From CurtCo Media.
I thought people might appreciate hearing the lives of what happened to these individual cars over the last almost 50 years when we finished writing. Because at the end of 1971, all of these cars were obsolete. Some of them were sort of left for dead.
This is Cars That Matter.
This Robert Ross with Cars That Matter. Welcome. And I would like to welcome a very special guest today, Jay Gillotti. Jay is up in Seattle at present, I'm in Los Angeles. And we are having a great conversation over Zoom. Jay, welcome to our program.
Thanks Robert. I'm glad to be here.
Jay, you've got quite a story and I think we've got quite a conversation in store, especially for people who love a very, very special and very important race car. But before we tell everybody what that is, a little something about you. You retired from the big corporate life in 2016. And by my reckoning, you're still a young guy. You've been able to focus on essentially a second
career as an automotive writer. I don't want to shortchange you. You've been actually doing that for a long time, but now you're doing it full time. So I don't know if I should say condolences or congratulations, but I think that's a great transition.
I think it's congratulations. The good news is when I retired from the corporate world, I said that I wasn't really retiring. I just wanted to work on things that I wanted to work on. So that's pretty much what I'm doing.
You certainly are. And of course your name ring a bell with me when I first got this notice to have a podcast with you. Because as a long time Porsche Club of America member, I've seen your name in Panorama. And obviously you've got a lot to say about Porsches. We're here to talk today about a book that you have just published with Dalton
Watson Fine Books. It's a book called Gulf 917. Boy, that one word and that one number, it just pulls at the heartstrings of race fans everywhere. It would not be an understatement to say that this book is really a magisterial achievement. It's damn near two inches thick, about 500 pages and almost as many images. Jay, I wish our listeners could actually hold it in their hands because it's a hugely impressive tome.
Thank you very much.
It obviously culminates a close to 40 year love affair with the Porsche 917.
Actually longer than 40 years, if we really want to get into it. It goes back all the way to the first time I saw Steve McQueen's film, which would have been the first time they showed it on network television in the U. S., which we think was somewhere around 1972 or 1973. So I would have been eight or nine years old, an impressionable age. Obviously it made a pretty deep groove in the psyche.
Enough to make you the acknowledged expert on these cars.
Well, maybe one of the acknowledged experts. There are several out there besides me.
Certainly a modest one at that. For those listeners who may be familiar with the name Gulf and familiar with the Porsche model designation 917, it's a pretty complicated set of historical talking points. Tell us what makes the 917 such an important car.
First of all, it's a car that was designed to win The 24 Hours of Le Mans, which at that time and perhaps still is the most important motor race in the world. Certainly at that time I think globally, it was the most important motor race. And Ferdinand Piech who was head of research and development for Porsche clearly set out to build a car that was capable
of winning overall at Le Mans. Porsche had been many, many class wins at Le Mans in the first 20 years of their existence, but they hadn't won the race overall. So that's what he really set out to do with the 917. And he was successful. Porsche was still a relatively small company in 1969 when they started building the 917, I think
Porsche sold about 14, 000 cars. So you compare that to some of the other manufacturers, and Porsche really was still a small family owned company.
Mercedes was like GM by comparison.
And of course, Porsche has gone on to win Le Mans 19 times in total since then. The second thing on the 917 is as with everything Porsche does is engineering based, and they're always looking for transfer from the race cars to the street cars. So the 917 brought us a lot of experimentation with exotic metals and alloys. It was the first use of vented and cross drilled breaks. It
was the first experiment with ABS, antilock braking system. And of course turbo charging. For the Can- Am 917, that's technology that very quickly made its way to the street cars. And now, if you look at what Porsche is doing today, the majority of all of Porsche's cars, especially the sports cars are turbocharged. The third thing is the 917 has become a car culture icon, in part due
to Steve McQueen and the film as we mentioned. It's a pretty high power association between a very charismatic individual, and I would argue the 917 is a highly charismatic car. In fact, Steve was famous for upstaging his costars, especially early in his career in film. And I would argue if you watch Le Mans, the 917 actually upstages him. The fourth thing on the 917 is just speed. People
love sheer speed. And the 917 set numerous speed records. Now in 1970, Vic Elford was the first person to lap Lamont at 150 mile an hour average speed in the 917. '71, they were pushing something over 240 miles an hour down the Mulsanne Straight. And at Spa in '71, (inaudible) car's average speed was 154 miles an hour for 1, 000 kilometers. And that includes the time the car is
stationary in the pits. And Pedro Rodriguez set the lap record at 162 miles an hour on a public road. That's the fastest sports car race ever run. And I doubt that record will ever be beaten.
