Pink Pig: The Porsche Racing Car that had a Sense of Humor

Even a racing car can have a sense of humor.  A Porsche 917 racing car, the “Pink Pig,” proves the point.  Porsche made it into a butcher’s diagram.

Over the years, since the dawn of sponsorship making cars moving billboards, quite a few race cars have a wild paint jobs or crazy graphics.  Some have been art projects.  Yeah, we’re talking about you, BMW.  Or there have been no graphics at all.  There have been some mystery cars sporting only cryptic messages.  Some have had fake driver’s names.

In 1971, Porsche got creative with its 917/20, a rolling test-bed.  Considering the 917 was a big, burly, beast, built for tackling the great endurance races like Le Mans and blasting down the Mulsanne Straight at speeds approaching 230 miles per hour, or chewing up the track in Can-Am,  well, I heard it was kind of a pig handling-wise until they got it sorted out.  Because of this, the nickname when the 917 first appeared was “The Widowmaker.”  This particular iteration, the 917/20, which qualified 7th for the 1971 24 Hours of Le Mans was nicknamed the “Pink Pig.”  No, Robby Gordon did not do the naming honors.  The team decided to paint it pink with butcher’s markings delineating each cut of pork.  It was all in German.  You can see the red titles and red dashed markings outlining each cut.  This was the only race for the “Pink Pig” and it ended in a crash.  Oink.  Check it and other 917s here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_917.

(Attribution:  “Porsche917PinkPig”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Porsche917PinkPig.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Porsche917PinkPig.jpg)

By the way, this might be of interest to anyone with a bit of loose change jangling around in their pocket.  I saw a great “used” Porsche ad.  Yep, it was a “used” 1969 Porsche 917K Gulf competition car.  Don’t let that “used” be a worry, though.  I’m sure it was never driven hard or in anger.  In fact, it was only taken out on Sunday’s by a little old lady in Zuffenhausen.