Vintage racecars are always a fan favourite in the motorsport community because of their sound, beauty and history full of legendary races.
From Group C to Touring racecars, from endurance racing to Formula 2, in the historic racing panorama there is an incredible spectrum of engineering masterpieces and in Peter Auto’s events you can see this classic racecars in their natural environment, the racetrack….
….like the Porsche 917, that gave Porsche its first overall wins at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1970 and 1971. The car was designed by chief engineer Hans Mezger under the leadership of Ferdinand Piëch and Helmuth Bott. The car was built around a very light spaceframe chassis (42 kg (93 lb)) which was permanently pressurised with gas to detect cracks in the welded structure. Power came from a new 4.5-litre air-cooled engine designed by Mezger, which was a combination of 2 of Porsche’s 2.25L flat-6 engines used in previous racing cars. 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. To keep the car compact despite the large engine, the driving position was so far forward that the feet of the driver were beyond the front wheel axle. The car had remarkable technology. It was Porsche’s first 12-cylinder engine and used many components made of titanium, magnesium and exotic alloys that had been developed for lightweight “Bergspider” hill climb racers.