Long live Lancia
This year, 2026, marks the 120th anniversary of one of the world’s most celebrated and innovative car manufacturers.
Lancia is named after the engineer and racing driver Vincenzo Lancia who, along with his friend and fellow ex-Fiat employee Claudio Fogolin, created their new business on 27 November 1906.
The company has gone through troubled times, but its successes have been so great that its significance in motoring history cannot be questioned.
Here we’ll be studying Lancia by looking at some of the many fine cars it devised, concentrating on those that were in production before 2000 and listing them in chronological order.
Lancia 12hp (1908)
Despite the 1906 formation of the company, it wasn’t until 1908 that Lancia’s first model was revealed to the public at the Turin motor show.
It was named after its taxable horsepower, though the actual output of its 2543cc, in-line, four-cylinder engine was initially 24bhp, later rising to 28bhp.
A racing derivative called the Sport was successful in several motorsport events, beginning its career with a class win in the straight-line Padua-Boloventa time trial of 1908.
11 years after that, the 12hp was retrospectively renamed the Alfa, though there is no connection with Alfa Romeo. Alfa in fact refers to the first letter of the Greek alphabet, spelled ‘alpha’ in English, there being no ‘ph’ in the Italian language.
Lancia 20hp (1910)
In the early years, Lancia would, as other manufacturers of the time also did, put a car into production and then replace it with another shortly afterwards.
This applied to 1910’s 20hp which, long after it had been discontinued, became the first Lancia to be named Gamma.
Like the 12hp, it had a four-cylinder engine, though this one had a larger capacity by approximately one litre, at around 3.5 litres, and when a 4-litre was introduced in 1911 the car became the 20-30hp.
Body styles varied tremendously, from short-wheelbase sporting models which could be used for competition to the very much more elegant landaulet pictured here.
Lancia 35hp (1913)
Often referred to today as the Theta, the 35hp was a luxury car with convenient – and, at the time, modern – features such as a starter and electric lighting.
Powered by an engine with a near 5-litre capacity, it entered production in 1913 and, unlike previous Lancias, survived for half a decade, the final examples being built in 1918.
By that time, of course, the world was at war, and some Thetas formed the basis of military vehicles.
The body of the example pictured here was constructed in the 1990s, but the reference for its design consisted of two photographs of a car owned in period by Noel Macklin, the founder of Invicta and Railton, among other marques.
Lancia Lambda (1922)
The astonishingly innovative Lambda was blessed with a cornucopia of features rarely, if ever, seen on any previous mass-produced car.
These included independent front suspension, all-round braking (front brakes still being regarded with suspicion in some quarters) and a combined body and chassis, though in this case the roof was not part of the structure.
Perhaps most surprising was the world’s first production V4 engine (2121cc at first, but larger in later models), which was not only very short but so narrow that a single central camshaft could operate all the valves in both cylinder banks.
Other car manufacturers investigated the possibilities of the V4 only rarely, or not at all, but Lancia persevered with it into the 1970s.
Lancia Artena (1931)
Introduced in the year that the Lambda was discontinued, the Artena had another variant of the V4 engine with the same bore as the 2.6 but a much shorter stroke, giving a capacity often quoted as 1924cc but, going by widely quoted bore and stroke figures, actually 1927cc.
From a modern perspective, the Artena’s body-on-frame construction seems like a retrograde move after the unibody Lambda, but it did give owners the option of sending commissions the way of independent coachbuilders.
This is what happened with the car pictured here, whose body was made by the Dutch company B.T. Van Rijswijk.
Sales of the Artena to private customers had stopped by the end of the 1930s, but from 1940 Lancia built more examples for the Italian Army.
Lancia Astura (1931)
In some ways similar to the Artena, the Lancia Astura was generally a more luxurious car, with a wheelbase which started out longer than that of the Artena and became longer still through the 1930s.
It was also powered by a V8 engine rather than a V4, the unit initially having a capacity of just over 2.6 litres and later being enlarged to nearly three.
Once again, coachbuilders could be employed to produce bodywork matching the tastes of customers, the Farina design from 1938 pictured here being one of the more restrained examples.
Astura owners have included King Victor Emmanuel III, Benito Mussolini and, very much later, Eric Clapton.
Lancia Augusta (1933)
The Lancia Augusta was positioned almost at the opposite end of the motoring spectrum from the Astura.
It was powered by another V4 engine, this one the smallest yet with a capacity of 1196cc, and while that was larger than the in-line, four-cylinder unit used in the rival Fiat 508 Balilla, the Lancia looked less distinctive and sold in much lower numbers.