Jay, this is an incredible overview of an incredible car. Putting it into context, probably everybody listening to this show has seen the recent film Ford v Ferrari. And of course the Ford GT and the Ferrari 330s of the period were remarkable cars. But they essentially became antiques once the 917 hit the scene. It changed the game for everybody. Didn't it?
The funny thing is the 917 in a way also grew out of the Ford versus Ferrari period, because the FIA theoretically was not only worried about the sheer speed of the GT40s with their seven liter big block American engines. But also, people tend to think that the French maybe weren't too happy about the Americans coming over and winning Le Mans the way they did with a kind of
a crushing display of both money and horsepower. So the FIA changed the rules after Gurney and Foyt won in '67 in the Mark 4 GT, the FIA changed the rules and said for '68, you've got to come down to three liter prototype, which was the same as a formula one motor. But they left the door open to a 'sports car.' A series produced sports car could be
up to five liters. John Wyer and the Gulf team carried on with the GT40 with a small block because the GT40, they had already built more than 50. So it was approved from a homologation point of view and they could continue to race the GT40.
With a 289. Is that right?
Yeah. So the Gulf team went on to win Le Mans again '68 and '69 with their GT40s. And Porsche in '68 of course came out with a three liter prototype, the 908, which they had invested a lot in and thought was going to be very successful. And it was successful.
A lot of drivers like that car.
They are terrific cars. However, at the end of '68, the Gulf team had won the championship for Ford, the manufacturer's championship because Le Mans counted for more points than any of the other races. The Gulf team had used all of three chassis during the season. Whereas Porsche had built somewhere around 40 or more racing cars for their racing effort in '68. So that I think became a concern for ferry Porsche,
just the amount of money that Porsche was spending. On the other hand, Ferdinand Piech, when the FIA changed the rules and said, " Okay, we'll bring it down to 25 cars for group four, five liter homologation." Ferdinand Piech had that light bulb moment and said, " Wait a minute, we're building
all these cars anyway. Why can't we just go ahead and build 25 cars all at once and we'll get homologation approval for a five liter sports racer based on our 908." And that's really how the 917 project got started.
Let's jump off and help me understand, and those listeners who may not have a full taxonomy of 917s under their belt, there are so many of them. What are all the variants? You talk about short tails, and long tails, and spiders, and these evil Can- Am cars. And there's even a 16 cylinder prototype at one time. Let's talk about the Gulf cars because that is what your book is about.
The first 25 cars that were built actually came with two tails. You could have a short tail or a long tail. The tails were detachable, and you could run them either in a short tail or a long tail form. The problem was the car was highly unstable, no matter what tail you put on it at that point.
Those tails obviously weren't a fashion statement. Tell us what they were used for.
The long tail was supposed to be lower drag for high speed circuits. They did use the short tail at Spa, even though Spa is a high speed circuit. But neither tail worked particularly well because the car was so fast. The art of aerodynamics in motor racing at that time was still something of a black art. And they just didn't understand that the cars were going so fast, that they were creating lift at the rear of the
car. The rear wheels were literally trying to take off at speeds up around 200 and beyond. So of course, when your rear wheels lift up off the ground, it's unstable and hard to control. But in '69 Porsche also tried the first open cockpit spider of the 917 for the Can- Am. (inaudible) drove the car in the Can- Am in 69, kind of an experiment. They didn't have the horsepower to really race against the McLarens. But Joe
did pretty well. I think he finished in the top five in all the races he did in '69. For 1970 and '71, you mainly have two variations. You have the short tail, the 917K. And that's the tail that was jointly developed by the Gulf team and Porsche. Porsche also developed a new version of the long tail for 1971 in cooperation
with SERA S-E-R- A, which is the French aerodynamicists. And that car was much more stable and much faster and allowed Vic, as I said, do that 150 mile an hour lap at Le Mans. Then we have the spiders, again, both for Can- Am and inter serie racing in Europe where you didn't need headlights. You didn't need to have a roof. There were sort of Can- Am rules, and there was no minimum weight. So you could cut
the roof off and have a spider. And then for Can- Am in 72, they developed the 917/10, which eventually became the first Porsche to be turbocharged. And from the 917/10, we went to the 917/ 30 in 1973.
That was the big brute. Wasn't it?
