“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 was very smart but didn’t make a big deal about it. He drove and engineered race cars for a man named Roger. Roger was a stickler for details. Together, they were like chocolate and peanut butter.
Today, we tell you about the time in the 1970s that Roger, Mark, and a guy named Flegl turned a barely drivable 700-hp Porsche into a 1500-hp dollbaby so blisteringly successful that it killed a prestigious race series deader than hell.
This show’s format rotates weekly, because squirrel. This episode is our monthly deep dive into an epic moment from racing history—or in this case, a series of moments across years:

[drumroll please]

Mark Donohue, Roger Penske, the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, and the bonkers development process for the 1972–1973 Porsche 917/10 and 917/30!

Related Trivia: Jeff met Mark Donohue 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.