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What: Porsche Racing Cars

Author: Bill Oursler

Publisher: MBI Publishing Co.

Mark Donohue had just won the 1972 Indianapolis 500 in convincing fashion when two sportswriters ran into him coming out of St. Elmo’s steakhouse where he had been celebrating with his mechanics.

“Congratulations on your win, and why are you leaving the party so soon?” Roger Penske’s driver was asked.

“I’ve got to get some sleep because tomorrow we test the new Porsche,” he said. “It’s the greatest car I’ve ever driven. Wait until you see it.”

The car was the famous blue, Sunoco-backed 917 “panzerwagen” that dominated America’s finest sports car series so thoroughly that the Can-Am program folded two years later.

Author Bill Oursler calls the 917 “the benchmark by which all others were measured and in some ways, still are . . . after two decades, a car that still stirs the soul.” There are Porsches, the sporty little machines so popular on the nation’s highways, and there are Porsches that are specially built racing machines.

This book is about race cars only, from the 1939 Berlin-to-Rome coupe to the 1998 911 Turbo that won the 24 Hours of LeMans. Among the German factory’s most significant successes were its first Formula One win, scored by Dan Gurney in the 1962 French Grand Prix at Rouen, and the domination of the Daytona 24-Hour enduro in the 1970s by Peter Gregg and Hurley Haywood in Brumos Carreras.

Also told were its failures at Indy, such as the Porsche that Ted Field was supposed to enter but that never came to fruition, and the overweight car that Al Unser drove briefly in 1987 before the program was scuttled.

Of special appeal to Porsche fans are 100 color and 100 black-and-white illustrations in the 192-page book.