Well, the 917/ 30 as raised by Mark Donohue and the Penske team developed. You hear all kinds of numbers and it's hard to really nail down what the numbers were, but certainly something in the region of 1, 200 horsepower or more depending on the boost was available to Mark in the 917/30. Probably the 917/ 10s that everybody else was racing were somewhere close to that in terms of horsepower.
That's big power for the time, especially given the rubber technology, and breaking, and everything else they had to contend with. Turbos were pretty primitive animals back then too.
Verbose were common in old track IndyCar racing and had been for quite a period of time. But to use a turbocharged engine for sports car racing on a road circuit was a whole new different animal to try to make the car controllable and make all that power usable on a circuit where you have to speed up, and slow down, and go around corners, and so on. That was all new territory. Donohue and the Penske team helped
a lot with Porsche and developing that. As we say, the rest is history.
By 1974, we had a 930 turbo 911.
It's amazing how quickly that technology made it to the street. And then Porsche went on to win numerous additional victories at Le Mans with turbo charge 936, 956, 962.
Thanks for that primmer on the 917, a fascinating family tree of remarkable cars. But within that family tree, you have focused on the so- called Gulf cars. Everybody probably knows Gulf Blue. I'm a fan of it. And a true confession. I've got a car, it's called blue because for me it represents probably the most iconic racing team in history. So you've got a book called Gulf 917. We got the Porsche factory, we've got Gulf Oil,
we've got the John Wyer racing. Tell us what it's all about. How did it all come together?
It's actually what I would consider an early experiment in what today we would call outsourcing. Porsche, by most accounts Ferry Porsche thought that Porsche was spending too much money on their racing. Not just
money, but also engineering resources. In a small company, he thought perhaps his engineers were spending too much time actually traveling to the races and conducting the races as opposed to being at their desk and designing the next generation of Porsche street cars as well as racing cars. And then there was a little bit of if you can't
beat them, join them. I mean, Porsche had lost the championship and lost at Le Mans to John Wyer's team in '68. So they came up with this idea to actually outsource the factory, the official factory Porsche racing team to John Wyer with Gulf sponsorship for 1970 and '71. That's how
the Gulf 917 story got its start. Important piece of it was toward the end of 1969, the very first test session that was attended by John Horsman, who was the chief engineer for the Gulf team was a test session at Zeltweg in Austria. And they still couldn't get the 917 to behave on track.
The 69 was a troublesome debut for that car. Is that right?
The driver is were afraid of it. Some of them were anyway. My friend Vic Elford was not afraid of it. He loved it, even though it was a spooky handling. But being a rally driver I think gave him a little different level of confidence with being able to control the car on track, at least at Le Mans, which is
where he almost darn near won Le Mans in 1969. They were 50 miles in the lead when the transmission case cracked. The 917 did win its first race in August of 69 at Zeltweg. But the still wasn't handling in a way that gave the drivers full confidence in what the car was doing. So in October of '69, the first test that was attended by the Gulf team with John
Horsman as the engineer, they basically figured it out. John noticed that the little gnats, the little bugs were collecting on the front of the car, but there was nothing on the tail. There were no little bugs, no little dead bugs. Even though the tail flaps were raised almost full vertical position, there was just nothing. He just said, " There's no air getting on the tail. So there's no
downforce back there." So the Porsche guys let him borrow one of the two coops that was there and they cobbled together using some sheet aluminum, and pop rivets, and tape. They basically created this upward sweeping tale. It was an amazing transformation. Brian Redman was the first guy to drive
it when this cobbled together tail was ready. And I think he was pretty skeptical at first, but they had been trying to fix the car by adjusting the suspension with spring rates and shocks, and nothing was working. And the drivers would only go out for two laps, and then they would come in, they would shake their head.
They would say, " No, it's no better." But when Brian tried the so- called horseman tail the first time, he stayed out for five laps and was going progressively faster, came in the pits, and famously said, " Now it's a racing car."
Entomology in the service of motor sport. And by the way, the resulting cars were some of the most beautiful profiles of any race cars there.
John Horsman gets a lot of good credit for solving the problem. But I think that we also have to remember that it's pretty well accepted that the Porsche engineers that were at the test, at least Helmut Flegl and Peter Falk who were the Porsche engineers at the test. They knew full well what the problem was. Their problem was with their boss because Ferdinand Piech had a mandate that the
cars must be low drag. He wanted it to go fast down the straight. So minimizing drag was it for him. So they didn't quite know how to tell their boss, " We've got to sacrifice on drag to get some downforce so this car will handle," but they were conveniently then able to blame it on John Horsman and the Gulf team. And they could go to their boss and say, "
Look, the car is four seconds a lap faster." And when you think as Brian would say, when you think how you struggle for a 10th or two.
