The Way they Were...

[jluetjen]

But what are they???

Does anyone recognize these cars and know how they are related??? Need I say that they are a very important part of Porsche's sports car racing history.

Here are two views of one of the models...


... And here is the second car

[Jim Richards]

904 and ???

[jluetjen]

Nahhh! Try again. I'll give you a clue, they are not the obvious solution.

[Tim Walsh]

I'd say it could be a 905 but I've never heard of anything under that designation. It looks to be a mid to late 60's car before alot of the aerodynamics came along.

Clueless.

[Jim Richards]

I'm clueless as well.

[Shuie]

Ferrari maybe?

cegerer will know for sure.

If I didnt see it here, I would think the blue car was a bad ebay replica of something.

[oldE]

Cooper-Porsches? Maybe its just the color, but something about the blue one makes me want to say Matra.
Les

[Carl Bauer]

Second one IS a Matra

[jluetjen]

OK Carl's got one -- sort of. The second car IS a Matra. It's hard to disguise THAT color. Can anyone guess what what Matra it is and what it's relationship is to Porsche's competition history. If you can get that, you can also get the other car.

[Carl Bauer]

1966 BRM M620

[jluetjen]

Yup -- One down and one to go. If no one gets it, I'll post the answer and some cool supporting stuff this afternoon.

Until then, back to work...

[Carl Bauer]

Were all of these cars in the 1966 Spa 1000km?

[jluetjen]

What do both of these cars have in common? They were both "the vanquished" by the Porsche 906.

What sort of story would Porsche's racing history be without someone to beat. Sure, most of us have seen some pictures of the Ferrari Dino 206's

-- but at the end of the day I believe that there were only a few of those built. I suspect less then 10. So who made up the rest of the field?

More specifically, the question is; in 1966, what were the "Hot Cars to have" in the 2 liter sports car series??? According to a September 1966 Car and Driver article titled "2-Liters: Where the Action Is!" there were a number of interesting cars. Among them were the two mystery cars.



First the Matra-BRM M620 which was built by the French Aerospace giant and used an bored and stroked BRM F1 motor. BRM started with the 1.5 liter F1 V8 motor and first took it out to 1880 cc's for 241 HP at 9750. Certainly no sloutch of a motor! After further refinement they got it up to 1920 cc's and 260 HP at 10000 RPM. If you had an old F1 engine, they'd do the conversion for $2750. If you wanted one built new it would be $13,500. For long distance events it was supposed to be good for 240 HP at 9000 RPM. All in all, it sounds like a pretty hot package. Unfortunately it wasn't reliable and didn't work like it should have and alas -- very few people remember them now.



The other mystery car is a Prince R380 from Japan where it actually beat the 906 (with non-factory drivers) on occasion. The car was built using a space frame modeled after the Brabham BT8, but used British wheels and a Hewland gearbox. The 1370 lb car used a straight 6 from the Prince Gloria Super Six which put out about 210 HP in racing trim. The engine used DOHC's with 4 valves per cylinder and 3 Weber side drafts. While it rarely seemed to race outside of Japan, within Japan it did pretty well and even beat the 906's at the 1966 Japanese Grand Prix. So in some respects it did better then the Matra did. Alas, the R380 also disappeared in time. But in some respects it is still with us since the Prince car company in Japan was bought up by Nissan in 1966 and some of their models such as the Fairlady (aka: 240Z) did come back to race Porsche with some degree of success.

But they were all vanquished by the Piech's "Batmobile".


You can read all about it at this excellent site which has all of the Autosport articles on the Prototype scene of that time including countless awsome color pictures of the cars and drivers. They also cover the following 1967 FIA sportscar season as well as the 1967 CAN-AM season. Not too shabby for a slot car racing site. My hats off to them!

[tchanson]

Very cool, John. Great post.

Tim

[masraum]

Very cool!! I love the old info...