The Affluent Page Presents: Super Exclusive Exotic

A lightweight and sleek design makes this car speed past the competition.

By Michael Frank

It's a foot shorter, 500 pounds lighter and gets 33 more horsepower than the vaunted Porsche Carrera Turbo. But fast isn't the best adjective for the Lancia Stratos. This car is going to put the fear of God into Ferrari, Porsche and Aston Martin owners. It will not only outsprint those marques, but out-corner them as well. The key is an übershort footprint barely two feet longer than a Mini Cooper, and an exceedingly low weight. Why sweat weight? Because it's the enemy of great handling and cannot be overcome by suspension design. And if the rebirth of this car, the new Lancia Stratos, was to stand for anything, it had to be about producing the very best handling sports car on earth.

Or perhaps the best-handling car since the 1970s, when the Stratos HF, based on the Ferrari Dino, won three-straight World Cup titles, from 1974 to 1976.

This new Stratos, of which roughly 25 examples will be produced, was penned by brilliant design house, Pininfarina, and pays homage to the original batlike Stratos. Like the original, the 2011 Stratos is also based on a Ferrari, the 430 Scuderia, but is cut down from the original chassis by nearly a foot. A shorter chassis shaves nearly 200 pounds off the car's weight, but the Stratos is also stiffer with a carbon body that's directly bonde to the aluminum subframe. It is also safer thanks to an FIA approved roll cage, which the Ferrari lacks. At 2,900 pounds, the Stratos is lean, and with such a short wheelbase, begs to take corners as fast as you can focus on the next apex.

A near afterthought in all this talk of handling and carbon fiber re-skinning: The Stratos is as sharply angled and arresting to see as the original with a lower nose than the Ferrari, and the rear engine tucked in just aft of the driver, plumb ahead of the rear axle, and then boom, the car dead-ends right in back of the rear wheels. Beneath the shell, while this car has Ferrari at its roots, there are distinct differences. The seats are carbon buckets with a thin skin of leather, and even the dash and steering wheel are unique. Mechanically, the Stratos is deeply revised for higher performance. The donated Ferrari V8 is more urgent than that of the Scuderia thanks to a revised computer and exhaust that yield 533hp peak output. The engine launches the Stratos to 60 mph in three seconds flat, and you're pulling 125 mph, in a 747-like sub-10 seconds. Remember that business about weight being the enemy of handling? Less weight is the friend of fearsome acceleration.

However, the fast run against the clock isn't just about that Ferrari V8. The Stratos has a quicker-shifting transmission than the Scuderia—a sequential six-speed from Drexler that also allows for greater lockup of the rear wheels on launch. Finally, the suspension is entirely new as well, with driver-adjustable settings that deliver a far more aggressive, race car-like tune. If all this sounds like way more than a poser supercar, you've read right, because finally—well, maybe since the original Stratos was sold—a carmaker has realized that the best racing machine isn't necessarily the one with more horsepower, but the one with the right combination of horsepower, low weight and a small footprint.

New Stratos, contact@new-stratos.com, www.new-stratos.com