| Creator | Franz Gygax |
| Printing year | 1951 |
| Sheet size (cm) | 102×63.5 |
| Printing technique | Lithograph |
| Printer | J. C. Müller |
| Condition | A |
| Asking price | on inquiry |
| Categories | Cars | Bikes | Racing, Grisons, Sports |
After the Grisons section of the Swiss Automobile Club had suffered repeated deficits with the Maloja mountain race, first held in 1938 – not least because of the attractive but too remote route – the people in charge decided to try a much more accessible 6,25 km course between Tiefencastel and Lenzerheide (altitude difference 505 m) in 1951. On the occasion of this new start, the organizers decided to commission a poster from Franz Gygax (1915– 1998), who had designed three travel posters for the Lenzerheide-Valbella tourist office just one year earlier.
Meanwhile, his only racing poster is by far his most sought-after – also because Gygax placed the blood-red and powerfully staged Alfa Romeo Tipo 159 against the backdrop of the Lenzerhorn, a 700 kg 8-cylinder racing car that produced almost 430 hp from just 1,5 liters of displacement and on which Nino Farina and Juan Manuel Fangio won the first two Formula 1 World Championships in 1950 and 1951 (then Alfa Romeo withdrew – which Enzo Ferrari knew how to take advantage of).
Who cares today that the Tipo 159 didn’t even take part in the race? The winner of the day was Rudolf Fischer from Zurich in a Ferrari 212 with an average speed of 106.3 km/h. However, the race in Lenzerheide did not yield a profit either; 4000 francs were missing at the end.
And finally, a fun fact: Did you know that the Grisons government banned cars from all roads in the canton in August 1900? The ban was only lifted 25 years later in a referendum…