The New Stratos

[drcoastline]

The original is easily in my top five favorite cars of all time. While the new car isn't as raw as the original it is a pretty decent modern rendition. I know modern technology makes pop up headlights obsolete but they sure would be cool.



Sorry guys I haven't figured out to post the entire article. but it states the new Stratos utilizes the f430 engine and no more than twenty five version will be built.

[Sooner or later]

That old one was a bad sob

[Steve Carlton]

I really like the new one, too. They are plenty raw, too raw for me. They're build from a customer's Ferrari and it's around $750K. Love the design of the Stratos!

[astrochex]

Very nice!

It does not look overly busy.

[edgemar]

[ckelly78z]

Definately not "Misty eyed nostalgia"....way cool.

[KFC911]

Had a Stratos for 27 years...it wuz fast....on H2O ....

[drcoastline]

Originally Posted by KC911

Had a Stratos for 27 years...it wuz fast....on H2O ....

"HAD"? I don't know if that would be a car I would ever sell? Assuming of course I "had" one. Wow that is just cool. Was it street legal?

[berettafan]

bass boat DR.

[KFC911]

I'm so bad ....

[flipper35]

If I had room I would buy a Hawk replica.

[Sooner or later]

Originally Posted by drcoastline

"HAD"? I don't know if that would be a car I would ever sell? Assuming of course I "had" one. Wow that is just cool. Was it street legal?

Stratos boat

[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by KC911

I'm so bad ....

S'OK, when I first saw this thread i was wondering why anyone would get excited about one of those cars. didn't add up.

Then I realized they were speeling it with an O instead of a U.

[billybek]

I had a Stratos. Was at the very end of my brief racing career.

Was a team bike from Rocky Mountain Bicycles back in the day....
My brother still rides it on occasion.

[drcoastline]

LOL- that went right over my head.

[RWebb]

needs more CF, less Al

[Steve Carlton]

A new article in Road & Track:

The Lancia Stratos Is Every Bit as Weird and Good as I’d Dreamed

It’s not accommodating, comfortable, or foolproof. It’s all extrovert. All character. It’s a riot. And it rewards you when you get it right in a way a modern car doesn’t.
By Daniel PundPublished: Jun 27, 2025

I have no business driving this car. It’s not mine. I had to convince the company I work for to secure a $1 million insurance policy so I could fulfill this dream. I’ve known since my growth spurt at age 14 that I would not fit in it. As a teen, I was, at best, only a casual fan of rallying, the sole reason this car exists. And anyway, I wasn’t aware of the *Lancia Stratos HF until after it had retired from its years of factory-backed competition. This after three consecutive world championships in the mid-*Seventies. At that time, I was a much bigger fan of Popsicles than obscure Italian homologation cars. This one is from an automaker that was virtually unknown to the U.S. car market.

Indeed, apart from the fact that I was born only days after the Stratos HF prototype made its public debut at the Turin motor show in 1971, I have no connection whatsoever to the thing.

But there’s no accounting for love. And I have been in love with the Lancia Stratos HF for decades.

For those of you who don’t carry a crush for the Stratos HF, here’s a primer that may or may not explain my own affliction. Note: From here forward, I will refer to the car as simply the Stratos. The HF stands for High Fidelity, and who says that anymore? Anyway, this curious little car is the work of the biggest names in 20th-century Italian motoring. Were it not for the fact that the Stratos did actually get made, you might never believe that it could.

Nuccio Bertone of the Turin-based Bertone design house and small-batch specialty carmaker was looking to grab some work away from rival Pinin*farina. Lancia, which was just across town, was a primary target. Bertone’s lure was the genius work of Marcello Gandini, who’d been the studio’s chief designer since 1965. Gandini had already penned the gorgeous Lamborghini Miura in 1966 and the radical Alfa Romeo Carabo concept in 1968. By 1970, he was working on the groundbreaking Countach. In that same year, Gandini created the Stratos Zero concept, the most radical wedge-shaped car of all time. It was so low that fitting side doors was impossible—the flat windshield lifted out of the way to allow access to the pair of seats. The Zero was, not by coincidence, powered by a Lancia Fulvia engine. And then, Bertone himself drove the thing through Turin’s clogged streets to Lancia HQ. As planned, this stunt caught the eye of Lancia racing boss Cesare Fiorio, who was looking for a replacement for the aging Fulvia rally car.

A year later, the plump but pointy shape we know today as the Stratos appeared at the Turin show. Still radical, the Stratos, unlike the Zero, could at least be considered a viable automobile. Together, Lancia and Bertone had created the world’s first car designed specifically for rally domination. And, in a final complication, it carried the 2.4-liter V-6 from the Dino 246. Surprisingly, Enzo Ferrari agreed to supply the project with roughly 500 of these engines—and he actually did, after some fuss and delay. And 500 was no randomly chosen number; it was the exact number of cars Lancia and Bertone would need to build to homologate the car for Group 4 rally competition. Side note: Ford had a similar idea around this time, designing the mid-engine GT70 Group 4 car, but that project stalled.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the requirements of rallying that made the Stratos more appealing to me than the typical cutlery-inspired roadgoing supercars of my childhood: the Countach, the F40, the Vector, and the rest. The Stratos rides on a ridiculously short 85.8-inch wheelbase (5.1 inches shorter than the current Miata’s), has decent ground clearance, and carries stubby, upturned overhangs front and rear. It has the stance of a flea about to leap.

