Back in May, 1972, I believe I really upset Roger Penske.
This certainly had not been intentional. It was just happenstance that caused the whole thing. The British Porsche importer at that time was AFN Limited, the former manufacturer of Frazer Nash sports cars based in Isleworth, West London, right under the approach flightpath to Heathrow Airport.
The initials ‘AFN’ indicated ‘Aldington Frazer Nash’, and H.J. Aldington and his brothers had headed the company since rescuing it in 1929. John Aldington – H.J.’s similarly capable and impressive son, a real chip off the old block – was in charge into the 1970s. One day he had telephoned and asked if I would like to join a small group of journalists he was taking to visit Porsche’s then-new R&D centre at Weissach in Germany.
I jumped at the chance and on the appointed day in mid-May we flew in to Stuttgart and de-planed onto a bus which took us first – as best I can recall - to the Zuffenhausen factory. We had a quick look round the production lines there before scrambling back onto the bus and heading out to Weissach.
Almost our first sight there was of a kind of open-ended barn in which a Porsche 914 was bolted down onto a test rig, with its driven rear wheels on rollers and a complicated electro-mechanical piece of automatism in the driver’s seat, a maze of pistons and levers and linkages playing the pedals and yanking the gearshift up and down through the ratios. It was explained to us that this was a 24/7 100,000 kilometres-plus endurance test in progress...and the little ugly duckling of a car sat there revving away, up and down through its pre-determined gearshift cycle…and we moved on.
“Achtung! Ein souzand horzpahr…”.
We viewed the Weissach buildings, test houses and laboratories, all predictably as squeaky-clean as a surgeon’s operating theatre. We saw test engines being hand-assembled and painstakingly prepared. We saw others being stripped-down post-test, sample parts and by-products being carefully selected and taken away into the laboratories for inspection and analysis. It was all most impressive, but nothing more than any of us in that small group – about 15 of us – would have expected of Porsche in that period…
But then John Aldington turned to us, with the smiling and genial racing director Dr Helmuth Bott by his side, and said “Now come into the dyno house and take a look at this…”. And we crammed into the control room of one particular dyno cell and through the wired torpedo-proof glass window into the cell itself we could see one of the flat-12 air-cooled Porsche 917 engines to which we had become so accustomed over the preceding 2½-years. But this was a 917 flat-12 engine with a difference. Instead of open induction trumpets parading along the top of the unit, there were closed inlet manifolds, and hung on each serpentine exhaust group, projecting out the back, were two big snail-shaped Eberspacher turbochargers…
Ooh – this was something we had not expected. Nobody had given us any clue that this was what we were about to see. The engine was grumbling to itself at a borderline-juddery tickover, around 1500rpm.
Dr Bott waved his hand at the dyno operator seated at his control console and a brawny Swabian arm reached for the throttle lever. The cell operator drew it gently back and the engine on its cradle in the safety-glazed cell seemed to quiver, quite cheerfully and with total unconcern, while the indicator needle on the dyno load gauge – a huge dial about two feet or more in diameter – slammed round its sweep like a weighing machine’s needle with me jumping on the pad.
Whereupon the dyno operator turned to we eager British journos gathered attentively around his chair and announced flatly “Achtung! Ein souzand horzpahr…”.
And so it was, Dr Bott assured us – that indicated dyno load converted to 1,000 horsepower, no less.
In truth the most astonishing part of this entire performance was the completely undramatic efficiency of it all. Looking into that dyno cell – apart from the high revs and the unmistakable muscular din – 1,000 horsepower looked little more impressive than had the 1500rpm tickover. But the ramifications of what we were being told was what really counted. Our jaws dropped.
Our little party’s effective senior officer, Denis Jenkinson – the famous ‘Jenks’ of ‘Motor Sport’ magazine – immediately piped up to his old friend John Aldington, asking to be allowed into the dyno cell so he could experience 1,000 horsepower up close and personal. Quite a bit of excited German ensued, with much ticking and clucking, shaking heads and Porsche personnel shooting worried glances at one another. One could read the vibes – more or less, “Who on earth is this bearded little loony?”.
