The shriek behind our right ear is nearing hysteria as the on-ramp starts to peter out while the firewall separating our back from the feral Ferrari V6 offers all the insulating properties of a soggy newspaper. We're torn between the need to glance at the tach and a flick of the head to check the lane this car urgently needs to occupy.
We decide to check the lane first, which is borderline useless because the rear-quarter blind spot could hide a big-rig truck and there's not even a mirror on the right-hand fender. Then we check the revs, and out of sheer habit, the speedo, too. And start to laugh. Even with 1,000 rpm left to redline and a gear to spare, this Lancia Stratos HF has already gone seriously, license-threateningly post-legal.
Unless a big-rig truck can accelerate like an F18 fighter plane leaving a carrier deck, there ain't a ghost of a chance anything back there will trouble us, and the odds of getting tapped by some dimwit who didn't see this Roman candle of a car exploding into his world is about nil.
So we grab another gear and bury our right foot, the engine howl keeps coming and the Stratos slices cruelly through the traffic stream. That laugh of ours is developing some nasty psychotic undertones now, and we find ourselves returning the startled, wide-eyed stares of the drivers we leave behind with a leering, bad-boy sneer. God, we wish we'd dressed in black leather today.
Blame It on a Troubled Youth
Driving a Lancia Stratos HF is an invitation to attitude problems, and we're feeling especially antisocial since we're getting to drive two in a row, one of them the very first of the breed, the actual 1971 prototype of the 492 cars that were built between 1972 and 1974. Ever since Carrozzeria Bertone sparked the whole Stratos phenomenon in 1970 with a concept car by rising young designer Marcello Gandini (famed for the Lamborghini Miura and Countach), this insolent midengine Lancia has rattled the status quo and irritated the smug and complacent.
The Lancia Stratos has been rattling quite a few cages recently, as this very car appeared this past April at the exclusive (and very traditional) Villa d'Este Concours d'Elegance in Italy and nearly took 1st overall, raising quite a few eyebrows in some circles. This car also appeared in the Cartier concours at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the U.K. the weekend after our drive, and then has gone on to be part of the celebration of Lancia at the 2008 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in Monterey.
Built in secret (even from Lancia), Gandini's original radical, wedge-shaped, insanely low "Project Zero" was planned by Nuncio Bertone as pure commercial shock therapy, intended to convince executives of struggling Lancia that what they needed was a brash and exciting image builder, assembled on subcontract by a prestigious design house. Such as, oh, maybe Bertone.
Who knew that it would become the poster child for the midengine car? It's a scandalous, brutal midengine rejection of all the graceful, front-engine cars that had come before. Definitely a car of new beginnings, completely different even now.
Raging Lust
Project Zero was unveiled at the 1970 Turin Auto Show. Legend has it the deal was sealed the day Nuncio Bertone drove the Zero to Lancia headquarters in Turin, because when there was a delay raising the traffic barrier at the entrance, he just ran the thing straight under it.
In reality, the project had lots of barriers to overcome, chief among them political resistance within Fiat, which had recently taken over the struggling Lancia brand. The idea had some powerful friends at court, however. Cesare Fiorio, Lancia's competition manager, was looking for Lancia's next-generation rally winner. At age 31 (a year younger than Gandini), Fiorio had already produced international rally success for Lancia, which gave him considerable clout at Fiat.
But what really won over the foot-draggers was the prototype that Gandini created after the Stratos Zero. It was the first real Stratos, a fully functional, streetable development mule for all that came after, yet was also a center-stage, Day-Glo shocker of a car. Standing next to that car now, keys in hand, we understand how the unlikely Stratos program finally got off the ground.
If there was ever a machine to bring out the raging car lust inherent in even the hardest of Italian auto-mogul hearts, this is surely it.
Way Beyond Supercar
Some call the Lancia Stratos HF (HF stands for "high fidelity") a mini-supercar, but we don't agree. The typical supercar — no matter how exotic its bloodlines — is designed primarily for road use. The Stratos came to be built as nothing less than a series-built competition car, launched as Lancia's entry in the FIA world rally championship in 1972 and virtually unbeatable until 1975 when it was retired to give the lowly Fiat 131 a chance at competition glory. The Stratos was street-legal merely to satisfy the FIA rulebook, and the true beauty of Gandini's Stratos prototype is that he nailed this race-ready purity of purpose so squarely.
For the Miura and Countach, Gandini was charged with only the styling; for the Stratos, Bertone gave him the whole ball of wax from mechanical layout to the final form. What Gandini gave Lancia was a midengine layout built around a central monocoque with bolt-on space frames front and rear, fully adjustable suspension, four-wheel disc brakes and a transversely mounted DOHC Ferrari Dino V6 with a five-speed transaxle.