Forward and peripheral visibility were priorities for rally competition, when a sideways-*traveling driver would regularly be looking out the side windows. So Gandini crafted a turret-*like upper body with a radically curved windshield that melded near seamlessly with the side glass. The hood plunges down so steeply from the base of the windshield that it cuts below the top of the front wheel wells. From the driver’s seat, you can’t see even a sliver of the hood, only the clear, impressively distortion-*free expanse of the road ahead. The effect is of your body being suspended just above the surface of the road, like you’re blasting along with no car at all around you.

In profile, the high-waisted Stratos looks like a chubby little piece of orzo. It’s a curious, tiny object that’s somehow equal parts adorable and menacing. And it’s like an entirely different car depending on which way you look at it. Viewed straight on, the Stratos doesn’t seem like a car at all. But from any angle, it looks more like the future than the future ended up being.

The Stratos is still shocking to behold, but imagine how alien it must have looked rolling up to a rally paddock full of Ford Escorts in the early Seventies.

Bertone built a stout space-frame base and bolted on a rear subframe that’s as inelegant as it is effective at carrying the transversely mounted Ferrari engine, the transaxle, and the rear strut suspension. The upper-rear member of this subframe box unbolts to ease engine swaps during rallies. The fiberglass bodywork that sheathed the car’s structure is of middling quality with lumpy undersides. That’s not a dig. The beautifully original Stradale (street) version I drove—a prized possession of the unusually kind and permissive car collector Abe Joseph—is surely as good as any Stratos has ever looked. But these are homologation cars built to satisfy a regulation. The priorities are clear. The Stratos exists to win. It does not (f word) around.

If it wears the same belt-buckle-style exterior door handles as the Fiat X1/9 and the pinkie-*delicate interior door handles of a Miura, so be it. They were already in production, and they work. The Stratos doesn’t even have window regulators in the doors. The side glass pivots from the lower-rear corner and sort of falls partly forward into the door.

The moment of truth arrived when I opened the door for the first time to head out on my afternoon drive along some lovely Connecticut roads. And predictably, I do not fit. Not even close. Just to get my body inside the car means placing my butt at the leading edge of the suede-covered fixed-back bucket seat. Still, my head is jammed into the mercifully padded headliner. My legs are canted right so my feet meet the dramatically offset pedals, and my knees frame the little mod steering wheel. I don’t care. It’s fine. This is happening.

A couple of pumps of the Stratos’s impossibly stiff gas pedal primes the Weber carbs, and the V-6 rumbles to life. Even at idle, the Stratos is a sensory overload. So much urgent mechanical noise coming from just behind my ears. This is a Ferrari-*sourced engine, but it never sounded so intense or so present in the Dino. That beautiful racket, the recalcitrant gas pedal, the superlight steering, the utter lack of rearward visibility, and the quivering body make for a distinctively dissociative start to my day.

Heading toward a road that hugs a winding river, I trundle through a postcard-charming Connecticut town, all white-wood mansions. I suppose there are places in the world where this little Italian art project would look more out of place, but I can’t think of one. Though I’m already coming to grips with the Stratos’s peculiar ways, calibrating my pedal pushes and shifter shoves. I’ve accepted that I need my passenger, photographer Dre Wagner, to help spot anything that falls into my enormous blind spots. The dogleg five-speed is no snickety modern shifter. It requires force to move through its gates. And reverse is somewhere in New Hampshire. The Stratos is so short geared that when you upshift to second and ease off the clutch pedal, the car feels like it’s leaping off its tires. Such impatience.

When I finally hop out of the car after blasting along for several miles, I exclaim to no one in particular, “It’s alive!” It’s a quivering, jabbering, juking, treacherous little thing. This is as I’d hoped. I have had much less fun in cars with 10 times the Stratos’s 190 hp. And what a sweetheart that engine is. It’s built to spin—up to 8000 rpm—but delivers healthy torque throughout its rev range. Who needs electric assist and turbos? And the engine suffers none of the expected carburetor stumbles.

But it’s the Stratos’s hyperactive handling that had me daydreaming about spending a year just learning how to drive it to its full potential. Contrary to popular opinion, the Stratos does not want to kill you. But if you did die, it would just shrug its shoulders and move on. Well, not today, my black-eyed angel. Today, my one day, I will sneak up on it.

[Steve Carlton]

I will build up the pace, aware that even the slightest lift of the throttle sends the nose darting toward the inside of the corner and that the gentlest squeeze of the gas pedal pushes the car immediately toward the double yellows. If the steering were any quicker or more sensitive, the car might be undrivable, such is its eagerness to rotate. It pivots joyously just below your ass, and treated improperly, it will snap. The Stratos is, after all, a rally machine meant to be driven sideways. You can build a rhythm in the car and creep nearer and nearer to the edge. At speed, it all sort of comes together. The gas pedal doesn’t feel so stiff, the shifts rip by, the engine roars, and everything is much more cohesive. The Stratos simply doesn’t make any concessions to going slow. It wants only to go fast.

The Stratos doesn’t make it easy on you, but it does provide all the tools you need. It’s not accommodating, comfortable, or foolproof. It’s all extrovert. All character. It’s a riot. And it rewards you when you get it right in a way a modern car doesn’t.

I finish my day exhausted and fulfilled. I want to yell at surrounding commuters, “Do you have any idea what this thing is?! Do you understand what I’ve just done?!” They don’t. I’m pretty sure most passersby assume it’s some sort of VW-based kit car. So I keep my joy within the cabin. It’s probably for the best since the low roof has compressed my hair into a Gumby-like angle.

The Stratos is every bit as weird and good as I’d hoped. Which is great, because it’s too late for a new lifelong crush.

[kach22i]

A good read thanks.

The additional photos are welcomed.