The first car designed purely to win rallies, and it did
To win Lancia's business, the designer Nuccio Bertone built a wild wedge-shaped concept on a friend's Fulvia running gear and drove it to the factory, passing underneath the gate barrier to applause. The result, the Stratos, became the first car created from scratch for rallying and took three straight world titles.
Lancia usually worked with Pininfarina, so Bertone needed something eye-catching. His Stratos Zero, penned by Marcello Gandini, appeared at the Turin show in 1970: bright orange, just 84 centimetres tall and 3.58 metres long. It shared little with the production car, but it opened the door. A year later Lancia showed a fluorescent red Stratos HF prototype with a crescent-shaped wraparound windscreen that gave excellent forward vision and almost none to the rear.
The production car was a short, wide wedge so extreme that its nose dipped below the tops of the front wheel arches. Behind the driver sat a Ferrari Dino V6, and the whole car weighed only 900 to 950 kilograms. Rally versions made around 275 horsepower with 12-valve heads and 320 with 24 valves, until rule changes banned the latter from 1978. Lancia's team manager Cesare Fiorio, engineer Mike Parkes and driver Sandro Munari drove the project.
To qualify for Group 4 competition Lancia had to build 500 road cars, starting in 1973. Once homologated, the Stratos won the World Rally Championship in 1974, 1975 and 1976 with Munari and Björn Waldegård, and Munari won Monte Carlo three years running. It might have won more, but politics inside the Fiat group shifted factory support to the Fiat 131 Abarth.
Privateers kept winning anyway. A private team took Monte Carlo in 1979, and Bernard Darniche scored the final world championship win at the 1981 Tour de Corse. The Stratos also won the Tour de France Automobile a record five times and the 1974 Targa Florio. The Zero concept sold at auction in 2011 for €761,600 and appeared in Michael Jackson's film Moonwalker.
Source: Lancia Stratos