Most important, Gandini also delivered a simple, flip-up fiberglass body with a brutally stunning shape that makes most any other rally car (including the current lot of them) about as exciting as a refrigerator wearing number decals. Then he painted it screaming fluorescent blood-orange.
Chris Hrabalek, a London-based automotive designer who owns the prototype, calls it "an original work of art, by the hand of the artist himself." In 1971, the idea of the midengine road car was still exotic. The 1968 Ferrari 246 GT Dino had only recently made such a thing practical on the street and Chevrolet was busily exploring the midengine concept for the Corvette. But Gandini single-handedly yanked the whole midengine idea into reality with the Stratos, an angry rejection of the glossy GTs of the 1960s.
Even now, no other midengine car looks so modern as the Lancia Stratos. Its shape still has appeal, as Hrabalek proved when he drew rave reviews with his Fenomenon NewStratos, a concept car for an evolutionary interpretation of the Stratos idea that was unveiled at the 2005 Geneva Auto Show. Although Hrabalek was unable to get the project off the ground, he has found solace in what must be the largest collection of the Lancia Stratos in existence, some nine examples, including Gandini's original wooden mock-up.
Sound System by Ferrari
Amazingly, the Stratos production cars (if you can call 492 homologation units "production") all got the same wholesome goodness as the prototype. Oh sure, there are detail and materials differences, but Gandini's core vision survived unmolested. It says volumes that when Fiorio and company needed to build up a new rally car, they just went over to the Bertone workshop and pulled a candidate off the end of the assembly line.
So crawling from the Stratos prototype and into the immaculate Lancia Stratos HF Stradale road car is exactly the same delicate and vaguely humiliating improvisation of twisting and squirming and pelvis dislocation, and the bare-bones interior of the production car is basically a similar splatter of off-the-shelf 1970s Fiat furnishings.
The big sexy windshield will cook you instantly while you're stationary, even in the feeble English excuse for summer sun. The Ferrari V6 takes a healthy prod of the triple Weber carbs before it'll start, while finding reverse in the ZF-built, dogleg-style gearbox is completely trial and error (probably just as well, since from the driver seat you can't see crap back there anyway).
The steering at low speed isn't nearly as heavy as we expected, nor the pedal offset around the intrusive front wheel well as distracting. The Webers don't like moping around, though, and there's a lot of throttle-blipping involved in keeping them clear when creeping around a parking lot. Glorious, snarling, spitting, whoop-whoop, neck-hair-on-end sort of throttle-blipping — a terrible inconvenience, we could hardly stand it¿.
Grabbing the Tail of the Tiger
But sweet Holy Mother do the carbs clean out quick when the driving gets serious. Keep the tach needle above five grand — easy enough, the 65-degree V6 revs like a motorcycle engine — and you'll wonder why electronic fuel injection was even invented, since the throttle response from the Webers is already positively clairvoyant.
The book says the Stradale's 2.4-liter V6 does 190 horsepower at 7,400 rpm (the rally cars made 240 hp or so) and makes 169 pound-feet of torque at 4,000 rpm, so the car is good for zero to 60 mph in the sub-7s — impressive enough, if not life-changing. What the book doesn't say is the effect of 190 instantly available horses pushing only some 2,161 pounds balanced 46 percent front/54 percent rear on a tiny 85.8-inch wheelbase when you kick it at about 40 mph.
This, not drag strip launches, is the measure of a real car, and from 40 mph well into triple digits, the Stradale is fierce, with surging acceleration that seems to build steadily all the way to redline in every gear.
Handling at fast road speeds is exactly what you'd expect from a short midengine car with an engine that's mounted a little too high to deliver the center of gravity you want. You've got single-seater-type reflexes and feedback plus light, sensitive controls, all with the tiniest suggestion that when you push it a bit that this package with a miniscule wheelbase and low polar moment of inertia wouldn't give a helluva lot of warning once it decided to bite you.
Nothing unseemly, yet just a little reminder that the Stratos truly is a genuine competition car, never intended to make any allowances or compromises, and if you're going to get the full maximum from the car, you'd better be as good as it is.
Your Mother Would Be Ashamed of You
All this is naturally a part of the attraction of the Lancia Stratos, and why driving one — no matter if, yeah, sure, the car is far more capable than you are — makes you feel kind of special, kind of cocky.
More than 30 years after Project Zero first turned a wheel, people still turn and gawk at the Lancia Stratos, and sometimes, like the soccer mom waiting to cross with urchin in hand when we come to a stop at the traffic light, they give you the laser look that says you're living so far outside their drab, ordinary civilian comfort zone, you might as well be a vampire.
That's why we hold until the two of them take the first step off the curb before we give the engine one single almighty whoop; the woman jumps and jerks the kid back so hard his feet come off the ground.
