This fiberglass Porsche 917K-style front end was reportedly made from one of the original factory molds, it’s finished in the iconic blue and orange Gulf Racing livery, it has functional lights, and it’s designed to be mounted as wall art.
The Porsche 917 was developed by the German automaker as a sports prototype race car to take over from the earlier Porsche 907. The 917 would become one of the most dominant race cars of its kind in the early 1970s, perhaps the most dominant outright, and today it’s widely considered one of the most important race cars of the 20th century.
A 1:1 scale Porsche 917K-style front end may not be everyones’ preference for wall art, but for petrolheads it outranks the Mona Lisa.
The Porsche 917 was famously developed in just 7 months, it had been given the green light by Porsche who saw the car as their ticket to winning one of the most important prizes in the world of motorsport – victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The 917 was based around a lightweight spaceframe chassis, so light that it actually only weighed 42 kgs or 93 lbs. It was developed by an engineering team led by Helmuth Bott, and unusually, the chassis tubes were pressurized with gas to assist with rapidly detecting cracks.
The engine was initially a 4.5 liter flat-12 with double overhead cams per bank producing 588 bhp. It would soon see its displacement and power output grow, there would be 11 major iterations of the Porsche 917 and it would even be modified to race (with great success) in the Can Am series.
The Porsche 917K was developed for shorter road courses, it had a shorter cropped tail but offered excellent downforce, and it would famously win the 1970 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The 917-style front end you see here is full scale, measuring in at approximately 71″ wide, 68″ deep, and 19″ tall. As noted further up it’s said to have been taken as a mold right off the factory molds, so this is about as close to authentic as it’s possible to get without using real 917K parts.
Above Video: This is original coverage of the 1970 24 Hours of Le Mans in condensed form. It’s commentated in French but you can turn on English subtitles using the CC (closed captions) option on YouTube.
The piece has Lucas headlights with both white and yellow LED bulbs, Perspex headlight covers, and of course, a Porsche decal. The fiberglass is finished with blue and orange Spies Hecker paint with a number 20 roundel, ,matching the one that won at Le Mans in 1970.
It weighs in at 40 lbs and it has a white metal frame, which is designed to allow it to be securely hung on a wall as a display piece. It’s now being offered for sale out of Ventura, California on Bring a Trailer and you can visit the listing here if you’d like to read more about it or register to bid.
Images courtesy of Bring a Trailer
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
