by Mike –
This special Porsche race car was on display at the Porsche Concours D’Elegance In Monterey on June 16, 2014.
Text provided by the owner, Bruce Canepa,
The 917 was designed by chief engineer Hans Mezger under the leadership of Ferdinand Piech. The car was built around a very light spaceframe chassis (42 kg, 93 lbs) which was permanently pressurized with gas to detect cracks in the welded structure.
Power came from a new 4.5-liter air-cooled engine designed by Hans Mezger. The Type 912 engine featured a 180 degree flat-12 cylinder layout, twin overhead camshafts driven from centrally mounted gears and twin spark plugs fed from two distributors.
The large horizontally mounted cooling fan was also driven from centrally mounted gears. The longitudinally mounted gearbox was designed to take a set of four or five gears.
By the end of 1970 Porsche had stamped their authority on endurance racing by convincingly dominating the championship that year. Of 10 races in the championship (plus some other non-championship events) the works teams (John Wyer Automotive and Porsche Salzburg) had won every race except Sebring.
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