Augustas manufactured at Lancia’s factory in Bonneuil-sur-Marne near Paris were sold under the name Belna.
Some Belnas, with bodies by Pourtout, were among the earliest retractable-hardtop cars in history (though contemporary with the Peugeot 401 Eclipse), using a design created by Georges Paulin.
Lancia Aprilia (1937)
Notable for what was considered at the time to be streamlined bodywork, the Aprilia was the last model developed during the lifetime of Vincenzo Lancia, who died in February 1937 at the age of 55.
It started with a 1352cc V4 engine, but this was revised after two years, the later iteration having a capacity of 1486cc.
Production naturally ended with the outbreak of the Second World War, but it resumed in peacetime, and the Aprilia’s long career continued until 1949.
As with the Augusta, Lancia Aprilias were manufactured not only in Italy but also at Bonneuil-sur-Marne, and the cars which left the French plant (all of them before the war began) were marketed under the name Ardennes.
Lancia Ardea (1939)
In some ways a scaled-down Aprilia, with similarly streamlined styling, the Ardea was yet another Lancia with a V4 engine, though now the capacity was reduced to just 903cc.
Most Ardeas had saloon bodies, but Lancia also produced van, lorry and pick-up variants, as well as a long-wheelbase, seven-seat taxi.
At a time when a three-speed manual gearbox was normal for a small car (as it would be for several years after the Second World War), Lancia gave the Ardea four forward gears right from the start, and would add to this extravagance by providing five in the 1940s.
Lancia Ardea production lasted longer even than that of the Aprilia, finally coming to an end in 1953.
Lancia Aurelia (1950)
The most startling feature of the Lancia Aurelia was its then extremely unusual V6 engine, whose capacity was gradually increased from 1.8 to 2.5 litres, the stroke always being significantly longer than the bore was wide.
Naturally, the V6 was mounted at the front of the car, but the clutch, gearbox and differential were all combined in a transaxle which sat at the rear.
Updates were made on a nearly but not quite annual basis before production ended in 1958, and saloon, coupé, spider and convertible body styles were all available.
In 1954, having survived a protest about its eligibility, an Aurelia crewed by Louis Chiron and Ciro Basadonna became the first of many Lancias to win the Rallye Monte-Carlo, though Lambdas had twice achieved podium positions on that event in the 1920s.
Lancia Appia (1953)
The successor to the Ardea was the first Lancia designed after the Second World War to be fitted with a V4 engine (in this case measuring 1090cc, and with an extraordinarily narrow, 10-degree angle between the cylinder banks).
It was also the marque’s last model with the sliding-pillar front suspension, which had made its debut in the Lambda.
The Appia remained on the market for a full decade, which wasn’t a record for Lancia, but this time production did not have to be interrupted by a global conflict.
Lancia Appias were manufactured in three series (the third pictured here), and to add to the variety, several had bodies created by independent coachbuilders, examples including Farina’s coupé and Vignale’s convertible.
Lancia Flaminia (1957)
Although the Lancia Flaminia didn’t go on sale until 1957, it was to some extent prefigured by the Farina-designed Florida concept displayed at the Turin show two years earlier.
Both the Florida and the production Flaminia had the same drivetrain layout as the Aurelia, with a rear transaxle and a V6 motor, though the engine – while initially measuring 2.5 litres, as it had in the Aurelia – was far less undersquare than it had been before.
Its capacity was increased to 2.8 litres in 1962, the year the Flaminia entered its third and final series.
Various Italian designers created saloon, coupé and convertible bodies for the car as it was sold to customers, plus there were four long-wheelbase convertibles called Presidenziale, styled by Farina and requested by Italian President Giovanni Gronchi.
Lancia Flavia (1961)
As much as any of its models, the Flavia demonstrated both Lancia’s enthusiasm for innovation and its reluctance to build an engine with all its cylinders mounted in a straight line.
The engine was a newly designed flat-four, measuring 1.5 litres in early models but 1.8 litres from 1962, and it drove the front wheels, which meant that the entire drivetrain was mounted ahead of the windscreen, leaving plenty of more-or-less-uninterrupted space in the passenger compartment.
Originally sold only as a saloon, with the then-unusual feature of all-round disc brakes, the Lancia Flavia later became available as a Pininfarina-bodied coupé (pictured), a convertible created by Vignale and a Sport designed by Ercole Spada at Zagato.
A Scuderia Biondetti Flavia won the Rallye dei Fiori held on the roads of Sanremo in 1962. On the same event the following year, Flavia Coupés run by the works team, HF Squadra Corse, finished first to sixth, restricting the highest-placed Fiats and Alfa Romeos to the lower reaches of the top 10.
