In 1971, a French aerodynamics company produced a Porsche 917 body that someone remarked looked like a pig. A Porsche designer called Anatole Lapine took that observation literally, painted the car pink, and added a butcher's diagram of pork cuts across the bodywork. The result was one of the most recognisable liveries in motorsport history, and nearly fifty years later, it won at Le Mans again.
The original: Porsche 917/20 at Le Mans 1971
The 917/20 was a one-off experiment. Porsche asked the French aerodynamics firm Sera to produce a body that combined the advantages of the short-tail and long-tail versions of the 917, creating a car that could qualify and race without the aerodynamic compromises of either existing configuration. Sera delivered a body with larger, rounder curves than anything Porsche had run before, and somebody in the workshop noted that it looked like a pig.
Anatole Lapine, Porsche's designer, ran with it. The car was painted pink and decorated with a butcher's diagram identifying the various cuts of pork: shoulder, loin, belly, rump. The car was formally nicknamed "Die Sau" (The Sow), informally the Pink Pig, and "The Truffle Hunter of Zuffenhausen." It remains one of the most distinctive racing cars ever built.
The 917/20 qualified 10th at Le Mans 1971 but crashed before the finish, driven by Willi Kauhsen and Reinhold Joest. It never competed again. The livery, however, never went away.
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The livery lives again: Porsche 911 RSR at Le Mans 2018
For Porsche's 70th anniversary in 2018, the factory team entered the 86th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans with a 911 RSR wearing a recreation of the original Pink Pig livery. Pink bodywork, butcher's cuts redrawn across the modern car's surfaces, and a full commitment to the bit: pink headlamps instead of white ones, every pit stop announced as a "pigstop," and a stuffed Ikea pig thrown into the crowd.
The car was driven by Kevin Estre (France), Laurens Vanthoor (Belgium) and Michael Christensen (Denmark). It won the LMGTE Pro class.
A livery that had been born from an aerodynamic experiment and a designer's sense of humour in 1971 had, 47 years later, won at the same circuit where it first appeared. That's a rare kind of motorsport story.
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The designer: Anatole Lapine
The Pink Pig wasn't Lapine's only memorable contribution to Porsche's visual identity. He also created the so-called Hippie Porsche and reworked the Gulf livery for the trio of 908/3 cars at the 1971 Targa Florio. Lapine had an instinct for liveries that communicated something beyond sponsor colour schemes: cars that told a story or made a visual joke that worked at racing speed.
The Pink Pig is the most enduring example of that instinct. It worked in 1971 because it was completely unexpected on a racing car. It still works today for the same reason.
The car under the pink skin
The 2018 Porsche 911 RSR that wore the Pink Pig livery at Le Mans was powered by a 4.0-litre flat-six producing around 510 horsepower, driving the rear wheels through a paddle-shifted six-speed sequential transmission. It is the same car (in different colours) that competes in the LMGTE Pro class of the FIA World Endurance Championship.
The Pink Pig on the 918 Spyder
The livery has appeared on one more Porsche worth mentioning. A private owner wrapped their 918 Spyder in the Pink Pig livery, pink bodywork and butcher's diagram faithfully recreated across the hypercar's modern surfaces, and drove it to the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. Porsche never officially offered the Pink Pig as a factory option on the 918, despite offering Martini and Gulf liveries as alternatives. That makes this particular car something of an unofficial tribute to a tribute: a private owner deciding that the most distinctive livery in Porsche's racing history deserved to appear on their most extraordinary road car.
The 918 Spyder produces 887 horsepower from its combined petrol and electric drivetrain and was the fastest production car around the Nurburgring when it launched. Wrapped in pink with butcher's cuts across the body, it is perhaps the most Porsche thing that has ever existed.
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The three Pink Pig decks together
The 917/20, the 911 RSR and the 918 Spyder: three completely different Porsches, five decades apart, united by the same pink paint and the same butcher's diagram. Displayed together on a wall they tell the full story of one livery's unlikely journey from a 1971 Le Mans aerodynamic experiment to a Le Mans class win and a privately owned hypercar tribute.
Shop the Porsche 917/20 Pink Pig deck →
Shop the Porsche 911 RSR Pink Pig deck →
