Possibly the most iconic and recognizable race car in the history of four-wheeled anything, the Gulf-liveried Porsche 917, owes a lot of its star power to the kind of terrible 1971 Steve McQueen vehicle “Le Mans.” That very car, the one from the movie, the one that McQueen drove, is coming up for sale next month at Mecum’s Kissimmee auction, and it’s probably going to sell for a whole lot of money. This car, chassis number 917-022, has been part of Jerry Seinfeld’s private collection since 2001 and now he’s selling it so you can find out what’s the deal.
The current record for a public auction sale of any Porsche was a similar Porsche 917K at the 2017 Gooding & Co. Pebble Beach auction. That car was also used extensively in the film “Le Mans” and wears the same Gulf livery, though wasn’t the hero car of the film. Back then it sold for a whopping $14.08M and hasn’t been beat since.
From 2017 to today the values of collector cars have ballooned, nostalgia is hitting harder than ever, and the wealthy have more money than ever before, so it’s entirely possible that a bidding war will send the McQueen car into the stratosphere. Will it hit McLaren F1 or Ferrari 250GTO numbers? We’ll know next month.
917-022 passed through some pretty prominent racing hands, as McQueen sold the car to Reinhold Joest after production of the film ended. Brian Redman and Richard Attwood, each Le Mans winners, owned the car for a while. Frank Gallogly bought it at auction in 2000 for $1.32M and sold it to Seinfeld for an undisclosed sum the following year. This seems to have worked out well for Seinfeld as he got the opportunity to own a 917 for 25 years and then potentially 10X his investment if the sale next month goes his way.
These ultra-high-speed flat-twelve-powered racing monsters remain one of the coolest cars to ever have been built, and I contend that the 917 ultimately changed Porsche from a tiny German sports car manufacturer into a world-beating hero brand. Whichever billionaire money-hoarding monster buys this car, I hope they spend the rest of their lives running this 1960s sports prototype around a race track. Surely their money and driving talent are equal and nothing bad will ever happen to them. Right?