Well, Jenks didn’t get his eintrittskarte to the dyno cell, but we ended up doing something rather more fun for most of us, as we went out onto the pits and garage area of the Weissach track instead, to find the works’ famous ‘red fire engine’ 917 awaiting us, complete with veteran test driver Mimmler – and we were offered a rousing ride.
So we each took it in turns to insinuate ourselves into the 917’s almost impossibly slender passenger seat, buckled ourselves into the seat harness and enjoyed a couple of high speed laps around the sinuous and humpy, bumpy circuit with Mimmler doing his best to dislodge our breakfasts. Like all seasoned factory test drivers he was impressively quick and neat, loading up the car laterally so much I recall groaning against the seat belt pressure as we leaped over one brow, landed with a suspension-bottoming thump, then Mimmler kicked the brakes – hard – before slamming hard right (or left, I don’t recall which) into a previously unseen harsh turn. I must admit it was fabulously exciting, and I’d really have loved another go.
Unlike perhaps the most earnest member of our party, from one of the specialist weekly British magazines, who emerged from the ‘fire engine’ with his eye-glasses askew, straightened them on his graduate engineer’s nose and announced “I am really impressed by the ride quality”… The words ‘point’ and ‘missed’ sprang to mind amongst we pureblood racers.
We were then taken to the far end of the Weissach complex, where there was a 911 bumping and thumping along a rough road, paved with alternative Belgian-style pave blocks, rumble-strips and plain old jumbled boulders – and a skid-pan circle.
But on the skid-pan circle, surrounded by intent-looking engineers and mechanics, was an extraordinary experimental prototype car. It was a really, truly, terribly scruffy hack 917. It wasn’t a Coupe – it was an open-cockpit 917/10 roadster, basically as run in the previous year’s CanAm Championship series. But this was a 917/10 with a big difference. Its glassfibre body panels, so thin they were translucent, ranged in shade from matte white to natural resin-yellow/beige. The nose section was ugly in the extreme, tucked-down like a reverse-curve snowplough, with four vertical aerodynamic fences where the headlight-bearing front fender sides would have been in the endurance racing Coupes. Each fender hump over the front wheels was pierced by lateral pressure-relieving louvres, while at the tail a huge full-width wing was raised upon ‘Batmobile’-style end fences moulded into the body sides. And dangling in view at the open tail, on the upswept exhaust tail pipes, were two massive truck-style Eberspacher turbochargers…just as on the dyno-test unit.
There was a gent in a crash helmet and overalls sitting in this unlovely prototype’s cockpit, and as we strolled up I recognised him as Mark Donohue, ‘Captain Nice’ no less. But he seemed remarkably uncomfortable with our presence, and taciturn almost to the point of complete silence. Mark had previously tested a naturally-aspirated 917/10 the previous December in America, but now a much more muscular CanAm contender was under development for the new year’s Championship series.
A couple of the Porsche guys explained that this new prototype was designated the 917/10 Turbo, and Dr Bott explained how the spaceframe chassis had been enlarged to accommodate bigger fuel tanks, out to 220-liters. A new four-speed transmission with a beefed-up casing had been necessary to accommodate the power of the turbocharged flat-12 engine, a 4.5-liter at that time, boosted at “around one atmosphere”. Dr Bott was evasive about the material from which the frame was made, just “something special” – not magnesium – but I wondered what – magnesium-aluminium another engineer muttered…
New aluminium/copper brake discs were being used instead of the $1200-a-time experimental beryllium discs tried in mountain Championship competition, and the brakes were described as being by “Porsche with some Girling parts”. Some eight hours testing had already been carried out on 5-litre turbocharged flat-12 engine “…but in the final stages of development the engines will be run for 18 hours on full throttle…”. A bigger cooling fan had been fitted for turbo testing, oil circulation had been revised and, as Dr Bott, put it “we use different materials at critical points”. Plug burning problems had been fixed by a switch to platinum. The engines weighed a claimed 750kg. Dr Bott described how 5-liter and eventually 5.4-liter engines would be deployed and after three months work the shabby prototype seen before us was undergoing final handling testing – its engine output tagged at a comfortable 850-900bhp.
