On a quiet Irish road, an electric-blue coupe screams between stone walls. Beneath that wedge-shaped silhouette instantly recognizable, it isn’t an factory-built Lancia, but a Lancia Stratos replica built piece by piece by a father and son. Eight years of weekend work, a bare container as a workshop, a naked tubular chassis as the starting point, and at the end of the road, 950 kilograms of passion powered by an Alfa Romeo V6.
The story begins when Nathan Kennedy is thirteen or fourteen, in front of a Top Gear episode where the hosts assemble a Caterham Seven in a day before lining it up against The Stig. There, the Irish teenager makes a simple proposal to his dad: what if they, too, built their own dream car? No one yet imagines that this idea would lead to a Stratos tribute, registered in Ireland, that Nathan would eventually drive on the roads of Dalkey and then Swords, at the gates of Dublin, after nearly a decade of shared work.
From Top Gear to an Irish Lancia Stratos replica
In front of the television, the hastily assembled Caterham by the Top Gear crew acts as a spark. Nathan doesn’t just want to watch sports cars; he wants to build one with a father who has driven and prepped rally cars before. The duo eventually tackles a project far more ambitious than a typical kit car: a Lancia Stratos replica, that icon of global rallying in the 1970s.
The box that arrived, however, didn’t look like a car. “It literally arrived as just a chassis. It was literally just like a big roll cage of safety and that was it,” explains Nathan Kennedy. No donor, no original body shell: just a bare spaceframe, from which everything else had to be invented. Every bracket, every mount had to be fabricated, drilled, tapped by hand, sometimes several times. Nathan’s father, who has built and prepped cars before, recognizes that this project is unlike anything he’s known. And there, a simple Saturday can disappear into one piece to adjust.
Eight years of work for a 950 kg Lancia Stratos ready for Irish roads
The pace is the pace of everyday life: mostly weekends, guided by weather and means. The parts come together, come apart, and are reworked. “There’s always more to do, but yes, pulling it off, getting it running, and having it on the road for the first time was like an eight-year process,” says Nathan Kennedy. Eight years to turn a tubular skeleton into a low-slung blue coupe, with flared arches and the Tour de Corse rally look.
Behind the bodywork faithful to the original Stratos proportions, the chassis remains a dedicated spaceframe designed to respect as closely as possible the mechanical layout of the real car. The coupe weighs only about 950 kg. And at the center, mounted longitudinally behind the seats, you won’t find the official Stratos’s Ferrari Dino V6, but an Alfa Romeo Busso V6 3.0 L. “The originals would have had a Ferrari engine, but the Alfa V6 is a good second choice, I suppose, if you can’t get a Ferrari engine,” he explains. The power drives the rear wheels through a limited-slip differential, yielding a distinctly analog feel. Nathan describes a car that’s lighter, more direct, and more lively than some faster-on-paper machines.
First spin in Dalkey, a scare behind the wheel, and a Stratos that’s priceless
The first real outing occurs with the family, heading to Dalkey, just south of Dublin. Dad takes the wheel on the way there, the son on the way back. In their minds, one question looms: after nearly a decade spent assembling everything in a container, will the car actually make it onto the road? “I’d dreamed of this moment for so long, and I remember stomping on the pedal and being absolutely terrified,” Nathan Kennedy recalls. And yet, the home-built Stratos goes about its business, a mix of exhilaration and mechanical nerves that many enthusiasts will recognize.
Since then, Nathan looks for any excuse to take the car out, even for a casual evening spin around Swords after work. The bright blue paint, the rally livery, and the metallic roar of the Alfa V6 draw both specialists who recognize the silhouette and curious onlookers who just see a small but loud Italian rocket. He stops, chats, lifts the hood, and shares this extraordinary project with strangers, almost as if the Stratos no longer wholly belongs to him. Selling it, though, has never been an option: “There isn’t any amount of money, I don’t think, that someone could offer us to sell this car,” he says. Eight years of life packed into 950 kilograms of metal simply can’t be priced in euros.