That's an eternity, that's a lifetime.
And then when they put it on Firestone tires, five seconds faster. Porsche had to do the engineering of actually creating the new rear body work based on the experiment that Horsman had done. And that allowed for a bunch of other changes to the car that we're now so
familiar with. All the exhaust could exit out the back of the car, the ray's tail allowed for the transmission theoretically to stay cooler because there was more air circulation back there then in the original car. So they had to figure all that out. And they only had about four weeks to create the new body shape. Oh by the way, at the same time, they were also working on a
new shape for the nose. So it was a combination also of the new shape of the nose with the Horsman tail. And they only had about four weeks before they had to go to Daytona for the super secret test in November of '69. And that is something I cover in the book because it's an interesting test because no photographs exist. It was so secret. And in the book, I actually commissioned a couple of paintings that are kind
of like what if paintings. What if there were photographs? What might it have looked like at that test? But that test proved that the cars were ready to race in this new configuration in '71. The rest is history, as they say.
Your book really is an exercise in obsessive detail. And that's a good thing by the way. One of the reasons that it's so again, I use the word magisterial, is that it doesn't leave any stone unturned. And it provides a VIN by VIN analysis of every single Gulf 917. And there are 14 chassis and you talk about all of them.
Going into it, there was a thought in the back of my mind of why do we need another book about the 917? The 917 has been written about a lot. More books have been published about the 917 than any other Porsche racing car. I think I counted something over 20 books that have been written in the last 40 plus years of course, about the 917. But I thought it
would be nice to tell the story. The story hadn't fully been told from the English side, from the Gulf team's perspective.
Wyer was British and all of this work was German car with German engineers and British development people. And of course, international team of drivers.
There certainly were politics because not everyone at Porsche necessarily thought this was the greatest idea to outsource their factory cars to the Englanders. The thought is that not everybody necessarily went along with this. And Ferdinand Piech did a few
things perhaps to hedge his bets. His mother Louise Piech owned Porsche Salzburg, which is the Austrian arm of the Porsche business that was the importer for Volkswagen and Porsche in Austria. So in that Daytona in 1970, the Gulf team shows up with their two cars, and all of a sudden there's a third 917 there that they weren't expecting. And it's entered by Porsche Salzburg. Fer Piech is there with Porsche
factory mechanics. He's got theoretically two Porsche factory drivers, including Vic Elford. So there was some question about internal competition there, but the Gulf team did very well in that first race and Rodriguez and (inaudible) won with some help from Brian Redman won the race by 45 laps.
It was a pretty crushing display, not only by the 917 itself finishing first and second, but also the Gulf team conducted the race in the way that Porsche was hoping they would. And that's really I think what Porsche was betting on was the conduct of the racing program would be very effective under John Wyer's leadership and with Gulf Oil from the United States helping with paying the bills.
Was it just by accident that Gulf was brought in, and not Shell, or Union, or somebody else?
Chapter three in my book is a chapter called Gulf versus Porsche. And it talks not only about the period of time where Gulf was racing against Porsche, but it also talks a little bit about how the relationship got started between John Wyer and Grady Davis, who was the executive vice president of Gulf Oil. Grady bought a GT40 for himself that he thought he might race. That really
started the relationship between Grady Davis and John Wyer. Grady Davis apparently consulted with John Wyer about how Gulf could best deploy its marketing dollars relative to motor sport. Most of the other oil companies were spreading their dollars out very widely with signage at the race tracks and putting
one small decal on everybody's car. John Wyer, very cajole I think said, " If you would just sponsor one car in your colors, you would get much better exposure than the other fuel companies like Elf and Shell." And Wyer may have been a little bit self serving in that advice. But as it turned out, the combination of Gulf and John Wyer was pretty successful right out of the gate in 1967, which
was their first season. They did pretty well. There's an interesting story about the colors because initially Grady Davis, they raised his GT40 at Daytona and Sebring in '67. And he had it painted in the more traditional dark metallic blue with the orange, which was more of the official Gulf corporate colors. But all the guys thought that color combination was a bit on the dull side. So they went
looking for something that would pop a little more. So they came across the light blue with the Marigold, which is the official name of the orange. And people just instantly took a liking to it. And the livery developed a little bit during the '67 season, but it carried
on for a number of years. There's a whole color science to the light blue and orange, and why they work together, and they're opposite each other on the color wheel.
