It’s spring 1974, and a farmer in rural Italy is tending his crops in a field, perched atop his trusty tractor. Seeing from a distance that someone has had the audacity to park on his land, the old man sets off to remove the offending trespassers. As he chugs towards the low-slung vehicle, he can’t believe his eyes. After putting his tractor into neutral, he climbs down onto the land, exclaiming: “What am I looking at?”
The vehicle’s occupant is a Lamborghini test driver; his passenger is a lady he thought he’d impress by taking her for a spin in his employer’s latest model: the Countach. The farmer, staring in disbelief at the black, foreign object in his field, has another name for it: “disco volante” (“flying saucer”). As the driver’s door of the outrageous Lambo rises up in a scissor motion, the man who’s parked it there starts to climb out from his seat. As he does, the farmer quickly gets onto his tractor and flees the scene, evidently terrified.
Priceless anecdotes like this surround the early days of Lambo’s enfant terrible. When you consider what else it shared road space with in 1974, it’s easy to see why. Impossibly low and wide, with body creases so sharp you could cut your teeth on them, combined with slashes, vents, ducts, air intakes and those doors, this wasn’t a car – it was an Earth-dwelling alien ship; perhaps the closest we ever got to a production car with truly space-age design.
Even the Countach, however, was tame compared to some of the design concepts that Italian styling houses were coming out with in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A case in point being the Lancia Stratos Zero (below), penned by Bertone’s Marcello Gandini (who also had a hand in Lamborghini’s Miura and Countach) four years before that farmer chanced upon the mad Lambo. Have you ever seen a more stunning automobile?
Designed to sway Lancia from defaulting to Bertone’s rival Pininfarina, when it came to designing its next rally car, the Stratos Zero embodied all that was dramatic and futuristic about space-inspired design. The shock and awe tactics worked, too, and Bertone got the job, eventually designing the more conventional Stratos we know and love, which won Lancia huge rallying success from 1974 to 1976. But the one that will forever be remembered as the car that shook the motoring world to its foundations was the 1970 concept – an actual functioning car fitted with a paltry four-cylinder engine.
Looking back on such landmark designs and an era when stylists had free reign to do as they pleased, throwing caution and budgets to the wind, we might start to question why car companies play it safe these days.
Like some poisoned chalice, with technology comes increased understanding and cars now need to be aerodynamically efficient, to keep wind noise and fuel consumption to absolute minimums. Just because a 1970s supercar is lower than a limbo pole, that doesn’t necessarily make it efficient at cutting through the air – the opposite is usually true. The other constraints designers are hamstrung by these days relate to occupant and pedestrian safety. If you were hit by a Stratos Zero, you’d probably be severed in two and the occupants would fare little better.
These design constraints are insurmountable by the people who shape the cars we drive these days – there are now laws that must be upheld if any car is to make it beyond the drawing board. As much as designers would dearly love to once again send shock waves through a world fed up with uniformity and normality, the age of cars that look like they were built by space-travel obsessives is unlikely to ever return. What a pity.
motoring@thenational.ae