We grin that nasty grin again and give her a little nod. That's right, baby, we bad. We bad.
We decide to check the lane first, which is borderline useless because the rear-quarter blind spot could hide a big-rig truck and there's not even a mirror on the right-hand fender. Then we check the revs, and out of sheer habit, the speedo, too. And start to laugh. Even with 1,000 rpm left to redline and a gear to spare, this Lancia Stratos HF has already gone seriously, license-threateningly post-legal.
Unless a big-rig truck can accelerate like an F18 fighter plane leaving a carrier deck, there ain't a ghost of a chance anything back there will trouble us, and the odds of getting tapped by some dimwit who didn't see this Roman candle of a car exploding into his world is about nil.
So we grab another gear and bury our right foot, the engine howl keeps coming and the Stratos slices cruelly through the traffic stream. That laugh of ours is developing some nasty psychotic undertones now, and we find ourselves returning the startled, wide-eyed stares of the drivers we leave behind with a leering, bad-boy sneer. God, we wish we'd dressed in black leather today.
Blame It on a Troubled Youth
Driving a Lancia Stratos HF is an invitation to attitude problems, and we're feeling especially antisocial since we're getting to drive two in a row, one of them the very first of the breed, the actual 1971 prototype of the 492 cars that were built between 1972 and 1974. Ever since Carrozzeria Bertone sparked the whole Stratos phenomenon in 1970 with a concept car by rising young designer Marcello Gandini (famed for the Lamborghini Miura and Countach), this insolent midengine Lancia has rattled the status quo and irritated the smug and complacent.
The Lancia Stratos has been rattling quite a few cages recently, as this very car appeared this past April at the exclusive (and very traditional) Villa d'Este Concours d'Elegance in Italy and nearly took 1st overall, raising quite a few eyebrows in some circles. This car also appeared in the Cartier concours at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the U.K. the weekend after our drive, and then has gone on to be part of the celebration of Lancia at the 2008 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in Monterey.
Built in secret (even from Lancia), Gandini's original radical, wedge-shaped, insanely low "Project Zero" was planned by Nuncio Bertone as pure commercial shock therapy, intended to convince executives of struggling Lancia that what they needed was a brash and exciting image builder, assembled on subcontract by a prestigious design house. Such as, oh, maybe Bertone.
Who knew that it would become the poster child for the midengine car? It's a scandalous, brutal midengine rejection of all the graceful, front-engine cars that had come before. Definitely a car of new beginnings, completely different even now.
Raging Lust
Project Zero was unveiled at the 1970 Turin Auto Show. Legend has it the deal was sealed the day Nuncio Bertone drove the Zero to Lancia headquarters in Turin, because when there was a delay raising the traffic barrier at the entrance, he just ran the thing straight under it.
In reality, the project had lots of barriers to overcome, chief among them political resistance within Fiat, which had recently taken over the struggling Lancia brand. The idea had some powerful friends at court, however. Cesare Fiorio, Lancia's competition manager, was looking for Lancia's next-generation rally winner. At age 31 (a year younger than Gandini), Fiorio had already produced international rally success for Lancia, which gave him considerable clout at Fiat.
But what really won over the foot-draggers was the prototype that Gandini created after the Stratos Zero. It was the first real Stratos, a fully functional, streetable development mule for all that came after, yet was also a center-stage, Day-Glo shocker of a car. Standing next to that car now, keys in hand, we understand how the unlikely Stratos program finally got off the ground.
If there was ever a machine to bring out the raging car lust inherent in even the hardest of Italian auto-mogul hearts, this is surely it.
Way Beyond Supercar
Some call the Lancia Stratos HF (HF stands for "high fidelity") a mini-supercar, but we don't agree. The typical supercar — no matter how exotic its bloodlines — is designed primarily for road use. The Stratos came to be built as nothing less than a series-built competition car, launched as Lancia's entry in the FIA world rally championship in 1972 and virtually unbeatable until 1975 when it was retired to give the lowly Fiat 131 a chance at competition glory. The Stratos was street-legal merely to satisfy the FIA rulebook, and the true beauty of Gandini's Stratos prototype is that he nailed this race-ready purity of purpose so squarely.
For the Miura and Countach, Gandini was charged with only the styling; for the Stratos, Bertone gave him the whole ball of wax from mechanical layout to the final form. What Gandini gave Lancia was a midengine layout built around a central monocoque with bolt-on space frames front and rear, fully adjustable suspension, four-wheel disc brakes and a transversely mounted DOHC Ferrari Dino V6 with a five-speed transaxle.
Most important, Gandini also delivered a simple, flip-up fiberglass body with a brutally stunning shape that makes most any other rally car (including the current lot of them) about as exciting as a refrigerator wearing number decals. Then he painted it screaming fluorescent blood-orange.