Complementary colors. Yeah?
And again, the Steve McQueen movie, the great question is if he hadn't made the movie when he made it, would we even be here talking about the Gulf cars? I don't know. I can't answer that question, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
You're talking about chief engineer John Horsman for the Wyer racing, he was instrumental in informing your book, is that correct?
Yes. And we lost John this year, unfortunately. But I'm so glad that I met him and had a little bit of a relationship with him enough to consult with him. We got him to allow us to scan all of his period documents that he still had from that period. Many of those documents we present in the book. The
race data sheets are particularly interesting I think. What John would do is when he came back from each race, his handwritten notes would be typed up by his secretary in a standard format that they had started using with the GT40s. For each car at each race, there is this two page onion skin like document. They were taped together and they're in a loose- leaf notebook that John
had for all these years. And Halloween of 2017 actually is when I'll never forget spending a couple of days with John going through the first draft of the book and all my questions. And then we went and scanned all those documents very carefully untaping them, taking them out of the notebook, and then scanning them and putting everything very
carefully back into the notebook. But it's great to share all that information, especially for people who really want to geek out on gear ratios, suspension settings. He makes note of the weather.
That's fascinating. I love it. We're going to take a short break, but we'll be right back.
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We're back with Jay Gillotti. Jay, of the interesting things about your book is that you obviously give a lot of pages to the drivers. I know that a few of these guys have become friends. Talk about some of those stars that were actually driving these cars.
One of the perspectives I took on this book is that people might not necessarily know a whole lot about this period of history. Maybe they've seen the movie so they're interested in the cars, but they don't maybe know the history in great depth. Maybe they don't know a
whole lot about the drivers themselves. That's why I also include a very brief introductory chapter on the early history of Porsche, because people might not be Porsche aficionados, but they might think the cars are pretty cool. And that way they can learn a little bit about where Porsche
came in its first 20 years. But the drivers who are still with us, many of whom have become friends of mine and helped a lot with the book would be Brian Redman, Vic Elford, and Derek Bell. But we have a sidebar for each of the important drivers that did
multiple races with the Gulf team. So that includes also the great Jo Siffert and the great Pedro Rodriguez who were the number one drivers and who were two of the top drivers of that era, both in sports cars and Formula 1. Both very charismatic individuals. There was a tremendous rivalry, at least on the track between Siffert and Rodriguez. They famously hit each other at the start of the
race at Spa in 1970. There's quite a bit of video of that. So it was pretty intense rivalry. They both thought they were the best driver and were out to prove it. And they were both very successful. Pedro Rodriguez was a little more successful in the Gulf cars as it turned out, but they made for an exciting pair. I don't know how John Wyer, he tried to
manage them, but I'm not sure he was tremendously successful. And I think once they got out on the track, they kind of did their own thing.
They were unmanageable at that point.
Pedro Rodriguez, by most accounts, he was the more calculating driver. He was the more naturally strategic driver who would wait and look for his opportunity, not overstress the car. Because remember this is endurance racing we're talking about, we're not talking about sprint racing. Siffert was more of the charger as Brian Redman would say. So Siffert pretty much only knew one way to go. And that was as fast as
possible. And that unfortunately cost them the race at Le Mans in 1970, which turned out to be Porsche's first win at Le Mans. Really should have gone to the Gulf team of Siffert and Redmond. But didn't because Siffert missed a gear and blew the engine, which was the 917's Achilles heel. Like all great heroes, our 917s have an Achilles heel
that you have to watch out for. And unfortunately that cost Siffert and Redmond the race in '70.
That engine was obviously a layout that had not been explored by Porsche until that time. So Mezger designed essentially a flat 12. Is that right? I mean, that was quite a complicated power plant.
I'm glad you brought that up because we need to give great credit to Hans Mezger who was Porsche's engine genius for many, many years and participated in or designed many of Porsche's great engine. The 917 certainly one of those, when you think about it. The layout is similar to a flat eight 908, what with four more cylinders.
The main difference is the power takeoff is from the center of the crank through a system of gears that goes down to a prop shaft basically. And that was done to minimize vibration. So they used a lot of the dimensions and even some of the exact dimensions of the 908 engine, but just made it four cylinders bigger,
took the power off the center of the crank. The most amazing thing to me about it is they ordered the parts for all 25 engines without ever building a prototype.
