflation this amount comes out to approximately $345,000 in 2018. It’s surprisingly cheap when you think about the millions of dollars Porsche spends today developing just one part of its LMP1 cars.
Brakes Were Not Stable
According to drivers who raced the 917, the brakes would cause the car to become unstable when used heavily. It was quite the opposite characteristic than most people think of when Porsche Le Mans car. Brian Redman would go on to say when he owned and raced a 917 that he thinks the brake pads lasted longer because drivers were simply scared to use them heavily. Who would have known?
It Killed Can-Am
Younger readers might not know about the Can-Am series. Essentially a no holds barred series that allowed the 917/30 to produce 1,500 horsepower the series would eventually be disbanded. This came about when the FIA changed fuel regulations that blackballed the 917 from the competition. At a weight of 1,800lbs, the car was an absolute animal that would become too fast for the sanctioning bodies to handle.
Road Legal
In certain parts of the world, it is actually legal to register a 917 for use on public roads And, one gentleman in Monte Carlo recently did just that. Based on a precedent that had been set in 1975 by one of the owners of the famed Martini & Rossi company a man decades later would replicate the process required.