Let Automobilist Hang A Porsche 906 Or A Lancia Stratos In Your Living Room

March 29, 2018

Find these posters and more work from Automobilist in the Petrolicious Shop

We’ve written our praises for the team of artists behind Unique & Limited quite often here at Petrolicious, and today we’re happy to be adding four new posters to our shop from their Automobilist brand: two of the legendary Alitalia Lancia Stratos, and two featuring the 1967 Japanese GP-winning Porsche 906 Carrera 6.

Porsche 906 Carrera 6

Most people know the 906 as Porsche’s last street-legal factory racing car and for its string of class wins in 1966—its first season of competition no less—at such prestigious events as the 1000km of the Nürburgring, the 1000km of Spa, the 24 Hours of Daytona, the 12 hours of Sebring, and of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It also took an overall win at that year’s Targa Florio in the hands of privateers. The car was a marked improvement on the already-successful 904 it replaced (for one thing it was significantly lighter thanks to a tube frame chassis and a hand-laid rather than sprayed fiberglass body that didn’t need to be reinforce the structure like on the 904s), and Porsche remained the dominant force in the sub-two-liter category. The races above weren’t its only victories of course, and the 906 featured in the posters below spent its time racing in Japan rather than continental Europe. Before the Japanese GP became part of the Formula 1 calendar in 1976, it was open to sports cars, and the #8 906 driven by Tetsu Ikuzawa was the overall winner in 1967.

The above design depicts Ikuzawa’s race-winning Porsche head on with the iconic profile of a snow-capped Mt. Fuji looming in the background. After the first two iterations of the Japanese GP were held at Suzuka, it was moved over to Fuji where it would remain until 1987 before moving back to Suzuka once more, but the 906’s win in the earliest years of the race represented a truly international effort in motorsport, and Automobilist’s artistic tribute to that moment captures this juxtaposition of German engineering and Japanese landscape with a beautiful balance of shape and color. The layout is arranged such that even the loud colors and multiple design elements on the poster never seem to fight for attention.

Below, the same 906 is presented in a more descriptive manner, without the stylistic adornments of the mountain or the model name. This is part of their “Colors of Speed” line, wherein mainstays from the history of motorsport are digitally recreated—down to the dirt and bug splatters—and set against a full color background that ties into the livery. Great for collecting no doubt, but each functions as is a standalone piece too.

Lancia Stratos

The Lancia Stratos is about as Italian as it comes, and especially so in the case of the Alitalia works rally cars that competed in the 1970s’ WRC—if you have an engine from Ferrari powering your Bertone-designed Lancia, you may as well choose an Italian airline as the main sponsor, especially since the Stratos left the ground quite often. “Compete” might not be the best word to use though when talking about the car in its heyday, for the wondrous wedge would bring the championship home three times in a row between ’74 and ’76, and it kept on winning races until the early 1980s when it should have had no business being competitive against the new crop. It was a purpose-built Group 4 machine from the get-go, and it transformed the way teams would approach the discipline from then on. The car depicted here is the winner of the 1976 Sanremo Rally.

The poster above makes great use of selective detail, with the resulting image of the Alitalia Stratos striking an interesting middle ground between a studio photo, a digital rendering, and an action shot. The background has been wiped away leaving only the angular race car and a plume of gritty dust trailing behind its charge forward. It’s tough to make a traditionally “cool” angle like this translate into a higher form of art than an enlarged snapshot put into a frame, but by isolating the essence of the scene rather than showing its entirety, they’ve managed to make a sliding Stratos into something even more captivating.

Below is another Alitalia Stratos, but this time the focus is on the car’s winning history overall. Competing for just a few years shy of a full decade at the top of the sport, it’s as canonical to rallying as any Quattro or WRX that followed, and I’d argue much more so in fact. The poster below is the perfect tribute to the illustrious record of this Lancia what with the flags of the rallies and countries and cities it traveled to, and the piece is part of Automobilist’s new “Artist Edition” series, which will see them collaborating with leading artists from around the world. This was done by Pavel Fuksa, a Czech creative director and graphic artist. It is limited to 1,000 pieces.