Manuel Nathan
For those who’ve been keeping up, the story of the ‘New’ Stratos is a long-winded one, similar in scale to a box-set binge of The West Wing.
Some of us may spot that we were told there would be a road-going supercar, a GT racing car, and – be still our beating hearts – a Safari rally-spec variant.
The Lancia Stratos sprang from a luridly excellent Bertone concept car, which Lancia motorsport man Cesare Fiorio figured would make a helpful rally weapon. By the time the HF Stratos was homologated for the World Rally Championship, it was powered by Ferrari’s 2.4-litre Dino V6 (190bhp in road trim, 280 in competition form), and old Cesare was proved right. He’d meant it to win, and win it did, controlling the sport throughout the mid-Seventies, and racking up back-to-back championships in 1974, ‘75, and ‘76.
It also entertained a generation, a generation that moved on to make lots of money.
You have to rewind all the way back to the mid-90s for Genesis of the New Stratos story. Especially, when a teenager named Chris Hrabalek purchased the rights to the Stratos name, which Lancia had allowed to lapse. Ten years later, Hrabalek had a degree from the Royal College of Art’s Vehicle Design Course, and rather than present the customary collection of drawings as his final-year project, he chose to build his own version of the Stratos. Ten monied folks came ahead and made Hrabalek’s Stratos a reality, debuting it at the 2005 Geneva show.
Then, smoothly, a German billionaire called Michael Stoschek agreed to bankroll the project, with Pininfarina appearing on board too. Then they decided a Ferrari 430 Scuderia should be the donor vehicle for the new Stratos. By 2010 the New Stratos was set. But Ferrari then put its foot down and declined to supply parts for the 25 cars planned and Pininfarina had no choice but to drop the project.
It laid asleep until 2018 when somebody had got bored of 430 Scuderia and there were loads on the market to buy and open up into faux Lancias.
