Nervous handling cars at the corners?
The cars looked so nervous in the corners. Was that real oversteering or they were showing off for the camera?
Also, was it a real spun off in the rain by the green car?
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MovieChat Forums > Le Mans (1971) Discussion > Nervous handling cars at the corners?
That was definetly real Oversteering of the 917´s in this Film. By the Way most Shots of the Race were Made at the 24 Hours Race of 1971. One Porsche 908 was Specially equipped with Cameras.
One of the first "Under Race Conditions"-Drivers, was Dieter Quester, a BMW-Works-Driver who was lent by BMW for the Nuerburgring-1000km-Race 1969.
He said about his First Turns in the 917:
“Das Auto war eine Gefahr. Für mich war es eine neue Dimension von Power. Die 590 PS waren überhaupt nicht auf der Straße zu dosieren. Die Hinterräder hatten keine Traktion, das Auto war schon auf der Geraden gefährlich, in den Kurven die Rutschgrenze zu finden war russisches Roulette. Es bestand akute Lebensgefahr.”
Translated by myself, i´ve try´d to make it sensual as possible.
"This Car was a Danger. For Myself, it was a new Dimension of Power. You couldn´t dose the 590HP on to the Track. The Rear-Tires didn´t had Traction at all, on the Straight it was already Dangerous, but finding the slide-limit in the Corners - it was like Russian Roulette. It was highly Life-Risk."
-Dieter Quester, 1969-
To be exact the race scenes in this film are filmed during 1970 Le Mans not 1971. The in car shots are real and the camera car made it superbly to the ninth position in the real race! And all this despite the extra weight they had (3 cinema cameras in the car). Wow! Check the link below:
http://www.maisonblanche.co.uk/shop/en-us/dept_167.html
A 917k could output 510hp and weighed about 1760 pounds... It could go from 0-60mph in 2.5 seconds. The drivers in this race were racing, nearly at or beyond the limits of what these machines could do. In fact the racing conditions were so scary that several drivers retired after that year when their contracts were up because during races they were driving in conditions so dangerious that they had resigned themselves to dying in the cars during that race.
In the movie, much of the "incidental" footage was shot during a camera car entered in the 1970 race (it is briefly shown towards the end of the film), some of the accidents were recreated (based on accidents that did occur during the race (in particular the one where McQueen "writes off" his Gulf-Porsche #20)) as were some of the sequences directly involving the plot of the film.
But the Oversteer and the abysmal conditions were very similar to the actual race... For some first person accounts from Tony Adamowicz (who raced a Ferrari 312 P in the 1970 race and would later drive Ferrari 512's AND Porsche 917's) take a gander at these pages:
http://www.a2zracer.com/page29.html through http://www.a2zracer.com/page36.html In particular page 33: http://www.a2zracer.com/page33.html
C
The lack of traction control and big, heavy, powerful rear-wheel drive sportscars always made for some oversteer and sliding in corners. Great to watch!
sharehttp://www.a2zracer.com/img298.jpg
In case anyone is interested in seeing it. It's shown briefly near the pits towards the end of the race in the film...
C
Not sure what you mean by a real spun off. The car was driven by a stunt driver who was told to spin the car three and half times and stop on the shoulder. That is what he did first take, in the rain.
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AS has been stated already, you'd a car with an evil reputation that drivers, no wusses in those days of minimal driver protection and circuit first-aid facilities, were genuinely scared of. Part of this was due to the 'finger-in-the-wind' aerodynamics of the early cars, cured by the John Wyer Gulf team by removing the streamlined long tail from one of the early cars and rivveting on a sheet aluminium short or 'Kurz' tail, hence 917K. Even then, Derek Bell reported that once you got above 200mph on Mulsanne if you watched the horizon in the rear-view mirror you would see it drop as the rear rose!
Add in to this a car which used some of it's chassis tubes as oil pipes from the engine to the nose-mounted oil cooler and you can see why it was considered a deathtrap. It is, however, still my all-time favourite racing car, just because it was so outrageous, and because of that fabulous Gulf-Wyer paint job.
The original 917's were a bit nervous on the high speed sections and were improved with a long tail version but the cars in the movie were the short-tail versions which didn't handle as well on the fast turns. The long-tail 917 was developed for the 1970 race but it finished second to a short-tail version. Youcan see the long tail in the movie I think. This is a link to the 917 page at Wikipedia and it has a picture of the 1970 winner. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_917
shareYou´re right. The white Porsche 917, who leads early the Race, was an Longtail (Langheck)-Porsche.
Ich kam, sah und ging wieder...
I've read many reports about the 917 being a 'pig' to drive by the heroes that did.
No doubt the circuit that is Le Mans would be classified as a 'fast' track, with half it's 8 mile (13 kilometre) length being flat out straight. However, it is probably interesting to note that in the 1970 Sports Car season, John Wyer Gulf Racing chose a bunch of the lighter, more nimble 908 Porsches to tackle the 14 mile (23 kms), 140 or so corners, 7 or so jumps per lap circuit at Nurburgring for the 1000 kms, rather than the more powerful 917's.
That was real. These cars lacked aerodynamics like you see in the Formula 1 cars and the Le Mans Prototypes today. The air flow just zips right over the top of the car and the sides of the cars without any sort of air flow through the car. They lacked the mechanical abilities of the cars today as well, therefore they were very unstable in the corners. When they said these cars are averaging 130 miles an hour, they weren't joking. At the time, after nearly 4 miles flat out traveling in in excess of 230 miles an hour, braking for Mulsanne down to 30 miles an hour was virtually suicide. In most of the corners they were definitely between 30 to 70 miles an hour. Above that, no one will walk away because the downforce was not there.
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