Joe L and His 1970 Porsche 917 Creations: The Real Story

The pivotal year for the Porsche 917 was unquestionably 1970. Brian Redman in 1969 found the new developmental car to be unstable at speed, requiring all of the road to keep it competitive, and in fact most drivers preferred the 908 from which it was derived. Rule changes by the CSI arm of the FIA allowed for building only twenty-five prototypes in the five liter class.

Porsche jumped at the chance to manufacture less cars for homologation, with the goal of course to take LeMans from John Wyer and the Ford GT40. On April 20th, Ferdinand Piech displayed their twenty-five 917's in front of the Porsche factory for the CSI inspectors and offered them the opportunity to drive any of the cars, which they declined.

In early 1970 Porsche contracted with the JWA Gulf Team of John Weyer in England to further develop the car for competition. Weyer's engineer John Horsmann shortened the tail and the car became immediately more stable. However, Porsche was also supporting directly two other teams for the LeMans race-Porsche Salzburg and Martini Racing, and also had hired as an external consultant Robert Choulet who developed yet another long tail and low drag design which was far more driveable at speed than the initial 1969 version.The Gulf team entered three of the shortened tail 917K's at LeMans- two with the larger 4.9 liter engines and one with the 4.5 liter engine. Two of the long-tailed Porsche 917LH's were entered as well with one fielded by Porsche Salzburg and the second by Martini Racing. The Porsche Salzburg car, carefully driven by Hans Herrmann and Richard Attwood in the pouring rain would eventually win the race. However, this car was numbered 23 and not the 32 car built by Joe L. The JWA Gulf Porsche 917K, driven by Pedro Rodriguez and Leo Kinnunen as the number 21 car would not finish the race. The interesting parallel is found in the movie LEMANS, in which the hero Michael Delaney is found driving the number 21 car in the closing moments to second place.

In July of 1970, Porsche-Audi USA would enter a blue version of the Salzburg livery at the Watkins Glenn Can-Am race driven by Vic Elford. This car would finish a creditable fourth place behind the winning McLaren M8D of Denny Hulme. Pictured is the car passing Oscar Koveleski's Auto World McLaren M8B which placed twelfth in the race. So now you know some of the background to Joe L's amazing racers. Models from real life. God Bless! Tony mgbbrown