Porsche’s 917 is legendary. It produced Porsche’s first win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1970 and repeated the effort in 1971. At least 11 variants were produced and raced in all manner of racing series including the World Sportscar Championship and Can-Am. Nowadays, the 37 road going examples are highly sought after collectors pieces. One owner has managed to road legalise an example!
This isn’t the first time a high performance race car has been given road plates. We’ve seen numerous McLaren F1 GTR’s receive the treatment as well as a version of both the Maserati MC12 Corsa and the Ferrari FXX. This is by far the most iconic though, could you imagine spotting it on your local high street?
It’s not the first time we’ve written about a road legal 917 though. In period, an example was created by carpenter Joachim Grossman was cobbled together from a spare chassis and body shell for use on the street. This latest version is all the more authentic, owned by Claudio Roddaro, it is chassis 917-037.
It retains the original 4.9-litre air-cooled flat-twelve engine and is good around 600 bhp spine tingling horsepower. In a shell that weighs just 600 kg, it delivers a serious 1,000 bhp per tonne on a 50 year old chassis!