Talk about a leap of faith and some confidence in their own engineering.
And it worked. First time on the Dino, it made something like 540 horsepower, more horsepower than any previous Porsche engine and was the first Porsche engine to make more horsepower than its weight. And then pretty soon with the little development and tuning, they got it up to something like 580 horsepower from the four and a half liter version
that they race in '69. One other thing that's fun about that engine is unlike many of our other Porsche flat engines, or flat six 911s, the 917 is not a boxer. The opposing cylinders do not box. They move in the same direction. So that's why we argue about this endlessly, but most of us refer to it as 180 degree V12 because the opposing cylinders move in the
same direction. That's a fun argument in the Facebook group that we have.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Well, the primary group on Facebook is called 917 The Legend, and I've been participating in it now for, I think almost 10 years. And it's grown to an amazing number of members. It's up to 15,600 members, which is to me mind boggling. But it shows the tremendous enthusiasm that's out there around the world, literally around the world
for the 917. The two GTO groups combined I think have about 6, 000 members, and we're sitting at 15, 600 for 917 the legend. So that's pretty cool. And the other really cool thing about the group is we are still to this day turning up photos that have never been seen before.
Isn't that great?
These amazing old photos, many of them are just snapshots or whatever that have been digitized and show up in the group. And we have some really lively column discussions.
I'll bet you have some characters. There's always a few.
We have some unresolved chassis renumbering issues with a few of the 917s. So that becomes a very lively discussion occasionally. It's fun though. We try to keep it fun and friendly.
Boy, it really is fun to get into the weeds. And again, I mean your book does that in a fascinating way. Just being able to read the history of every one of those 14 chassis.
They've all had interesting lives. It's so interesting to me. I thought people might appreciate hearing the lives of what happened to these individual cars over the last almost 50 years when we finished writing. Because at the end of 1971, all of these cars were obsolete. Some of them were sort of left for dead.
These things weren't just old used cars once their racing careers were over. And I guess one of their drivers was able to actually acquire one. Jo Siffert got a 917. And that 917 of course resurfaced after a long spell in a barn. And it came to auction.
That's chassis 24. A lot of us refer to it as 24-2 because it's really the second car to carry the chassis number 024. But it was sold to Siffert and he leased it to Solar Productions for the filming of the Le Mans movie.
That's the star car of the movie.
Well, it's one of them because the other one is chassis 22, which was actually owned by Solar and is mainly driven by Steve McQueen in the stage sequences that were filmed for the movie. So the two cars are both stars. Siffert's car then, the sad moment came when it appeared in his funeral in 1971. Siffert and Rodriguez were
both killed in 1971. That's the sad part of my story is both of my number one drivers didn't survive. Siffert was killed in a Formula 1 accident and Rodriguez was killed in a Ferrari, in a sports car race.
It was a dangerous job back then, those guys were daredevils.
Siffert's car appeared in the funeral procession. 50, 000 people in Fribourg, Switzerland turned out for his funeral and they had the big black piece of cloth across the car, but then the car was sold and it was gone. It was lost for the better part of 25 years. It was stored in a barn near Paris, I think in France.
And then eventually it was discovered and restored. And then that's the car that sold at the Gooding auction a few years ago.
2017. I was all over that thing. And of course the closest I'll ever get to owning one is a 32nd scale model, but it was a remarkable thing to see. And of course the big secret is that it was in The Brumos Collection, and it's on display there now.
It's definitely a piece of history. It never actually raced.
Probably why it's still in one piece.
Yeah. Yeah. And again, all he did individual chassis have led rather interesting lives since the end of 1971. Several of them were actually had their roofs cut off and they were converted to spiders for inter serie racing in Europe. They've all now been restored back to coupes because they're more valuable that way. Some people are not happy about that part of it, but they're all back in Gulf colors now and
restored to coupe form. Nobody was ever thinking 50 years ahead of how are the historians going to know what we did with these cars? They had no way of knowing how valuable they were going to be.
Your book does serve to bring things up to the current state and will be regarded as a reference tool going forward to actually support the provenance of each one of these important automobiles. And not to put too fine a point on it, these were important automobiles because the Siffert car that sold at Gooding in 2017 sold for $ 14
million. That's not chump change. And clearly I think it indicates the significance of these cars not just to a coterie of collectors who could afford them, but in the whole fabric of Motorsport. That's a rare race car that achieves that kind of valuation.
