Few historic racing cars are as immediately identifiable as the Porsche 917. Stuttgart’s twelve-cylinder monster and the cars it spawned took the German marque to some of the most famous podiums in the world, and it gave the company the overall Le Mans win it had long wanted. The most iconic 917 is perhaps the short-tail 917K, the model that John Wyer’s team ran in Gulf sponsorship and the car that Steve McQueen drove in the movie Le Mans.
917s are famously wispy, ethereal things, machines built with a diabolical focus on endurance-racing speed. The car’s aluminum-tube space-frame chassis weighs less than 100 pounds. Its engine contains titanium and magnesium, and its shift knob is made of balsa wood. (Balsa!) The fiberglass bodywork is so thin you get the feeling you could stare a hole in it if you looked at it hard enough. But the 917 wasn’t alone in its focus. By the time the car hit the world stage in the late 1960s, Porsche had almost two decades of experience building lightweight competition vehicles. One of the company’s traditional speed touches lived in the car’s cockpit—Porsche took one of the few things the 917 had in common with street machinery and modified it for racing in a charming, clever way.
What was this component? (Hint: A drill was used.)
Answer: the ignition key. The 917, like many Porsche sports-racers before it, featured a drilled ignition key. You read that right: The head of the ignition key featured a series of holes drilled in it for lightness. You can just barely see it in the cockpit shown here; the key is sitting in the dash to the left of the steering column. (We weren’t able to get a clear shot of the keys in the 917s at Rennsport, but they looked something like this.)
Random Observation: In the past twenty minutes, I’ve seen four 917s. Earlier in the day, all four of them were sliding and slithering around Laguna’s dusty curves. When I die, I want it to be to the noise they make. Lordy.
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