WSJ. MAGAZINE
ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS PORSCHES in the world is a race car painted in a psychedelic swirl of purples and greens. Known as the "Hippie Car," the sleek, long-tailed Porsche 917LH stunned the racing world in 1970 by beating juggernaut Ferrari at the famed Le Mans race in France. It finished second behind another 917 on that torrentially rainy day, as captured in Steve McQueen's iconic racing movie, Le Mans.
Porsche says the Hippie Car raced again in 1971 in orange-and-blue colors, clocking 240 miles per hour, a record at the time.
That makes the vehicle an ultra-rare artifact -- with a market value potentially as high as the $25 million record currently held by another 917K. These days, masterpieces of motorsports history are selling for Pablo Picasso prices.
Only now, two people own what appears to be the same Hippie Car.
There's a purple-and-green Porsche at the Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum in Philadelphia. A second is owned by Frank Sytner, a former car dealer and race car driver who bought it in 2024 from another onetime race car driver in Brazil, who'd had it for decades.
The result is one of the strangest competitions in elite car history. While the museum has largely kept mum, Sytner, an 82-year-old Liverpool native based in Italy, has gone to great lengths to persuade collectors and experts of his car's singular authenticity. He launched a website to post his research last year and has taken his Porsche to upscale car shows and races around the world, including the Le Mans Classic, the Goodwood Festival of Speed and, this fall, the inaugural Rétromobile show in New York.
Last year, Sytner even visited the Simeone museum with his lawyer and adviser, where, over platters of pretzels and bagels, he says he politely asked its chairman, Robert Dusek, to further research its car. The museum confirmed the cordiality of their meeting. The problem for Simeone: The museum has never been able to verify with complete certainty that it has the Hippie Car, but its curators also harbor doubts about their newfound rival, according to Harry Hurst, the museum's director of programming. Were either car to come to market, the difference between the official Hippie Car and its copy could be tens of millions of dollars.
Dale Miller, a prototype Porsche adviser and former director of a historical car museum now known as the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida, has been tracking every hairpin twist. "Let's face it, one of these cars is being misrepresented," Miller says, "and something doesn't add up."
A MIX-UP LIKE THIS is easier than you might think. Before cars became collectibles, race cars were seen and valued as just that: cars to race.
Most race cars are identified by their chassis numbers, a serial number welded to a car's metal frame. In the 1960s and 1970s, racing teams at Porsche and elsewhere often changed out their cars' chassis numbers during the racing seasons, Miller says. Customs paperwork, or carnets, required listing a car's chassis number, but if an approved vehicle got damaged days or weeks ahead of a major race in another country, teams would often pry off its number and reattach it onto a spare that could race in its place.
No one cared about this hectic habit when the teams' goals were simply to win. For decades after each racing season ended, factories reworked or dismantled their cars for parts, or else sold them with whatever chassis numbers and records existed for them. Rupert Banner, a specialist at Gooding Christie's who sits on the Simeone board, says tracing original chassis details for historic race cars is now "forensically difficult" because, he says, the cars "were built for purpose, obsolete within moments and then treated by the factories as an excess to offload."
Both the Simeone museum and Sytner agree that the famous Hippie initially bore the chassis number 043. They also both believe the chassis numbers on each of their cars were, at some point, changed.
From there, their stories differ. The museum's founder believed his Hippie race car was retagged 044 by Porsche when the company sold the chassis several years after the Le Mans race. It went to a Hermosa Beach, California, car dealer named Vasek Polak for around $31,000 and then changed hands several more times.
Porsche says it actually sold at least two 917LHs to Polak -- and Sytner says one of these other cars later shipped to Brazil was the real Hippie Car, and it ultimately ended up with him.
WHEN FREDERICK A. SIMEONE, the retired neurosurgeon and legendary car collector who founded the Simeone museum, bought his purple-and-green Porsche in 1999, its provenance wasn't crystal clear.
