Porsche 917: The Gulf Livery, the Pink Pig and 1,500 Horsepower
The Porsche 917 exists in a category of its own. Built in 1969 to exploit a loophole in the FIA's Group 5 regulations, it was too fast for its own good: it killed its drivers, terrified its engineers, and won Le Mans twice in a row once Porsche had tamed it. The Gulf livery made it the most photographed racing car of the 1970s. The Pink Pig made it immortal. And the 917/30 Can-Am version produced 1,500 horsepower in an era when Formula 1 cars had 450. This is the full story.
The 917 is part of the Deckorate Porsche collection. For the full story of Porsche's Le Mans history, read our guide to the most iconic Porsche Le Mans liveries.
The loophole that built a legend
In 1968 the FIA announced new Group 5 regulations for sports car racing, requiring manufacturers to build at least 25 examples of any car they wanted to race. The intention was to keep sports car racing connected to production vehicles. The unintended consequence was that Porsche, with its engineering resources and motorsport ambition, could build 25 examples of essentially anything they wanted.
Ferdinand Piech, then head of Porsche's motorsport programme and later chairman of Volkswagen Group, oversaw the development of a car designed from first principles to win Le Mans. The 917 used a 4.5-litre flat-twelve engine producing 580 horsepower in initial form. The spaceframe chassis was constructed from welded aluminium tubes. The complete car weighed 800 kg. The top speed on the Mulsanne Straight exceeded 350 km/h.
Porsche delivered the required 25 cars to the FIA scrutineers at Stuttgart in March 1969. The inspectors arrived to find them lined up in the factory, most without engines, some without bodywork. The FIA accepted them. The 917 was homologated.
1969: too fast to drive
The 917's debut season was a disaster. The car was aerodynamically unstable at high speed: at 320 km/h on the Mulsanne the front axle generated lift rather than downforce, making the car genuinely dangerous. John Woolfe, a privateer, died in a 917 on the first lap of the 1969 Le Mans race. Works driver Vic Elford described the car as undriveable at full speed.
Porsche brought in John Horsman from the Gulf Oil-sponsored John Wyer Automotive team to solve the problem. The solution was a revised bodywork package with a long tail that generated rear downforce at the expense of top speed, and a shorter tail version for slower circuits. The aerodynamic problem was not fully resolved in 1969. The 917 retired from Le Mans that year with mechanical failures. But the foundations for 1970 were in place.
Gulf blue and orange: the most iconic livery in racing
John Wyer's Gulf-sponsored 917s wore a colour scheme that had already appeared on his Ford GT40 victories: powder blue with vivid orange accents, the Gulf Oil corporate colours. On the 917's flowing bodywork, at speed on the Mulsanne Straight in the early morning light, the combination became one of the most photographed images in motorsport history.
The 917K — Kurzheck, short tail — in Gulf livery won Le Mans in 1970 with Hans Herrmann and Richard Attwood driving. It won again in 1971 with Helmut Marko and Gijs van Lennep. Two consecutive Le Mans victories in the Gulf blue and orange. The Steve McQueen film Le Mans, shot during the 1970 race, placed the Gulf 917 in front of a global audience. The car and its colours became inseparable from the idea of what a racing Porsche should look like.
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The Pink Pig: too ugly to sponsor
For 1971 Porsche also entered a radically different 917 variant: the 917/20, a wide-body aerodynamic experiment designed by SERA Paris to test a completely new approach to generating downforce. The car was significantly wider than the standard 917, with a rounded, bulbous body that looked nothing like any previous Porsche racing car.
The shape proved difficult to sponsor. No major brand wanted their logo on a car that looked, frankly, like a pig. Porsche's solution was characteristically dry: they commissioned artist Anatole Lapine to paint the car with a butcher's diagram labelling the cuts of pork. The snout, the ear, the belly, the haunch — all annotated in German. The car was officially nicknamed Truffljeger, truffle hunter, but became universally known as the Pink Pig.
The 917/20 qualified second at Le Mans 1971 but crashed during the race without injury to the drivers. It was never raced again. Its existence lasted precisely one race. And yet it became one of the most recognisable cars in Porsche's history: recreated by Porsche themselves in 2018 on a 911 GT2 RS for the 24 Hours of Le Mans anniversary, and again in 2023 on a 963 LMDh for the centenary race. A car that raced once is still being referenced fifty years later.
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The 917/30: 1,500 horsepower
After Le Mans banned the 917 at the end of 1971 — new regulations limited engine displacement to 3.0 litres — Porsche took the car to the Can-Am series in North America, where no such restrictions applied. The 917/30, developed for Can-Am from 1972 with a turbocharged 5.4-litre flat-twelve, produced 1,100 horsepower in race trim. In qualifying specification with higher boost, outputs approaching 1,500 horsepower were recorded.
Mark Donohue drove the 917/30 to the 1973 Can-Am championship, winning six of eight rounds. The car was so dominant that Can-Am introduced fuel restrictions specifically to reduce its advantage. Those restrictions effectively ended the series — without the 917/30 to compete against, no other manufacturer had the incentive to develop seriously competitive machinery. The most powerful racing car of its era destroyed the series it competed in by being too fast for anyone to challenge it.
The legacy
The 917 is the car that made Porsche a Le Mans institution. Before it, Porsche had been a successful manufacturer in smaller engine classes without an outright Le Mans victory. After it, Porsche was the team that had built a 1,500-horsepower racing car, won Le Mans back-to-back, and left a visual legacy so strong that their liveries from 1970 and 1971 are still being referenced and recreated half a century later.
Every subsequent Porsche Le Mans programme — the 935, the 936, the 956, the 962, the 919 Hybrid — exists in the shadow of what the 917 established. The Gulf blue and orange is the colour scheme against which all other Porsche Le Mans liveries are measured. The Pink Pig is the joke that turned into an icon. The 917/30 is the machine that proved Porsche would rather be banned than be beaten.
On your wall
The Deckorate Porsche 917 collection covers the two most significant expressions of the car. The Gulf deck captures the 917K in the blue and orange livery that won Le Mans in 1970 and 1971 and became the most reproduced image in Porsche's racing history. The Pink Pig deck covers the 917/20 that raced once, crashed, and became immortal.
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