Lancia Stratos Clone With a 10,000+ RPM V8 Might Be Better Than the Real Thing
Yes, it’s a kit car. But did the real Lancia Stratos have an engine that sounds this good?
The Lancia Stratos HF is one of the holy grails of rally cars, and suggesting you could improve on it would be like sacrilege to some people. But they may reconsider when they learn of the replica powered by a V8 that'll rev all the way to 12,500 rpm, and sound better than a Formula 1 car doing it.
Listed for sale on Race Cars Direct is a Stratos replica powered by a 2.0-liter V8 based on a Yamaha bike engine. It's one of the few engines that could eclipse the 2.4-liter Ferrari V6 in the stock Stratos, provided its chassis is up to the task. And it sounds like it is, based on what its designer Hawk Cars says about it.
The U.K.-based kit car company says its HF Series (which this car is) is so accurately engineered that its replica body panels are sometimes used to repair the real Lancias. This particular car is clad in carbon kevlar, and set up like a race car with fully adjustable suspension—wishbones, sway bars, coilovers, and Öhlins shocks. It has a foam-baffled fuel tank, an adjustable pedal box, and four-piston calipers with two-piece rotors all around. It's appropriate for a car said to have been built for hill climbs and track days, all while remaining road-legal.
The stradale however isn't the ideal place to wind out that 2.0-liter V8. Info on the engine is scarce, as its creator Cyclone Power appears to have gone under, but some info remains in a thread on Lotus Talk.
The Y-40R, as it's named, is apparently based on a pair of five-valve Yamaha bike engines, and can rev as high as 12,500 rpm. It generates up to 325 horsepower and 167 pound-feet of torque while only weighing 161 pounds itself. It gives this Stratos replica a power-to-weight ratio in the region of 300 horsepower per ton—around that of a Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat—and a howling exhaust note that you can hear in the video below. It's mated to a six-speed Hewland sequential manual with flat shifting, and the whole car is said to have been professionally maintained with no expense spared.
As you can imagine, this kind of setup doesn't come cheap, which is why this car's listing on Race Cars Direct basically says price on request. Like they always say: if you have to ask, you can't afford it. But if you can afford it, then you probably can't find many more stimulating driving experiences—at any price.
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