At a Christie's auction the year before, the house said it was "believed to be the Martini/Gulf racing 917LH that placed second overall at the 1970 Le Mans." A California dealer consortium called Symbolic Motor Car Company bought it for $1 million and reached out to Porsche afterward to secure confirmation on the car's origins.
On October 1, 1998, Porsche's customer racing coordinator at the time, Jürgen Barth, wrote Symbolic a letter confirming that the factory had stripped the famous 043 to its metal frame after the 1971 race and later sold it to Polak "believing it to be 917-044," according to a copy of the letter shown to The Wall Street Journal.
Kevin Kelly, Simeone's executive director, says Frederick Simeone bought it from Symbolic in part because he believed in the car's possible ties to Le Mans. He also kept it purple and green in part because he liked to keep his cars as he bought them, dents and all. (Simeone died in 2022.)
"It's a fuzzy story," Kelly says, "but he was doing his own research."
Frank Jung, head of corporate archives and collections at the Porsche Museum, says the company's own internal archives are based on cataloging by the historian Walter Näher, and Näher's 917 research doesn't corroborate that 043 was switched out for 044. Jung said he can't verify the 1998 letter but said the company did make chassis-number changes to its race cars. Barth, the letter's author, retired and was later accused but not convicted in a German regional court of sharing car records with a group creating Porsche copies; he denied any wrongdoing. Barth disputed Jung's findings and said he stands by his own 160-page report on the 043.
"We refrain from making judgments regarding the authenticity or originality of the vehicles that exist today," Jung said.
A SELF-DESCRIBED PETROL HEAD, Sytner used to keep a wish list of cars he had never driven or owned but wanted. At some point, the 917 became "the one box that was never ticked," he says.
He says he set out to "find the truth" about the Hippie Car after he bought his vehicle from Massimo Pedrazzi, the Brazilian race car driver, in 2024.
Sytner hired Porsche experts including Andy Prill and automotive writer Doug Nye to study his acquisition. Sytner says Pedrazzi's 917 at one point carried the chassis number 040, but Porsche said the other 917 it sold to Polak had the chassis number 009.
Prill chalked up the chassis number confusion to a deliberate disguise: When Polak sold the car to Pedrazzi in the 1970s, Prill theorized, Polak switched out the chassis plate to avoid paying higher customs taxes on a famous race car. If customs officials checked on the car parts as they entered Brazil, they would see Porsche had logged 040 as scrapped -- and seemingly of lesser value. But Prill said he has no documentation to prove the chassis-plate swap.
Last year, Sytner also shipped his Porsche to Germany to be looked at by 917's original engineers, including Norbert Singer, who confirmed he looked in the car for about half an hour. Singer says he noticed some bodywork changes but can't vouch for either car as the original.
Sytner says he intended for the trip to be a reunion and a photo shoot, not a verification, adding about the car, "I feel very confident in its provenance."
Jung isn't ruling for either car. He said Porsche's records now indicate the Simeone's 044 was a spare when Polak bought it, but Polak's other 917 wasn't logged as the famed 043, either. Porsche is open to having "constructive discussions," Jung said, adding that he hopes "the owners of both vehicles are working together to establish the actual facts."
Lately Sytner has been campaigning for his Hippie Car to be dubbed the world's first art car.
This bragging right is built on the history of Porsche designer Anatole Lapine, who slathered the 043's white fiberglass body in 1,500 spray cans of purple and green paint on the morning of the Le Mans race that would make it famous.
Sytner says he's not trying to market his car to sell it -- it's not for sale, he says -- but he thinks among the Le Mans cars, it should be considered a work of art.
Miller, the car historian and consultant, says artists such as Sonia Delaunay were well known for transforming cars, including the 1925 Citroën B12, with geometric shapes many years before. Porsche said it has never referred to the Hippie as an art car.
Recently, Sytner produced a video on the grounds of the historic Château de Chantilly. "This is not just a car with a significant race history," Sytner's cousin Jeremy Jackson-Sytner, an event organizer known as Mr. Concours, says to the camera. "It's an extremely rare and hugely valuable piece of moving sculpture."