Back to the 70's
It is something from another world when rally cars were wild, fire-breathing monsters with enormously powerful engines in cars designed to race in world rallies from the wilds of Africa to the icy roads of Sweden.
The 1970s was the golden era of the World Rally Championships, when car manufacturers designed ever more powerful cars to take home the title. Dominating the mid-70s was the Lancia Stratos, which was the first car specifically designed to meet the Group 4 rally regulations which required 400 cars to be built. This was no family sedan with a tuned motor. It was a step ahead of the rest when the racing was fast and spectacular, and attracted huge crowds around the world. It looked like a sports car and it went like a sports car.
Lancia officially retired from rallying only in 1979, after winning the Monte Carlo Rally for the fourth time, adding that score to three world rally championships, four European drivers’ rally championships and three rally constructors’ championships. The Stratos model took 62 overall first places in world championship series rallies, and 180 first places in championships run under the FIA banner, during its competition career.
By the time the World Rally Championships came to Australia and Western Australia won the rights to host a round of the series for 1988, the days of the monster rally cars were over. The first Rally Australia was won by a far more humble-looking Mazda 323. But one of the Group 4 rally cars of this era still rumbles down the streets of Perth occasionally. It is a 1974 Lancia Stratos owned by Peter Briggs of the Fremantle Motor Museum.
This car is painted in white with stripes of green and red, and why shouldn’t it have such garish colours? They are, after all, the colours of the Italian national flag and the Lancia is the quintessential Italian car. The colours also happen to reflect the manufacturer team’s principal sponsor in those days: Alitalia Airlines. From a heritage which includes the legendary Lancia Lambda, a car built in the 1920s, with a monocoque body just like cars today, Lancia has always had a reputation for following a different path.
The space age Stratos looks like a sports car rather than a rally car. Its wedge shape comes from the famous Italian design house of Bertone and was inspired by a dramatically styled show car made for display at the Turin Motor Show in 1970, just months after man landed on the moon. It is all engine and cockpit. The engine sits centimetres behind the rally driver and navigator, driving the back wheels. It is derived from the Ferrari Dino V6 engine.
Entry for the driver and navigator is via two large doors. The doors are paper thin pieces of glass fibre -- just a skin separating the occupants from the dust and the mud flying around on a typical rally course. They are kept safe by a roll cage which makes getting into and out of this little rocket a challenge for anyone but a contortionist. The driver and navigator sit behind a patchwork of switches and gauges which would be just as much at home in a Cessna. They buckle up into full racing harnesses and look out through a heavily-raked windscreen.
The carefully designed wedge shape at the front of the car is obliterated by a line of spotlights which give the car a purposeful, almost utilitarian stance. The engine roars into life, the car shakes and the noise reverberates in the cabin as there is no insulation. This is a race car after all.
As the car takes off it whines in each gear with a seemingly endless ability to rev itself out. Its wheels and tyres wouldn’t look out of place on a Grand Prix car of the 1970s and it has incredible grip on the corners.
It’s a rustic mix of Italian supercar and off-road buggy.
Yes, the Lancia Stratos is wild and an incredibly exciting ride.
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