The motoring press have finally got up close to the long awaited reborn Lancia Stratos, an original Stratos also came along and made an appearance.
The meeting between car and the journalistic world happened at the Alfa Romeo test track, Balocco. This was the same place which was the test cars stomping ground, and where those first scoop pictures were taken.
Lancia also took opportunity to name the man who funded the whole project, he was a businessman called Michael Stoschell. The car that was at the meet is Stoschell’s personal car. The car was intended to be purely a one off for Stoschell, however, the company has admitted that small scale production may happen. After all, the Morgan Aeromax was originally conceived as a one off for a Swiss banker, but the Morgan entered production as did the Aero Supersports, Morgan are bursting at the seems to cater for demand. Lancia could potentially capitalise on this niche small scale market.
Now as I am sure you are aware, the Stratos shares its underpinnings with the Ferrari F430 Scuderia. Lancia takes the basic architecture of that car and fettles with it to produce a platform for the Stratos. The aluminum space frame is shortened to bring the character of the previous Stratos back into the new one. The Scuderias V8 unit is also tweaked to produce more power, albeit slightly more that the Ferrari. The newly released horsepower coupled together with the Stratos low kerb weight means that the new car should have an astonishing turn of speed. The Stratos kerb weight is lower than the Scuderia due to extensive use of carbon fibre in the body panels and aluminum within the chassis and main parts of the space frame.
To put that into context, the Scuderia is the result of Ferraris engineers taking a not to portly supercar and taking it to the gym, pumping it full of steroids and striping out the interior and being completely obsessed with weight saving. The result is a power to weight ratio of 1220kg, but the Stratos will have a power to weight ratio of 1200kg! By using the F430 Scuderia as a base Lancia is playing a deadly game in terms of pricing. Lancia would to like to make the Stratos project profitable. In order to do that the list price for the Stratos may run into hypercar territory. This is the result of Lancia buying Scuderias base, in which is shared between the two cars.
However, if the car does make small scale production, I think Lancia shouldn’t worry about the pricing, look at Sypker for example, small dutch outfit, only makes a few cars a year and the ones that they do produce are hugely expensive, but somehow they survive, and even more surprisingly, they bought Saab!
It shows you that exclusivity DOES sell!
By Cameron Gibson
