The Bertone styling house is probably the most influential in creating what a 'supercar' looks like. The late '60s and early '70s was the golden era of the wedge-shaped one-of-one concept car and one of the pinnacles of the paradigm, in my view, is this: Marcello Gandini's space-age concept, the Lancia Stratos HF Zero, named to evoke the edge of the stratosphere, the border of space.
This is the very extreme of car design, way beyond utility and into art. When it was first shown, this car was a metalflake copper orange, and was intended to appear carved from a single block of bronze (note the lack of panel seams visible anywhere) but was later resprayed silver. This car is, it must be acknowledged, ludicrous; it's actually hard to fully take in without comparing it to known things like people or other cars because its form is so different. Here are some charming period shots of the car alongside a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter and an apparent cowgirl aviator who's just finished her bombing run and is keen to get home in her Stratos Zero:
The Ford GT40 is so named because it's only 40 inches tall, a fact that clearly made a big impression for that to be the origin of it's name; the Stratos Zero is 33.3 inches tall, due to the remit given to Gandini being to make the lowest possible car, and the occupants (there is a passenger seat) essentially lie down to drive, like luge riders, sliding into the oncoming world feet first.
The windscreen is the door and hinges open at the top like a glazed trapdoor, allowing the steering column to hinge forward on hydraulics. You step inside and duck under the roof sill as you recline on the chocolate bar-like seats. The black panels to the rear of the front wheels are the side windows, allowing you to see the ankles of pedestrians and wheel nuts of other traffic in perfect detail, along with the wing mirrors housed inside the front wheel arches.
While cars like this would become the main application of the pop-up headlight, this doesn't have them. Instead there are ten small lights across the slot on the front, and the rear lights house 80+ tiny red bulbs (well before the advent of LEDs, after all). The car is in fact the first use of sequential indicators, opting to animate the front and rear lights instead of using anything as vulgar as orange indictor lights.
Few concepts before this were this extreme yet functional. Bertone showed the Alfa Romeo Carabo in 1968, and the month before this was shown, Pininfarina displayed the almost equally spacecraft-like Ferrari 512 S Modulo. This car is built from the crashed remains of a Lancia Fulvia Coupé 1.6 HF rally car, the modest (113hp) but rally-tuned 1.6L V4 engine housed beneath the side-hinged triangular louvres, and was constructed without Lancia's knowledge. A couple of months prior to the reveal, Nuccio Bertone came clean to Lancia and asked to put a Lancia badge on what his firm had built. Lancia wanted to see it, so he drove it through Milan, which looked like this:
As I heard it, the gate guard at Lancia was only aware Bertone had arrived when he drove under the barrier, not bothering to sign in. It's the kind of car where these possibly apocryphal stories are made plausible by the implausibility of the car itself; if impossibilities like this could be real, who knows what can happen? In a way the point of one-off concepts like this is to make us dream, push us to imagine better futures where cars like this roam the streets. It certainly pushed Lancia, who observed the buzz around this car and commissioned Bertone to co-build with them a car to replace the Fulvia Coupé that would improve on the Fulvia's already impressive rally record.
That, Bertone did, and even retained the name; a straight line exists between this car and Lancia's legendary status in rallying. The Stratos HF prototype was first shown in 1971, entered production in 1973 and was homologated for rally in 1974, winning the rally chamionship for three years running until internal politics at the FIAT group meant factory support for Lancia rallying was pulled.
The Stratos Zero also caught Lamborghini's eye, and Gandini was hired to design a successor for the Miura. Along with the wedge profile, the early Countach shared the upswept cowling on the rear wheel and the chocolate-bar seats, and the flat, extremely-pitched windscreen, although Gandini reused the scissor doors from the Carabo rather than retaining the hatch-like door/window.
I've been waiting for this model for about 30 years. It appeared in a favourite book of mine in its silver guise, and compared to the copper orange I think it's immeasurably better looking, even if that's its original look. When the recent Hammer Drop series debuted the casting in orange I was disappointed, but luckily I was able to find this silver version from the Marcello Gandini two-pack on its own on ebay for barely over the price of a single car (I already had the red Countach 5000QV from the Jay Leno series, naturally). I understand the Stratos Zero is kind of unpopular compared to other cars in that series, but the only reason I can imagine is that people perhaps understandably don't realise it's not a fantasy car, or at least not entirely. I think it's a stretch to call it fully real either.