Dr Bott finished his comments by explaining how Mark Donohue would be driving the new turbo 917 for the Roger Penske team in the forthcoming 1972 CanAm Championship series, adding his confidence that “We will not win the first two or three races but by the end of the CanAm series we should be in front…”.
So, what was a keen young freelance motor racing journo to make of such a scoop?
The moment I got back home I was ringing round the various magazines to which I contributed worldwide. Ooh yes, in France, and Sweden, and Italy and Japan – and in the USA – interest was great. My contemporary colleagues at ‘Autoweek’ particularly liked the story, and they took it up – I sent them photographs of the prototype car that Weissach day, with the diffident, uncomfortable-looking Donohue in the cockpit, and they rapidly ran the story.
The next thing I heard was that Roger Penske was absolutely burning up the telephone line to ‘Autoweek’s editorial office, berating them for having ruined his launch-party plans. Their story, by yours truly, had just pre-empted and totally ruined what he’d prepared for a stupendously stunning, utterly unexpected, major press launch of the Penske-Porsche Turbo panzer operation for that year’s CanAm series. This guy Nye had just torpedoed the entire program. Mr Penske was out for blood, but ‘Autoweek’ – totally blameless – just referred him, I guess, to his friends at Porsche.
It had been their invitation and their hospitality which had plainly blown the story – either intentionally or totally unwittingly – by entertaining a visiting party of British sporting scribblers on the same day that Mark and Penske’s finest were present with that first 917/10 Turbo.
As a great believer in the screw-up theory of life, I have always preferred to believe that this event was more screw-up than German Porsche pre-emption of an American Penske media event. We just assumed it was open-season on what turned out to be a great topical story. Nobody chez Porsche had told us anything about a pre-launch embargo…and if they had, we would have complied with it.
OK – so why have I been reminded of all this? Well it’s because while trawling through the Revs Digital Library last night, I came across a shot of Mark Donohue in the new L&M-sponsored Porsche 917/10 Turbo after finishing second in the 1972 CanAm opener at Mosport Park between the hitherto all-conquering Gulf McLarens of Denny Hulme and Peter Revson.
That was actually the 50th CanAm race run and that first Penske Porsche Panzer had started on pole and led for much of the race until a turbo system inlet valve began jamming, costing Mark three laps in the pits. Whatever reservations the new sponsor might have had about the bungled launch spoiling their media exposure, the 917/10 Turbo just spoke volumes for itself out on track.
However, staying on the track became the problem as poor Mark had the rear body clip come adrift, triggering a blow-over backflip accident in his Mosport car at Atlanta the Monday before ’72 CanAm Round 2. Knee injuries sidelined him for much of the remaining season. At short notice George Follmer was brought into the fray in the spare Penske L&M Porsche Turbo, which I believe was ‘our’ Weissach car in finalised form, and he immediately won that Atlanta round after Denny Hulme had a blow-over crash which destroyed his Gulf McLaren M20, and team-mate ‘Revvie’ lost his car’s engine. Follmer went to win four more of that series’ qualifying races, at Mid-Ohio, Road America, Laguna Seca and Riverside. The returned Mark Donohue won at Edmonton, Denny Hulme for McLaren at Watkins Glen and Francois Cevert in the Young American Racing McLaren at Donnybrooke. Game, set and Championship title to the Porsche Turbo – and we had been right in there at the program outset.
And in retrospect – at 44 years range – if Roger Penske still feels aggrieved about “this guy Nye” having screwed-up his planned sensational program launch – I can only offer my sincere apologies. Like most things in my life – it was totally unplanned…
Credits:
The Revs Institute