New Hot Wheels Premium Porsche 917K 917KH Gulf Wyer Racing vs HO Slot Cars Steve McQueen Le Mans 1970

February 1, 2021

#417 

Gentle reader,

If you are reading this, you are probably of an age such as myself, where you may have seen the Hollywood legendary actor Steve McQueen's dramatic racing film Le Mans which came out in 1971.

My brother and I did, even though it was showing in the next town. We took a bus to get to the theater and and back. We were that determined to see it.

You also no doubt know that the actual race and ending of the film are quite different. In fact, the #20 Gulf Wyer 917K did not finish the race at all because Brian Redman's co-driver missed an upshift and blew the engine up as it was racing past the pits. And yes, I know it did not finish in the film either.

In fact, the #23 917K which was using the original but smaller displacement 4.5 liter engine won. It was part of the Porsche Salzburg (Austria) team and not the official Gulf Wyer team. But that is racing and history.

You also no doubt saw : "HO Slot Cars" in the title of this article.

My brother and I, (there were five of us kids, two boys and three girls) were fortunate to receive an Aurora Model Motoring HO slot car set for Christmas in the 1960s. We later found friends who also had a set and we combined them all into a really long circuit, wondering why the cars got slower halfway around the track.

Having six kids between the two of us and now six grandkids, we have shared our love of certain types of toys, including slot cars, with them all to varying degrees of acceptance/excitement. 

We upgraded to AFX and Tyco race sets as the years gone by. We still have a lot of track and many cars too. Sadly, no room to set up a proper sized race course.

Since I have AUTOart's gorgeous 1:18th scale replica, as well as another brand's replica of the 1970 Daytona 24 Hours race winner, #2 917K, I will first show you the Hot Wheels 917KH (I'm not sure why the added the "H" which stands for heck or tail in German) but they did. The long tail 917 was called 917LH for lang-heck while the short tail was simply K for kurtz. Hot Wheels has made 917LH cars, but they are not premium models as the short tail version certainly is.

Anyway, I will show you different angles of both cars and some photos of the real cars to let you form an opinion as to how well Mattel did and then show you a couple HO slot cars with it for comparison's sake.

Since Blogger updated their program, it has been loading the photos in descending instead of ascending order which greatly slows down the process. Grrr.

They sort-of included the spare tire on the Hot Wheels car.

Above is the rear of the #2 917. Note there is no spare tire at all. Now they MAY have not run with one at Daytona to save weight, or the maker of #2 model, which has NOTHING that opens, may have decided to not bother molding one in.

The AUTOart #20 has slicks while the #2 has intermediate or perhaps rain tires. The actual tires are EIGHTEEN inches (350mm) wide!

While both these cars have the small wing between the ends of the body, the winning car in 1970 did not use it. So I can't blame Hot Wheels designers for leaving it off.

The real engine is covered by a fiberglass cover and two covers for the twelve intake trumpets for each of the cylinders.

The engine cover and covers for the intakes are removed in this photo of the real #2 917K.

Since it will not let me write between the photos today, I will reload the left hand side photo below.

So far, if Mattel did not use the same model I did, they must have either seen a real 917K or photos of one, as they did a generally very good job.

One nit to pick, see the orange stripe on the side of the large model? It coincides with the seams at the bottom of the doors and engine cover. Whereas the Hot Wheels car's orange stripe is lower.

Here is the real car having just exited the then-new Ford Chicane and accelerating up the pit straight. 

These are two HO (actually HO is 1:87th scale, and these are 1:64th scale) slot cars. Left is a Tyco in which the engine is ALL wrong, and an Aurora AFX in the center which is much closer to realistic. 

 

The Tyco headlight cover's shape are the closest to correct. But, their cockpit area is way too w-i-d-e. 

 

One thing that bothers me about the Hot Wheels car is that they molded the central windshield wiper into the clear plastic! WHY?

 

Hot Wheels got the curvy shape the most correct of the three. Also, the team (see below) used three different stripes so that the cars could be told apart as they were speeding into the pits. But, AFX got it wrong by adding a stripe from the nose to the windshield, which is absent on #22 below.

I found this photo online, I think it is a set of 1:43rd scale cars and shows the correct striping of the 1970 Le Mans Gulf Wyer cars. Note that these do not have the narrower "waist" of the real cars.

This is a replica, I believe. But you can clearly see how the body narrows from the fenders through the doors and widens again after them.

Based upon this frontal view, the Tyco is wrong. The AFX is closest and the Hot Wheels is fairly close to realistic.

One can clearly see how wrong the Tyco engine is here. Well, it's wrong in several ways. Note the color differences. But then, the two 1:18th scale ones have different shades of light blue as well. 

Comparing the rear ends details of the three above shows that both slot cars have spare tires, but again, the AFX is much closer than the Tyco to reality.

Now, for your edification, several photos of the real cars from 1970, either Solar Production photos or of the actual race.

I believe this photo is from the a museum, but I do not know where it is.

THIS car is in the Porsche Museum in Germany. But it is a 1971 model, one can tell by the vertical fins on the rear/top of the engine cover. I don't know which race it represents, but I have a photo of it with #19.

THIS is the actual car that won in 1970 at Le Mans. Note the lack of a central wing on the tail. 

This is the rear of the real 917 #2 which is also in the Porsche museum in Germany. Just look at those fat tires! And note the compact spare tire. I had one of those in my 1979 Chevrolet Monza. It included a can of compressed air which one would use to inflate it to it's full diameter.

This photo is from the 1970 BOAC 1000 race at Brand's Hatch in England. Note that back then, every car was assigned a racing number at each event. I have a poster of this photo, but it is much darker, the crowd is not visible at all.

This is a 1969 917 which had a long tail, but was extremely difficult to drive!

This is how the JW Engineering mechanics figured out how to defeat the 917's unsafe habit of trying to kill it's driver. From this application of plywood and tape, came the 917K short tail.

And finally, from the 1970 race at Spa in Belgium, that is John Wyer, he had just signaled the driver to GO!

Thank you for taking the time to read my humble blog. Please take a moment to click or tap the FOLLOW button which is located on the edge of the photograph of the three 1:43rd scale models. That way, you will receive notifications of new articles as they come out. Also, feel free to leave a comment below or on Facebook.

 

Scott

 

February 1, 2021

 

#417