Porsche had so much trouble getting the 917 to work properly on the race track that they contracted arch-rival John Wyer Racing, who had been regularly beating them with their beautifully prepared Gulf colors Ford GT40s to do the development work on the car. Wyer's chief engineer, John Horsman, noticed a pattern of gnats smooshed on the bodywork, show the pattern of the airflow. The tail was clean of gnats, demonstrating that no aerodynamic downforce was being created at the tail.
They basically chopped the classic Porsche-style Langheck style tail off the back of the car and created a wedge-based design to obtain some real downforce at the rear, the Kurzheck (short tail) version, thus the designation: Porsche 917K.
The car depicted here ran at Daytona in the 24 hour endurance race in 1971 with Vic Elford and Gijs van Lennep sharing stints. Pretty!
