The Spirit of McQueen - Porsche 918 at Circuit des 24 Heures

To some, Steve McQueen is best remembered for starring in twenty films and having fourteen appearances on television across his twenty seven year career. His onscreen/offscreen "King of Cool" image is still very strong in the public eye even today, nearly forty years after his passing.

He was also fairly famous for being a race car enthusiast, collector and especially driver, never passing up the chance to do both when the opportunity was presented. Onscreen, he would perform a lot of his own stunts, when the producers and insurance underwriters would let him. Offscreen, he was a serious driver.

McQueen started his formal racing career when he entered a Siata 208S in the 14th Palm Springs Road Race in 1958. During the 1961 British Touring Car Championship season, McQueen would finish third in a Mini at Brands Hatch. In 1970, he raced at 12 Hours of Sebring with a cast on his left foot (thanks to a motorcycle accident two weeks earlier). McQueen and co-driver Peter Revson would take the Three-Litre Class title with a Porsche 908/02.

There have been volumes written and documentaries produced about McQueen's movie and racing career that would be more informative in content, so to cover all that same martial here would be an exhaustive and pointless venture.

Instead, I will talk about my personal perspective on one of what I would consider to be McQueen's greatest movies (the other would be Bullitt), Le Mans.

Of everything I have seen in my life, Le Mans has had the biggest impact on how I look at cars from the outside and how to drive them from the inside. Part drama, part documentary, the movie is an immersive time capsule of a era where drivers fought each other and themselves to not just win races, but to stay alive to see another day. Their attention to minute details and overall environmental awareness seems to be something lost on today's everyday motorists, even with all of the technological advances in "driver's aids."

In the modern world of "over-safe" vehicles, be it on the road or the track, this movie could be a real somber eye opener of how far we have come (or gone backwards, depending on your perspective) from having a driver in control of a vehicle and not a series of computers.

Ignore the look on my face, I was just told how much the car I am touching is worth.

The current Porsche 918 is so much the spiritual and technological successor to McQueen's 917 that once I learned our local Porsche showroom possessed one, I just had to see it and if lucky enough, touch it. Imagine my surprise once I saw it was wearing Gulf livery, almost completing a connection from my youth to today.

Steve McQueen died in November of 1980, when I was entering my third month of Grade 1, so I will never meet the man. However, I do believe that anyone who understood what he was trying to do with Le Mans, that connection he had with that Porsche 917, the very package of it all, will have a little McQueen inside of them....