Lancia Stratos

The Lancia Stratos HF, was a very successful rally racing car during the 1970s and 1980s. It started a new era in rally racing as it was the first car designed from scratch for this kind of competition.

The bodywork was designed by Bertone and loosely based on a (Lancia Fulvia V4 powered) concept car called Lancia Stratos 0 first shown at the Turin Motor Show in 1970. The body was wedge-shaped, and unusually short and wide, providing maximum traction. However the final version of the Stratos was very different from the concept car. It had a distinctive crescent-shaped wrap-around windshield providing maximum forward visibility with almost no rear visibility (which was unnecessary for rallying anyway), and the engine was a mid-mounted 190 bhp (140 kW) 2418 cc Dino Ferrari V6.

The car won the 1974, 1975 and 1976 championships in the hands of Sandro Munari, and might have gone on to win more had not internal politics within the Fiat group placed rallying responsibility on the Fiat 131 Abarths. The final point to the Stratos's racing career at international level took place as late as 1981, at the Tour de Corse Automobile, a World championship event, with a victory of Bernard Darniche.

When the Fiat group favored the Fiat 131 for rallying Lancia also built two Group 5 turbocharged 'silhouette' Stratos for closed-track endurance racing. Theses cars failed against the Porsche 935s on closed tracks but proved successful in hybrid events. The last surviving car would win the Giro d'Italia event again before it was shipped to Japan to compete in the Fuji Speedway based Formula Silhouette series, which was never raced. The car would then be sold and reside in the Matsuda Collection before then being sold to the renowned collector of Stratoses, Christian Hrablek, also the founder-designer of Fenomenon.

// Extracted from Wikipedia (see full text clicking here)//

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... and the Stratos development proces: