Lancia’s Stratos is an incredibly special car, but more than its specialty, it is on the verge of bleeding simplicity. In an effort to design the car to achieve the lightness of the race car, Bertone and Lancia have created what should be the simplest and yet most efficient. the window mechanism I’ve seen so far. With little more than a wing nut, the unorthodox operation of Stratos’ window is infinitely adjustable and totally infallible.
Due to the strange shape of the Stratos, there are not too many doors in which to lower the window, so a traditional vertical window channel simply would not do. With a traditional window operation, the buildings would have been finished an inch or two above. So to get more window in the door, enough to get to a rally sliding scene time or something, mounted the back of the window on a pivot and made a curved channel in the door on which the front of the window could be caught. It’s literally a moving part, the glass.
While there are so many interesting things about the Lancia Stratos, from the history of the rally to its Dino-derived engine, I’m stuck admiring the windows. Maybe because I fell in love with this strange car and its amazing shape since I was quite young, I am even more amazed by the things that most would consider quite trivial. Taking a simple problem, such as lowering the window and turning it over, to do something as simple as this is just a testament to the creativity and genius of designers and engineers. who worked on this project.
In everything that is mechanical, I always look for simplicity and light design. In all these years, I have not seen anything as simple and easy as the Lancia Stratos window mechanism. To my slight tip the engineering story was that Porsche made 909 Bergspyder brake rotors out of toxic berilium. I’m sorry, German engineers, you were usurped by the Italians.