After two crashes during testing with the prototype 917 040/006 and 917 041, Porsche was under considerable time pressure. The 24 Hours of Le Mans race was just three weeks away. Two new long-tail chassis, namely 917 042 and 917 043, were prepared as quickly as possible. On 6 June 1970, Willi Kauhsen took part in testing with 917 043 in Hockenheim. The handling was still problematic; Kauhsen informed the Porsche engineers that the car sometimes touched the track with its underbody. Helmut Flegl delved into the problem. The long-tail Porsche was fitted with a rear wing that could be adjusted to suit different tracks. Final testing with Vic Elford was promising, so 917 043 was loaded up and sent to Le Mans.

Le Mans 1970 – Second place despite handling problems

The car competed under the banner of Hans-Dieter Dechent’s Martini Racing Team. It was equipped with the tried-and-tested 4.5-litre engine, which at that time delivered around 545 hp. Porsche competed at Le Mans with a total of seven 917s, two of which were long-tail versions. There were 11 Ferrari 512 S cars, only four of which were entered by the factory. The second long-tail 917 from Porsche Salzburg with Elford/Kurt Ahrens had a 4.9-litre engine with around 600 hp. In addition, there were the 917 KH from Porsche Salzburg for Hans Herrmann/Richard Attwood with the 4.5-litre engine, three 917 KHs from John Wyer’s team – two with the 4.9-litre engine and one with 4.5 litres – and a 917 KH from the Solar Production team with a 4.5-litre motor. Due to the wider overall speed range, the long-tail Porsches had a five-speed transmission, while the short-tail models had to make do with four gears …

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by Thomas Nehlert

Photographs: Porsche, McKlein, Getty Images, Michael Keyser

After the 1971 Le Mans 24 Hours, the second and last race outing for 917 043, the long-tail Porsche was returned to the factory. Porsche ended its collaboration with John Wyer’s team (JWAE) at the end of the season because, from 1972 onwards, only three-litre prototypes were permitted in the World Sportscar Championship. The body on 917 043 was dismantled in August 1971 and mounted on Porsche 917/10 001 for wind tunnel testing as part of Porsche’s new Can-Am project. Meanwhile, chassis 917 043 was fitted with its original bodywork from 1970.

Stopover at Vasek Polak’s

On 10 December 1971, numerous Porsche racing cars from the previous season were registered as ‘scrapped’, including 917 043. In truth, however, these extremely valuable racing cars were preserved after what was merely a formal writing-off process for bookkeeping. Porsche sold a large part of its remaining stock to two customers, Freisinger and Vasek Polak. Polak, based in the USA, acquired a huge collection of spare parts, engines and transmissions, as well as no fewer than six Porsche 917s over the years, including the 917 043 LH. He had a huge warehouse in Los Angeles filled with old Porsche racing cars and vast quantities of parts. In his halls the old Porsches were restored to top condition, and after reassembly, Polak took great care to ensure that the correct chassis numbers were returned to the respective vehicles. That was also the case with 917 043 …

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by Thomas Nehlert

Photographs: Porsche, Dino Eisele, Imago, Christian Sandler, Jason Fong

After almost three years, the ground-up restoration of the ex-Anatoly Arutunoff Lancia Stratos HF Group 4, affectionately known as ‘The Duck’ thanks to its bulging bright yellow bodywork, is finally complete. This was the delivery sign-off shakedown, which pre-cursed a rather sad ‘arrivederci’ …

Unusually for a Stratos, its story was forged not on the special stages of the World Rally Championship, but rather on the history-steeped road-racing circuits of the United States of America. Originally built as a Giallo Fly road car with a Bleu interior (hence why it became affectionately known as ‘The Duck’), the car was acquired new by Oklahoma-based entrepreneur, Ferrari dealer and oil industry heir Anatoly ‘Toly’ Arutunoff. Arutunoff was the youngest son of Russian émigré Armais Arutunoff, who had built a sizeable fortune after inventing the world’s first submergible oil pump. A reportedly charming and colourful character, ‘Toly’ had begun racing in 1959 and, over the course of the next three decades, earned a number of accolades both stateside and in Europe.

On a brisk November morning in 1976, Arutunoff arrived at the Lancia factory in Turin to personally collect his new Stratos HF, for which he had paid the princely sum of 13,542 US dollars. Adorned with the temporary export registration ‘EE 74313’, this car was driven through the night to Cherbourg in Northern France, where it was loaded aboard the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 and set sail for New York.

It gets better. Arutunoff took this Lancia fresh off the boat after its maiden voyage and drove 1,400 miles through thick snow and treacherous ice to Tulsa, Oklahoma. During the transatlantic crossing and with several hundred Stratos miles under his belt, ‘Toly’ had already begun to think about what special modifications he was going to make to his new car to make it as user-friendly and, perhaps most importantly, competitive on the racetrack as possible. Almost unbelievably, we have Arutunoff’s hand-written notes about the car on the RMS Queen Elizabeth-headed paper …

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by Max Girardo

Photographs: Gabriele Natalini for Girardo & Co.