The might of Mezger
No, these are not photographs – they’re digital images that have been rendered in painstaking detail by the London-based production studio Ink as an extension of its Plain Bodies series. The subject is the stillborn 6.6-litre, 750HP flat-sixteen engine that was developed by the legendary Porsche engineer Hans Mezger, who recently passed away. The idea was that if Porsche was going to enter the Can-Am championship with the 917, it needed a more powerful engine to match the American V8-powered competition. Unfortunately, the sixteen-cylinder unit proved both too heavy and temperamental and Porsche instead turned to the dark art of turbocharging for its Can-Am effort. And we all know how successful that turned out to be…
Photos: Ink