‘He added tan leather to a Le Mans car because comfort matters when doing Mach 1 past Lyon.’
Most of us buy a car. Count Rossi asked Porsche to convert a 917K—yes, the Le Mans-winning one—for the road.
600 horsepower. A flat-12 engine. Tan leather. And number plates.
It’s the automotive equivalent of fitting a flamethrower to a golf trolley and calling it ‘brunch transport’.
Because when you’re royalty, ‘daily driver’ means ‘Le Mans prototype.’
In the early 1970s, Count Rossi of Martini & Rossi vermouth fame wasn’t content with mere Ferraris or Miuras.
No, he wanted to drive a ‘daily’ Porsche 917K.
In 1974, he politely asked Porsche to convert a Le Mans-winning prototype for road use as you do.
Porsche’s surprise reaction, with leftover chassis lying about, they shrugged, dusted off test car #030, and got to work.
Porsche carried out modifications (if you can call them that), the Aero fins were binned, the exhaust was sort of silenced, and tan leather was added.
That’s it. It still had 600 bhp and terrifying intentions.
Bizarrely, the car was registered in Alabama, with the caveat that it never actually entered Alabama.
Bureaucracy meets lunacy.
In 1975, Count Rossi drove it straight from Stuttgart to Paris.
No helmet. No roll cage and presumably lots of champagne.
‘Street-legal in the same way a Bengal tiger is house-trained’
