I remember the Cyclops cartoons, What a fun little ride idea..Reminds me of motorized bar-stools too. Now we have the Smart Car, kinda close if you added the lights and wings! Didn't someone build a Cyclops on a go-kart chassis??? Fuzzy memory, but I think I recall seeing a photo of it...
Kremer Porsche project...
Open roof for rear-view mirror....
Well now, there was a real good reason for that opening...[ From Jan Luhn's website] .....
"The Kremer brothers, famous for their successfully modified Porsche 935s (the most famous of all being the K3, which had won Le Mans in 1979), had been collecting parts for a planned one-off 917, intended as a show/concept project. Sufficient parts were in hand when the 1981 Le Mans regulations were released late in 1980. This was to be an interim/transition year between the old Group 6 and the new Group C categories, and as such created a loophole whereby a closed car could run in Group 6 as long as there was some sort of permanent opening in the roof. This was incorporated into the design of the 'new' 917 to see the roof mounted rear view mirror.
Kremer approached the ACO who were very keen on the idea, especially as it would create substantial interest for a year that had little else to offer, despite a country still riding high after Rondeau's win in 1980 and the little local WM team running four cars, two of which were running to provisional 1982 regulations and as such were the first Group C cars to officially enter Le Mans as they had their own category." ....."The concept and basis of the project was to take the original design, update it to incorporate current technology and build the new car from scratch at Kremer's workshops in Cologne. The Porsche factory co-operated by allowing the brothers to use the original drawings. The pay back for the factory would be lessons learned with reintroducing coupé aerodynamics as 'Spyders' had been to the fore since 1972. Porsche themselves were well advanced with the Group C 956 programme but any information gleaned would be most useful, even at that stage." ....." A particularly problematic area in the redesign was adapting suspension geometry and components to cope with the huge increase in tyre technology in the 10 year gap"....." Kremer opted for the 4.9-litre, [ VS the 4.5 ] assuming that the increased power but poorer fuel consumption would be a better bet against the turbocharged cars that would use more fuel anyway. With the project always running close to schedule, little time was devoted to the aerodynamics; the team concentrating more on the engineering side (similar to Porsche when they developed the 'Moby Dick' 935-78, hence the particularly long wing endplates on that car - they never had time on the track to evaluate trimming them up!). Body styling of the 917K81 was of course pretty much already done for the overall look but Kremer 'guessed' the rest, choosing an almost flat rear deck with a full width rear wing mounted on endplates integrated into the bodywork. Also gone were the rounded sides, latest 'slab' sides were introduced to assist the whole 'ground effect' underneath."
So there you have it....The Kremers got to play, and the factory got some small amount of aero data before the actual 956 bodies went into build and test. It was still the days before high power computational fluid dynamics and easy access to large wind tunnels, so common today in high budget racing, so any functional knowledge gain was well worth the pursuit.
I did not know that this car even existed until only a few days ago...It is indeed a rare one-off, authentic Porsche, and yet unique in almost every way. Sadly, not successful in the 2 times it was campaigned.
Jennifer