Lancia’s Stratos is an incredibly special car, but more than its peculiarity, it is on the verge of simplicity. In an effort to design the car for lightweight racing cars, Bertone and Lancia created what must be the simplest, yet most effective window mechanism I’ve ever seen before. With little more than a wing nut, the Stratos’ unorthodox window controls are continuously adjustable and completely foolproof.
Because of the Stratos’s odd shape, there isn’t much door for the window to drop down, so a traditional vertical window gutter just wouldn’t work. With a traditional window control, the property would run out a few inches from the top. So to get more of the window in the door, enough to reach out for a meeting stage time slip or something, it mounted the back of the window glass on a pivot point and made a curved channel in the door for the front of the glass to clamp to. It is literally a moving part, the glass.
While there are so many interesting things about the Lancia Stratos, from its rally history to its Dino-derived engine, I’m stuck admiring the windows. Maybe because I’ve been enamored with this weird car and its amazing shape since I was quite young, I’m even more blown away by the things most would consider pretty mundane. To take a simple problem like lowering the window and taking it upside down to make something so simple, this is just a testament to the creativity and genius of the designers and engineers who worked on this project.
In everything mechanical, I always look for simplicity and lightweight design. In all these years I have never seen anything as simple and lightweight as the Lancia Stratos window mechanism. Until this is my peak lightweight technical story was that Porsche manufactured the 909 Bergspyder’s brake discs from poisonous beryllium. Sorry German engineers, you have been usurped by the Italians.