Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen the Steve McQueen’s movie Le Mans and don’t want to know how it ends, might we interest you in clicking to another Autoblog post?
Monterey Car Week gathers the perfect audience for a bauble such as this, the 1970 Porsche 917K hero car from the 1971 movie Le Mans. Steve McQueen’s Solar Productions bought chassis 917-022 from Porsche to be the #20 car his character in the film, Michael Delaney, attempts to pilot to cinematic victory at La Sarthe. According to behind-the-scenes tales, after Delaney crashed the #20 beyond repair in the film (actually a Lola wearing 917 bodywork), the crew repainted the car as the #21 917 that Delaney took over for the final stint and drove to second place. That’s a key point here: Second place. The winning car in Le Mans is a different chassis. The lure of this car is that it’s the one McQueen bought for the film and drove, and the one he signed afterward with, “‘Finished.’ Thanks for staying together.”
As far as we can tell, this chassis last hit the auction block at the RM Monterey Sports Car Auction in 2000, changing hands for $1,320,000 after fees. A Hagerty piece reveals that Jerry Seinfeld bought the car in 2001. Mecum hasn’t provided the ownership history and doesn’t say if Seinfeld still owns the 917K, but claims a “complete and known ownership history.”
There will be plenty of sleuthing into that and other issues over the next five months, though, since the Porsche isn’t going up for auction until Mecum’s Kisssimmee 2025 auctions running from January 7-19, 2025. We don’t have a pre-sale estimate, either. The most recent 917K affiliated with Le Mans to sell at auction earned $10,080,000 after fees at Gooding & Company’s Pebble Beach Auction. That remains a record amount for the 917 and the entire Porsche brand.
We know where auction prices have gone since then, and this example will be aided by having just been restored to 1970 as-new spec. As McQueen’s aura has grown — a nutty fact considering the guy was called “The King of Cool” when he was alive — and 917K values have climbed, it takes more investigation than one would expect to figure out which Le Mans car deserves which accolade, though. The parsing is made more difficult by teams running eight 917s in the 1970 race, Porsche rebuilding wrecked chassis’ with extended chassis numbers, and Solar Productions using three 917s for filming, all painted with liveries from the 1970 race.
For instance, in 2021, RM Sotheby’s Monterey Auction offered a 1970 917K that raced in Le Mans and appeared in the movie Le Mans, saying 917-031/026 was “Immortalised as the winning car in Steve McQueen’s 1971 Solar Productions film Le Mans.” However, this car appeared in the 1971 film only in racing footage that the film’s production crew shot during the 1970 24 Hours of Le Mans. In reality, Mike Hailwood wrecked chassis 917-026 on the way back to the pits on lap 49 of the 1970 race, Porsche rebuilt it as chassis 917-031/026, and it wasn’t used for movie filming in 1971.
Before that, Gooding & Co. added chassis 917-024-2 to the catalog of its Pebble Beach Auction in 2014. This had been a works team test car that racing driver Jo Siffert bought in 1971 and rented to Solar Productions for the film. This was the winning car in the film, the #22 driven by Larry Wilson, played by actor Christopher Waite. Gooding pulled the car from sale before the auction without explanation, and we can’t find record of a public sale since. Racing driver David Piper crashed the third 917K during filming, a real Porsche loaned by JW Automotive. Its whereabouts are unknown.
For the detailed rundown of what’s what, check out Gianni Cabiglia’s breakdown at Flat Sixes.
Porsche 917K examples not affiliated with Le Mans haven’t crossed the $5,000,000 mark in public auctions. This could be the one to surpass $20 million next year. Let the hype begin.