They're not the rarest of Porsche racing cars because Porsche did build quite a number of them. But because of their appeal, I don't think I'm out on too much of a limb to say that the best of the 917s are the most valuable of any Porsches in the world. We don't know exactly how valuable the best of the best are because they don't sell publicly. So we
don't know exactly how much they're worth. A few of them that have really super race histories have been in the same hands for a long, long time. So we don't really have an idea of how they would compare with say Ferrari GTO money or whatever. But they're up there for sure. I don't particularly love the word icon. But if there's a good use of the word icon, I think our Gulf 917s are right there.
No argument at all. Well, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
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Welcome back to Cars That Matter. Let's talk about the book itself as a want to be writer. I think I understand what it would take if I could become a good writer. And clearly I've seen that in your book. Is it a fair question to ask how long it takes to actually complete a book? Can you take us through that process?
I'm not sure if my answer is representative of most books in the automotive space. It might be. In my case, you could argue it's a 40 year process because I started collecting the information when I was in high school or certainly in college. When I was a freshman in college, I bought my copy of John Wyer's book called The Certain Sound. So that's way back in 1982. The book had come out I think in 1981.
I'll bet you still have it.
Yeah, I still have it. And now I'm glad I have it because if you go on eBay, you're looking at 350 bucks for a copy of that particular book. It's funny, the cars have gone up in value, but even some of the things like books and posters have gone up tremendously in
value as well. But in the early 1990s, I had a little bit of an epiphany where you have certain car guys who can just quote you facts and figures and just, they can carry all the information in their head about every Porsche ever built, or every BMW, or every Ferrari or whatever. And I just realized I wasn't going to be that guy. So I said, well what
can I do? Maybe I can focus on one car and really try to develop my expertise in one particular car. And I said well, the 917 is my favorite. So I'll concentrate on that. Since the early '90s, I really tried to collect every shred of information that I could find. From a writing perspective, I did a fair
amount of writing in the corporate world. When I joined the Porsche Club in 2009, I started writing for our region newsletter here in the Pacific Northwest region called The Spiel. And I did over 40 feature articles for The Spiel before I sat down to do the book. So I'd had quite a bit of practice with that kind
of writing. So when I actually did sit down to write the book on January 3rd of 2017, I had a lot of information and a lot of experience going for me. So I think the writing of the first draft and then completing the book actually went pretty fast just because of all the prep work. I know there are other projects in the automotive book space that go faster.
And I know there are a lot that take much, much longer than what we took on this book.
It sounds like you were able to take many, many decades of experience and study and all of a sudden bring it to life within a pretty short period of time.
The other advantage was I had a vision in my head. My other hobby is music recorded, a number of albums of my original songs that I've written. When you go to make an album, you sort of have to have an idea of what you want the finished product to be. And with the book, it was very much the same thing. I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted the finished product to be. I knew
the structure. I knew I wanted it to be chassis by chassis, race by race. So it was already pretty well organized in my head. And it was just a matter of then pulling all the information together into some kind of a sensible narrative. And I also knew that I wanted to try to thread needle between being a reference book and a story book. In the world of car
books, some books are really, really great reference books. And the authors are really concerned about getting all the information in there for posterity.
But boy, they can be as dry as a piece of Melba toast. I mean, you need something to wash it down.
Exactly. And then there are a great story books that are written about cars and automotive history, that you can't really necessarily use as reference books at all. So I tried to go down the middle between those two and produce something with a lot of good reference material. Some of which had not been seen before, had not been published before. But I was hoping people would actually read the
book. So I tried to also make it readable the way it flows from one car to the next and within a certain chapter, how it goes from one race to the next. My advice to people who buy the book is don't read more than one chapter at a time, because there's a lot of information there. And if you want to just read one race at a time for that particular car, that's not a bad way to do it either.
Can you tell us a couple of discoveries you made as you were writing the book? Was there some stone you turned over and all of a sudden oh my gosh, look at what's under this.
Yeah, there were a few. I didn't think that I was necessarily the greatest networker in the world, but I had some success networking amongst the owners, and their representatives, and previous owners of the car. Another person that we lost this year unfortunately, is a guy by the name of (John Thomas) , who was a great friend and co-
driver, and wing man for Otis Chandler. And Otis Chandler of course, was the owner of the Los Angeles Times and owned one of my cars, the chassis 17- 004. He owned it for many years, but he couldn't really fit in it because he was too tall.
