Porsche 917 Homage adds iconic touch to Historics Bicester Heritage Sale

The passion of the classic car scene will be loud and proud at Bicester Heritage on Saturday 24th September, the day Historics Auctioneers opens its doors to the brand’s inaugural sale at the bustling venue. Whilst near two hundred fine and varied entries will pass across the auction block that day, pride of place outside the auction hall will be occupied by an extraordinary tribute to the short-tail 917. Known as the Icon 917K, this amazing road-legal motorsport machine heads Bicester Heritage’s evocative display of privately owned ‘Supercars and Poster Cars’, each vehicle lifted from the venue’s Scramblers club.

The Icon 917K is a UK road-registered homage to Porsche’s legendary endurance car and is the pride and joy of automotive design engineer and Historics Auctioneers client, Dave Eaton. His childhood passion — shared by engineering wizard and close friend, John Hartland — was to build from scratch a road-registered and trackcapable 917 replica. Eloquently described by Dave as the culmination of “ten years of madness”, the car makes use of a bespoke spaceframe beneath a body formed from moulds taken from the five-litre 917 owned by former F1 and endurance racer, David Piper, who bought his car (the tenth 917 assembled) direct from Porsche in 1969, the same year the works team employed him to tackle the 1,000km of Nürburgring.

Offered by Graham Turner, who worked for Piper many moons ago, the panels soon found their way to Dave’s workshop, whereupon he began the arduous task of studying every engineering diagram, blueprint, book, video, photograph and film relating to each of the 917s assembled. “With moulds from a genuine 917, I was keen to construct an accurate recreation of the original car,” he continues. “I didn’t want a 917 silhouette over a decidedly non- 917 chassis. There could be no compromise. I was adamant the finished car should be able to accommodate a flat-twelve and be accurate to within 10mm of Porsche’s original design. I’m delighted to say that goal has been achieved.”

Using state-of-the-art CAD, bespoke chassis tubework was imagined using reduced-scale factory drawings, as well as the accepted front and rear axle positions. A wooden frame was constructed to arrange the body correctly in order for it to be scanned, a process which required the application of more than 2,000 reflective dots. The resulting scan was then converted into a surface model on CAD, ensuring the proposed steel metalwork — far more rigid than the aluminium used to form the guts of the original 917 — would sit pretty. “It worked first time,” smiles Dave, proud of a job well done.

Subsequently, more than 220 tubes were lasercut from CAD models, dropping into a jig with such precision the chassis almost built itself! The Icon 917K eventually earned its stripes with registration as a new build with UK manufacturer status. Since then, it has amassed some three thousand road miles, whilst plans for limited production have attracted the interest of collectors worldwide. View the car for yourself when the Historics sale gets underway. Full information about the event, plus instructions to register for bidding in person, online and by telephone, can be found at historics.co.uk.

MOULDS TAKEN FROM THE FIVE-LITRE 917 OWNED BY FORMER ENDURANCE RACER, DAVID PIPER