Stratos vs Stratos

Still, no point pussyfooting around. Remember, the donor car for the New Stratos was a Ferrari 430 Scuderia, whose shiny surface bits were all thrown away, but whose gizzards have been reincarnated in a most spectacular fashion. At 1,247kg, this car is reckoned to be around 150kg lighter than the Ferrari, and, thanks to a new ECU and extraordinarily costly bespoke exhaust system (supplied by Capristo, it's made of stainless steel just 0.5mm thick), it now wrings 532bhp from its 4.3-litre, normally aspirated V8. The suspension runs new damper rates and has stiffer springs and new bushes. Brembo ceramic discs - at 398mm upfront, 350mm at the rear, they're almost the same size as the old car's wheels - provide retardation, and the tyres are chunky Dunlops. This isn't a car so much as a war machine.

Crucially, the new Stratos also lops 20cm out of the Scud's aluminium chassis, so it even apes the original's truncated look. This is both exciting and worrying: such was the old Stratos's tricky polar moment of inertia, it was rare to see one travelling in a straight line, even as it racked up three back-to-back world rally championships in the mid-Seventies. Its propensity to sideways behaviour was mainly due to its Ferrari V6 sitting relatively high and transverse in the middle of the chassis, but also because of that comically stumpy wheelbase.