He was a big guy, yeah.
His friend and his car guy adopted brother John Thomas is the guy who really drove it most often when they would either go vintage racing or just go play with the cars for fun. And John was very enthusiastic about the book. He loved that car, and he would just go on and on about how much he loved it, how much he loved driving it. That particular car has an unusual tail, unusual looking tail with unusual rear
wheel arches. In our Facebook group, we had been speculating for years and years, trying to figure out where did this tale come from? Why does it look so strange, etc., etc. I managed to solve that one by talking with John Thomas directly because he had really been in charge of looking after the car for all those years that Otis owned it. So we were able to explain that one. Another one is the two cars that were
purchased by Gerry Sutterfield directly from Porsche in 1975. One of which is the car that ended up with Otis Chandler, but the other one is chassis 16. That particular car, there was a little mystery around how much work had Porsche done on those cars before they were sold.
And so actually having the honor of being allowed to use Gerry Sutterfield's photo of the two cars when they first came from Porsche really solved all those mysteries about the fact that Porsche essentially did nothing to them cosmetically. Porsche just got them rebuilt mechanically and got them running.
But cosmetically, they still had their 1971 paint jobs. Chassis 16 still had the orange roof paint scheme on it from 1971 at Watkins Glen, where it had that livery. And of course in the case of the car that went to Otis Chandler, where you can see that it did not have those strange rear wheel arches that later appear and still up here on the car. So that
kind of stuff was really fun. I liked the detective work, even though there wasn't that much detective work to do because these cars are so well known. There wasn't too much in the way of mystery to uncover or sort out, but we uncovered and sorted out a few of them.
The cars themselves would have been a whole heck of a lot more well known if we'd all been able to go to Pebble Beach this year, because I know that there was a special class. And you're instrumental in organizing that. The good news is that it's going to happen next year in 2021. Can you tell us about what was planned at the Concours d'Elegance at Pebble Beach?
I wouldn't say that I was instrumental. I was one person who did a little bit of lobbying and suggesting gently that maybe this would be a great year to celebrate the 917 at Pebble Beach because it's the 50th anniversary of Porsche winning Le Mans for the first time. And I thought it would be appropriate for Pebble Beach
to celebrate that kind of a milestone. And there's never been a class for the 917s at Pebble Beach before.
So I was one of the people kind of doing a little bit of gentle suggesting and was very nice of the folks at Pebble Beach to invite me to be a part of the subcommittee along with (Ken Gross) and (Paul Haggemann) to just sort of advise the selection committee in the background about the history of the different cars and which cars might be worth going the extra mile to try to invite to be in the class.
Certainly if it had happened this year, I think it would have been a very, very good display, very representative display on the history of the cars. And hopefully knock wood if we can all be out there next August, it'll still be a good. And who knows, maybe it'll be even a slightly better display. It's always a chance that one or two cars that weren't available this year
might be available next year. We'll just have to wait and see. But the 917 is a car that matters, and Pebble Beach is the greatest car show. So actually when I was talking to Derek Bell for my book, I had this crazy idea about bringing the 917s to Pebble Beach. And I asked Derek about it because he's been involved with Pebble Beach a lot over the years. And Derek sort of said, well, of course, we have
to have the greatest sports car at Pebble Beach. I mean for him, it was like it's a no brainer. So I was happy about that.
Well, there is much look forward to. And that'll be a great opportunity to celebrate the 917 and your book as well.
We should mention that the other things that were planned for Pebble Beach this year are pretty mind boggling. So assuming it all comes together with a lot of the same content for next year, it should be amazing event.
It always is an amazing event. But when you talk about gathering previous best of show winners and featuring (inaudible) , those kinds of things will be I think equally great, even though I'll probably be hovering over my 917s very closely.
I'll make sure to spend some serious time with you there. And maybe we'll have a follow up to this conversation. Jay, thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you.
Thanks to Jay Gillotti, the author of the book Gulf 917 for joining us today on Cars That Matter. Come back next time as we continue to talk about the passions that drive us and the passions we drive. This episode of Cars That Matter was hosted by Robert Ross, produced by Chris Border, edited by Chris Porter. Sound engineering by Michael Kennedy. Theme song by Celeste and Eric Dick. Additional music and
sound by Chris Porter. Please like, subscribe, and share this podcast. I'm Robert Ross. And thanks for listening.
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