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Wie vielen Lancia-Freunden bekannt, wird aktuell ein Lancia Stratos bei RM Sotheby’s in Amerika zur Versteigerung angeboten, dessen Besitzer sich in die lange traditionsreiche Liste der Lancia-Privatfahrer einordnen darf.
Anatoly „Toly“ Arutunoff, in den Siebzigern in den USA bekannter Privatfahrer, setzte einen Lancia Stratos nach IMSA Regeln modifiziert mehr oder weniger erfolgreich bei diversen Rundstreckenrennen in den USA ein.
Aus „Hagerty Media“
“Funded by a family oil fortune, Arutunoff filled his life and passport racing in amateur series all over the globe. He sat on SCCA grids in the 1960s and 1970s, the golden age of sports-car racing. He ran the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash—the famously illegal 1970s cross-country race that birthed two Burt Reynolds movies—not once but twice, declaring it “a day and a half of paranoia bracketed by great parties at each end.” He tackled both the Pikes Peak hill climb and the very first One Lap of America. His multiple stints at Italy’s infamous Targa Florio included the final FIA-sanctioned race in 1973, flat-out through Sicilian mountains, and the event’s first running for vintage cars, a tamer event years later.
Arutunoff is the only member of his family to have so deeply invested in car racing. His father, Armais, the son of an Armenian soapmaker, emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1923 following the Russian Revolution. Armais brought with him both his family and a new design for a submersible electric oil pump. The Arutunoffs landed in Los Angeles, then Michigan, and finally oil-rich Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 45 minutes north of Tulsa. Backed by Phillips Petroleum Company, Armais began to manufacture his pump (U.S. Patent no. 1,610,726). By 1938, the Russian Electrical Dynamo of Arutunoff (REDA) Pump Company was lifting an estimated two percent of all U.S. oil.”
Aus „Autoweek“:
“One of his Lancias, a Flavia Zagato, he calls the ugliest ever made.”
Eine Liste seiner Einsätze bei diversen Rennen in den USA, nicht angeführt unter anderem der Einsatz 1983 in Miami beim Budweiser GP.
http://www.ultimateracinghistory.com/racelist2.php?uniqid=14764
Weiters aus“ Hagerty Media“:
“Two Zagato-bodied beauties—a baby-blue Lancia Appia and a wine-colored Bristol—rest shoulder-to-shoulder by the garage’s two-car-wide door. The Bristol is shorn of rear wheels and atop jack stands. The Appia wears a scrapbook of stickers across each fender: Circuit de Lédenon (France); Lane Motor Museum (Nashville, Tennessee); Automobile Club d’Italia; Alpine Rally Association; Ristorante Nino Corsaro, located in the shadow of Europe’s highest active volcano; Giro di Sicilia, a retracing of the Targa Florio managed by a car club that refused to abandon the course after the FIA struck it from the international calendar.”
Man kann nur hoffen, dass der Stratos in der Art und Weise erhalten bleibt, wie er aktuell angeboten wird, mit all den Spuren und Modifizierungen der vielen Renneinsätze in den USA.
Der Link zum Fahrzeug und zur Versteigerung:
G. Wöss / 07.2022
Das Ergebnis des Stratos:
| 215 | Lancia Stratos HF | 1976 | $ 400’000 | – 600’000 | VP 510’000 | $ | = +13,2% |