Documents
HISTORY 1
My first story is a remembrance: my fleeting contact with the Stratos project, at the beginning.
We were in mid-1971 (or not? I am no good at dates) and I was the chief project engineer of the braking system of the Lancia Beta, Bendix employee, supplying Lancia.
The head of chassis design department at Lancia, had asked the Bendix brakes of high quality.
In particular, the front brake had to be equipped with two separate circuits, so that in any case of rupture of a hydraulic part there could be an efficiency level of good braking.
The solution was imposed by the same client, that is a front brake with two cylinders in series with each other.
Very easy to say, but it was very difficult to achieve in a functional way. Despite all the brake was designed with original solutions (patented by myself) and made functional without defects. For reasons of cost, however, only the industrial realization remained out of a large number of that type. This the premise.
When the first brake prototypes, were built and tested at Bendix I personally took a pair to the test laboratories of Lancia, so that they could verify their real effectiveness.
My partner at Lancia laboratories was a young engineer, like me, with whom I had established a good relationship, even though, like many others in Lancia, did not like the new supplier of brakes. As in practice Lancia (and also Fiat), to have access to laboratories or workshops, a visitor had to get a permit and be accompanied by his partner, who signed the permit and was held responsible of the foreign presence. To reach the laboratory where I had to leave my two prototypes, we passed by a corridor, and it was there that in looking through the partly open door I had my first contact with the dazzling Stratos: in that room there was a special test bench for testing the mechanical resistance under fatigue of the suspension tips. In practice, there was only the chassis; never seen one like that.
At the tips through the intermediary action of springs, a system of pistons exerted alternating stress of considerable violence. I remember that I asked myself whether they wanted to make a run at more than one hundred and fifty kilometres on a Belgian Pavè. The Lancia engineer having noticed that I had been able to peek into the test frame, was very worried and made me promise that I would not tell anyone, and I never told anybody for many years. How the lovers of the history of Stratos know, the project suffered fluctuating fortunes, and even lengthy arrests before reaching good results with the early prototypes.
To connect the story with a picture, this is the Stratos prototype of 1973, the second in the "Targa Florio" with Munari Andruet. The photo is absolutely unprecedented, was extracted from an amateur film Super 8. In that same race, the Ferrari 312 P of Merzario stops due to fracture of the shaft, the photos of this will be published shortly.
LM