Lancia Stratos

Marcello Gandini drew it at Bertone, and it began as a show car with no engineering behind it at all. The Stratos Zero of the November 1970 Turin show was 84cm tall, orange, entered through the windscreen and carried a Fulvia V4. It was not a proposal for a product. It was Bertone getting Lancia's attention after Pininfarina had taken most of the marque's work. The running prototype that followed a year later kept almost none of the Zero's surfaces and all of its attitude. The wraparound windscreen, curved far enough to carry past the driver's shoulders, is the defining element, and it was a functional decision as much as a stylistic one: it gave a rally driver a field of view no conventional screen could. Behind it the roof drops away into flying buttresses, the tail is cut off flat, and the overhangs barely exist because there is barely any car ahead of or behind the wheels. Nuccio Bertone wanted to call it Stratolimite, the limit of the stratosphere. It got shortened, and period documents and badging often render it with an apostrophe, as Strato's. Bertone built the bodies at Grugliasco; Lancia finished the cars at Chivasso.

Eighteen World Rally Championship wins between 1974 and 1981, and three consecutive manufacturers' titles in 1974, 1975 and 1976. The first win came at Sanremo in early October 1974, days after Group 4 homologation was granted, with Sandro Munari driving; Lancia took that year's title on 94 points to Fiat's 69 in a season the oil crisis had cut from thirteen rounds to eight. Munari then won the Monte Carlo Rally three years running from 1975, and took the 1977 FIA Cup for Rally Drivers, the forerunner of the drivers' championship and the first won by an Italian. Outside the WRC there is the 1974 Targa Florio, won outright by Gerard Larrousse and Amilcare Ballestrieri in a Marlboro car, plus five Tour de France Automobile wins and three Giro d'Italia victories. The ending is the interesting part. Fiat group politics moved the rally budget to the Fiat 131 Abarth, a saloon, and the works programme wound down. Privateers kept winning anyway. Bernard Darniche, in Andre Chardonnet's blue car, beat Bjorn Waldegard's Escort by six seconds across the whole 1979 Monte Carlo Rally, then took the Stratos's last WRC win on the 1981 Tour de Corse.

In Europe the Stratos is rally shorthand the way a Mustang is muscle-car shorthand in America, and livery got it there as much as shape did. The green, white and red Alitalia scheme on a wedge sideways in the trees is one of the most reproduced images in motorsport, sold continuously as a model kit, a diecast and a poster for fifty years. The Marlboro and Pirelli cars have their own followings. Games did the rest. The Stratos has been a fixture of driving games since the first Gran Turismo era and turns up across the Colin McRae, Dirt, Forza and Assetto Corsa families, which is how a car that stopped being built in 1975 stays familiar to people born decades after. The oddest screen credit belongs to the concept rather than the production car. The machine Michael Jackson transforms into during the Smooth Criminal sequence of Moonwalker in 1988 is the Stratos Zero, with film-prop bodyshells over a Fiat X1/9 chassis for the stunt work. Then there is the tribute industry. Michael Stoschek commissioned Pininfarina to build a New Stratos on a Ferrari F430 Scuderia in 2010, and Manifattura Automobili Torino later put a series of 25 into production.

Owning one is a small-car experience with big-car running costs, and owners tend to be cheerful about both. The cabin is tight for two and heats up fast, because that wonderful wraparound screen is a greenhouse and the ventilation was never generous. Cooling is the system that wants the most attention: water pumps, radiator cap fitment and airflow all matter more here than on a conventional layout, and a Stratos running warm on a slow road is telling you something. The spaceframe is where the real money hides. It carries the roll cage and the entire structure, most of it is invisible behind bonded glassfibre, and a corroded or badly patched frame is a serious job by any measure. Glassfibre panels craze and crack around mountings and stress points, and original panels are not sitting on a shelf anywhere. The Ferrari V6 is a known, sturdy quantity that drives its camshafts on chains rather than belts, so it rattles before it fails. The Marelli ignition box is the classic electrical weak point. Everything else follows from there only being 492 cars. Trim, glass, badges and the correct Campagnolo wheels are all findable, and none of it is quick.