Can You Have Too Much Power? — (Donohue 1970s Porsche Can-Am)

It's Not the Car

“It will never have enough . . . until I can spin the wheels at the end of the straightaway in high gear.”

A man named Mark said that. Mark engineered and drove race cars. In the early 1970s, he was handed a barely drivable, 700-hp Porsche. Because Mark had a brain the size of a planet, he made the car a blisteringly fast, 1500-horse dollbaby. It was so good, in fact, that it killed a prestigious international racing series deader than hell. What happened in between is utterly bonkers.

This show’s format rotates weekly, because squirrel. This episode is our monthly deep dive into an epic moment from racing history—in this case, Mark Donohue, Roger Penske, and the 230-mph Can-Am Porsche 917s of 1972–1973.

Related Trivia: Jeff met Mark once, long ago, when he was a little Jeff. When Sam was a younger Sam, he went to Sears Point to drive a factory-owned 917K (not the Can-Am car) but got rained out and was sad. Ross was never younger or older and has always been an ageless sage; he’s basically a Galápagos tortoise who really likes trail braking.

This episode was produced by Mike Perlman.

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ABOUT THE SHOW:

It’s Not the Car is a podcast about people and speed. We tell racing stories and leave out the boring parts.

Ross Bentley is a former IndyCar driver and an internationally renowned performance coach and author. Jeff Braun is a championship-winning race engineer. Sam Smith is an award-winning journalist and a former executive editor of Road & Track magazine. Together, we explore the emotion at the heart of the machine.

We don’t love racing for the nuts and bolts—we love it for what it asks of the bag of meat at the wheel.

New episodes every Tuesday.