Giorgio Pianta

'Died recently.
I thought it might have been mentioned on here by now.
Here's a photo of the man.

I was reading about him in autosport mag last night.

Posted a few pics of him on the Lancia Motor Club Forum. Here's a few from when Andrea & I met him in Turin in 2006. It was the first time he'd seen a Strato replica and was fascinated by it, we spent 20 minutes talking about the Stratos and Alen plus the 037, S4 and Integrales.

Guy, if Giorgio Pianta liked it, that's good enough?
I guess those photos are treasured even more now?

Certainly are Chris. The memory too... We'd pulled up at the La Mandria test circuit for the regularity test which we were to do after lunch and he was there as one of the dignitaries. I remember that we'd just parked the car up (reversing a Stratos isn't easy and it was a very hot day so it was just abandoned and sod the white lines, plenty of space) and got out. Next thing is one of our guides comes up and says that Giorgio Pianta has asked if he can come and talk to us!! Wasn't going to say no to royalty was I!! The first thing I told him was that it was a replica and he said yes, he'd realised as the steering wheel was on the right but wanted to have a really close look so we opened the car up and he crawled all over it looking at the mechanics of the car. Comments were all great and he seemed genuinely impressed with the car itself and the design of the chassis.
We spent so much time talking to him that I think others might have missed out but then we missed lunch that day too..... The regularity event took place in the afternoon with about 80 odd cars competing. The test circuit had been split into four timed sections with different average speeds on each, none difficult for a powerful car but some of the smaller engined cars had to be pedalled quite hard to get near the target times/averages. Andrea had never done anything like a regularity event before and the electronic stopwatch they gave us didn't work so we had to use the stopwatches on the dash. Plus speeds had to be converted from Km to Miles so it took a bit of doing. We expected to hear the result at the end of the day but nothing was forthcoming. The results were finally announced at the end of the week and somehow Andrea & I had managed to win the Group 4 regularity with times closest to the targets on the timed sections.

All in all a fantastic day!

Guy