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Lancia Stratos
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The Lancia Stratos HF, widely known as Lancia Stratos is an automobile made by Italian car manufacturer Lancia. The HF stands for High Fidelity.
Stratos was a very successful rally car during the 1970s and early 1980s.
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Encyclopedia
The Lancia Stratos HF, widely known as Lancia Stratos is an automobile made by Italian car manufacturer Lancia. The HF stands for High Fidelity.
History
The Stratos was a very successful rally car during the 1970s and early 1980s. It started a new era in rallying as it was the first car designed from scratch for this kind of competition. The three leading men behind the entire rallying project were Lancia team manager Cesare Fiorio, British racer/engineer Mike Parkes and factory rally driver Sandro Munari.
The bodywork was designed by Marcello Gandini, head designer at Bertone, and the technical layout was loosely based on a (Lancia Fulvia V4 powered) concept car called Stratos Zero first shown at the Turin Motor Show in 1970. The body was wedge-shaped, and unusually short and wide, providing maximum traction.
In 1971 Lancia presented the Lancia Stratos HF prototype. The Stratos prototype (Chassis 1240) was fluorescent red in colour and featured a distinctive crescent-shaped-wrap-around windshield providing maximum forward visibility with almost no rear visibility (which was unnecessary for rallying anyway). The prototype had three different engines in its early development life: the Lancia Fulvia engine, the Lancia Beta engine and finally the mid-mounted 190 bhp (140 kW) 2418 cc Dino Ferrari V6. |
Lancia did extensive testing with the Stratos and raced the car in several racing events where Group 5 prototypes were allowed during the 1972 and 1973 seasons. Production of the 400 cars required for homologation in Group 4 were launched in 1973 and the car was homologated for the 1974 World Rally Championship. The Dino V6 was phased out in 1974, but 500 engines among the last built were delivered to Lancia.
For racing, the engine was tuned up to and even to with a single KKK turbocharger. However, turbocharged versions were only allowed to compete in Group 5 and were never as reliable as their naturally aspirated counterparts.
The car won the 1974, 1975 and 1976 championship titles in the hands of Sandro Munari and Björn Waldegård, and might have gone on to win more had not internal politics within the Fiat group placed rallying responsibility on the Fiat 131 Abarths. As well as victories on the 1975, 1976 and 1977 Monte Carlo Rally, all courtesy of Munari, the Stratos won the event with the private Chardonnet Team as late as 1979.
Without support from Fiat, and despite new regulations that restricted engine power, the car would remain a serious competitor and proved able to beat works cars in several occasions when entered by an experienced private team with a talented driver. The final point to the Stratos' racing career at international level took place as late as 1981, at the Tour de Corse Automobile, another World Rally Championship event, with a victory by longtime Stratos privateer 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. These cars failed against the Porsche 935s on closed tracks but proved successful in hybrid events. While they failed in the Tour de France Automobile, one of these cars won the 1976 Giro d'Italia Automobilistica, an Italian counterpart of the Tour de France Automobile. Unfortunately one of the cars was destroyed in Zeltweg, when it caught fire due to overheating problems. 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 Stratos', Christian Hrabalek, a car designer and the founder of Fenomenon Ltd.
Hrabalek has the largest Lancia Stratos Collection in the world- he owns 11 unique Lancia Stratos cars, including the fluorescent red 1971 factory prototype and the 1977 Safari Rally car.
Production
With only 492 ever made, the Stratos is very rare to this day.
In 1978, Bertone created and designed a concept car based on the Stratos called the Sibilo.
Fenomenon Stratos
At the Geneva Auto Show of 2005, a British design firm known as Fenomenon debuted a retromodern concept version of the Stratos.
External links
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