The 1970 psychedelic Porsche 917 racing car that pre-empted the art car movement

By the summer of 1970, the world was in flux. Paul McCartney had walked out on the Beatles in April; the Woodstock documentary was in cinemas, cementing the summer of ’69 as pure spectacle; and the World Cup was beaming out of Mexico, the first tournament broadcast in colour. That same energy reached motor racing at precisely four o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday 13 June, when a psychedelic Porsche 917, shaped like a spaceship and hand-painted days earlier, rolled onto the start line of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The car was chassis 917-043, a long-tail Porsche 917, built to deliver Porsche’s first outright win at the legendary 24-hour race. More than five decades later, I encounter the ‘Hippie Car’, as it was dubbed by spectators in 1970, in the grounds of the turreted Domaine du Château de Chantilly, at the Chantilly Arts & Elegance Richard Mille.

The car is in stark contrast to its clipped, formal surroundings, sitting alongside pre-war cabriolets and coachbuilt Delahayes, arranged across the château’s pristine lawns. The Richard Mille concours is a picture of civility and period correctness, but 917-043, as it did in 1970, still creates a stir. Deep indigo-blue, split by great sweeping fields of psychedelic green, outlined in white. It is the loudest object in a 17th-century garden by some margin.

When 917-043 first raced at Le Mans in 1970, Gérard Larrousse and Willi Kauhsen brought it home second, behind the short-tail 917K of Hans Herrmann and Richard Attwood. It was a Porsche one-two, and the marque’s first overall win at Le Mans, in one of the wettest races on record. Frank Sytner, founder of the Sytner dealership group and 1988 British Touring Car Champion, has owned the Hippie Car since 2024, as part of his collection, based in Europe.

Sytner was in his twenties that summer and remembers precisely what the paint signified. It was early days for sponsorship in motorsport, and ‘to a lot of us, it wasn’t awfully attractive’, he tells me. ‘A car in sponsor’s colours were designed by someone not as art, but purely as an advertising hoarding.’

But the Martini-backed 917-043 bucked the trend. ‘They put their symbol on the back and sacrificed the rest of the car to let a form of art be played out,’ Sytner says. ‘The sponsor stayed in the background. At a moment when every other team was converting its bodywork into a billboard, 917-043 was a canvas for the counterculture.

‘It was the Woodstock era,’ Sytner adds. ‘The hippie movement and the psychedelic era introduced so many new ideas. It was a changing attitude to life, and designs like this came from imagination that may well have been influenced by, well, certain chemicals.’

The job of decorating the car fell to Anatole ‘Tony’ Lapine, head of Porsche’s design studio, who burnt through roughly 1,500 spray cans to create the unique livery in the days leading up to the race, while the car was stationed with the Porsche works team in the village of Teloché, outside Le Mans.

The Latvian-born designer trained at General Motors under legends Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell before joining Porsche design in 1969, where he remained for two decades. One of his first projects at Porsche was the Le Mans paintwork. ‘He was an artist who drew cars,’ says Sytner. ‘None of 917-043’s livery was designed on a computer. Lapine was a gentleman with a pencil and a piece of paper, who could see form, and the beauty in shape.’

Five years after 917-043 ran at Le Mans, BMW commissioned Alexander Calder to paint a 3.0 CSL, followed by Andy Warhol’s BMW M1 in 1979. Like the psychedelic Porsche 917, both BMWs debuted at Le Mans. Calder and Warhol were outside artists, invited in, but 917-043’s livery had come from inside Porsche. ‘The Hippie Car was the precursor to art cars in motorsport,’ Sytner says. ‘The radical shape of the long-tail 917-043, paired with its podium place and psychedelic paint, makes it unrepeatable.’

The car ran against Ferrari’s 512, Enzo’s answer to Ferdinand Piëch’s 917, with Larrousse battling through the rain. ‘We had no electronic system to look after the wheelspin,’ says Larrousse. ‘The mist was so big that we could not see to overtake. When we arrived behind a 911 it was a blur. You had to listen for it and decide if it was on the left, or on the right,’ he recalls. Earlier this year, 917-043 made its debut up the hill at the Goodwood Festival of Speed 2026, driven by Larrousse, now in his eighties.

After the 1970 podium place, 917-043 returned to contest the 24-hour race again in 1971, now wearing Gulf colours and an aerodynamically revised body. Jackie Oliver and Pedro Rodríguez were the drivers, with Oliver putting the car on pole. In a test session before the race, he set the lap record (3:13.60 minutes) and went on to clock the highest top speed (239mph) down the Mulsanne straight. Oliver still describes it as the best car he ever drove.

Retromobile.us, ChantillyArtsetElegance.com, Goodwood.com, Porsche.com