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Jeff's statement concerning the Porsches is only partly correct. What was the success of CanAm? No restrictions at all! V8's up to 9 litres, rear wings like king size beds - great stuff! And then Porsche came up with this small little mechanical gimmick called "turbo". In 1972 nobody on the other side of the pond knew what it is, but, what the hell, it allows tiny 5 litres to beat our big bangers! Luckily at the same time the Arabs locked down the oil stream, so this was good possibility to introduce a fuel consumption formula, resulting not only in Porsche's retiring, but also in the slow death of CanAm racing.
McLaren M8s to beat Porsche 917-30? Yes of course, it's a quite simple financial calculation. Most of the M8 running in super sports series are no genuine McLaren, but Trojans. For those don't know, every year Trojan built a series of last years McLaren to be sold to privateers, whereas the real McLaren had always been works cars. Blowing up a Chevy big block in today's historic racing may be painful, but a substitute is found rather easily. Blowing up a 917 engine would be a desaster, not only in terms of money, but also as the originality of the car is away. So racing with museum rarities against "stock cars" will never show the real relations. Any idea why in today's historic racing most E-Types are beating the 250 GT SWBs and even the GTOs?
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