Chris Hrabalek, a London-based automotive designer who owns the prototype, calls it "an original work of art, by the hand of the artist himself." In 1971, the idea of the midengine road car was still exotic. The 1968 Ferrari 246 GT Dino had only recently made such a thing practical on the street and Chevrolet was busily exploring the midengine concept for the Corvette. But Gandini single-handedly yanked the whole midengine idea into reality with the Stratos, an angry rejection of the glossy GTs of the 1960s.
Even now, no other midengine car looks so modern as the Lancia Stratos. Its shape still has appeal, as Hrabalek proved when he drew rave reviews with his Fenomenon NewStratos, a concept car for an evolutionary interpretation of the Stratos idea that was unveiled at the 2005 Geneva Auto Show. Although Hrabalek was unable to get the project off the ground, he has found solace in what must be the largest collection of the Lancia Stratos in existence, some nine examples, including Gandini's original wooden mock-up.
Sound System by Ferrari
Amazingly, the Stratos production cars (if you can call 492 homologation units "production") all got the same wholesome goodness as the prototype. Oh sure, there are detail and materials differences, but Gandini's core vision survived unmolested. It says volumes that when Fiorio and company needed to build up a new rally car, they just went over to the Bertone workshop and pulled a candidate off the end of the assembly line.
So crawling from the Stratos prototype and into the immaculate Lancia Stratos HF Stradale road car is exactly the same delicate and vaguely humiliating improvisation of twisting and squirming and pelvis dislocation, and the bare-bones interior of the production car is basically a similar splatter of off-the-shelf 1970s Fiat furnishings.
The big sexy windshield will cook you instantly while you're stationary, even in the feeble English excuse for summer sun. The Ferrari V6 takes a healthy prod of the triple Weber carbs before it'll start, while finding reverse in the ZF-built, dogleg-style gearbox is completely trial and error (probably just as well, since from the driver seat you can't see crap back there anyway).
The steering at low speed isn't nearly as heavy as we expected, nor the pedal offset around the intrusive front wheel well as distracting. The Webers don't like moping around, though, and there's a lot of throttle-blipping involved in keeping them clear when creeping around a parking lot. Glorious, snarling, spitting, whoop-whoop, neck-hair-on-end sort of throttle-blipping — a terrible inconvenience, we could hardly stand it¿.
Grabbing the Tail of the Tiger
But sweet Holy Mother do the carbs clean out quick when the driving gets serious. Keep the tach needle above five grand — easy enough, the 65-degree V6 revs like a motorcycle engine — and you'll wonder why electronic fuel injection was even invented, since the throttle response from the Webers is already positively clairvoyant.
The book says the Stradale's 2.4-liter V6 does 190 horsepower at 7,400 rpm (the rally cars made 240 hp or so) and makes 169 pound-feet of torque at 4,000 rpm, so the car is good for zero to 60 mph in the sub-7s — impressive enough, if not life-changing. What the book doesn't say is the effect of 190 instantly available horses pushing only some 2,161 pounds balanced 46 percent front/54 percent rear on a tiny 85.8-inch wheelbase when you kick it at about 40 mph.
This, not drag strip launches, is the measure of a real car, and from 40 mph well into triple digits, the Stradale is fierce, with surging acceleration that seems to build steadily all the way to redline in every gear.
Handling at fast road speeds is exactly what you'd expect from a short midengine car with an engine that's mounted a little too high to deliver the center of gravity you want. You've got single-seater-type reflexes and feedback plus light, sensitive controls, all with the tiniest suggestion that when you push it a bit that this package with a miniscule wheelbase and low polar moment of inertia wouldn't give a helluva lot of warning once it decided to bite you.
Nothing unseemly, yet just a little reminder that the Stratos truly is a genuine competition car, never intended to make any allowances or compromises, and if you're going to get the full maximum from the car, you'd better be as good as it is.
Your Mother Would Be Ashamed of You
All this is naturally a part of the attraction of the Lancia Stratos, and why driving one — no matter if, yeah, sure, the car is far more capable than you are — makes you feel kind of special, kind of cocky.
More than 30 years after Project Zero first turned a wheel, people still turn and gawk at the Lancia Stratos, and sometimes, like the soccer mom waiting to cross with urchin in hand when we come to a stop at the traffic light, they give you the laser look that says you're living so far outside their drab, ordinary civilian comfort zone, you might as well be a vampire.
That's why we hold until the two of them take the first step off the curb before we give the engine one single almighty whoop; the woman jumps and jerks the kid back so hard his feet come off the ground.
We grin that nasty grin again and give her a little nod. That's right, baby, we bad. We bad.
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