Lancia Fulvia (1963)
The Fulvia shared the front-wheel-drive layout of the Flavia but not its flat-four engine, Lancia having decided to create yet another narrow-angle V4.
This started out with a capacity of 1091cc, but there was clearly plenty of room for manoeuvre, since the engine would eventually become available in 1584cc form.
Saloon, or berlina, versions (Series 2 pictured) were manufactured until 1972, but in 1965 Lancia introduced the Coupé, which remained in production until 1976, largely because of the public appeal generated by its success in motorsport, which we’ll be looking into shortly.
There was also a third Fulvia model, designed by Zagato and known as the Fulvia Sport, produced from 1965 until the early 1970s.
Lancia Fulvia in rallying
A Lancia Fulvia berlina won the Italian Rally Championship in 1965, and Coupés took the same title every year from 1966 to 1969, and again from 1971 to 1973.
At international level, Fulvia Coupés were victorious in the European Championship in both 1969 and 1973.
The model’s greatest success in the sport, however, came in 1972, when three wins, a second and a third achieved by Fulvia Coupés were enough to secure Lancia the International Championship for Manufacturers (the immediate forerunner to the inaugural World Rally Championship) with 97 points, well ahead of Fiat’s 55 points and Porsche’s 53.
Lancia did not seriously contest that first world title in 1973, but even if it had it might not have been able to match the Alpine A110, which was beyond dispute the most capable rally car on the planet that season.
Lancia 2000 (1971)
The first Lancia in decades with numbers in its title was a reworking of the Flavia introduced 10 years earlier.
Disc brakes and front-wheel drive were now less surprising than they had been in the early 1960s, but the flat-four engine was still an unusual though not unique feature, because only a few other manufacturers had adopted it.
Although lower capacities had been available in the Flavia, the revised model’s unit was offered only in 1991cc form, the 2000 name being an approximation of this.
Not unusually for Lancia at the time, the 2000 was sold in two forms – as a saloon (pictured), designed in-house, and as a coupé, whose body was the work of Pininfarina.
Lancia Beta (1972)
The Beta was not only the first Lancia in many years to be given a letter (to be precise, the second) of the Greek alphabet, but the first ever to be developed after the ailing company had been taken over by Fiat.
This new Fiat connection also meant that the Beta was powered by an in-line, four-cylinder engine, a conventional layout which Lancia had been avoiding for a very long time.
On the plus side, this unit was the celebrated Fiat Twin Cam, available in capacities ranging from 1.3 to 2 litres.
The basic body style was a saloon (pictured), though one which gave the car the look of a hatchback, but Lancia also offered a coupé, a spider and a three-door estate marketed as the HPE.
Lancia Stratos (1973)
It’s unlikely that Vincenzo Lancia could ever have dreamed of a car like the Stratos, but it would certainly have intrigued and possibly excited him had he lived to see it.
Though produced as a road car, the Lancia Stratos was designed with motorsport in mind and represented a colossal step forward from its predecessor, the Fulvia Coupé.
Strictly a two-seater, it had a 2.4-litre, V6 Dino engine supplied by Ferrari and mounted transversely at the rear, where its sound created an aural drama (especially when heard echoing off the trees in a forest rally stage) at least equal to the visual drama of the compact body.
Lancia Stratos in rallying
The Lancia Stratos was a huge success in rallying right from the start, immediately demoting the Alpine A110 from its position as the finest car in the sport.
In terms of the World Rally Championship alone, the Stratos gave Lancia the manufacturers’ title every year from 1974 to 1976, while in 1977 Stratos driver Sandro Munari won the FIA Cup for Rally Drivers, the precursor to the drivers’ championship.
By that time, policy dictated that the Fiat 131 Abarth would become the company’s rally contender, which it did to great effect, winning the manufacturers’ crown three times in the next four years.
It’s within the bounds of reason, however, that the Lancia Stratos would have remained at the top of rallying for considerably longer if this hadn’t happened, because Bernard Darniche, with co-driver Alain Mahé, secured the car’s 18th and final World Championship event victory as late as 1981, on the Tour de Corse.
Lancia Beta Monte-Carlo (1974)
Despite its name, the Lancia Beta Monte-Carlo was related to the regular Beta only in that it used the same 2-litre Fiat Twin Cam engine (mounted, as in the Stratos, transversely at the rear) and some elements of the suspension.
It was also only peripherally a Lancia, because the design and assembly were entirely the responsibility of Pininfarina.
Available with two body styles, the Beta Monte-Carlo reached a production total of 3385 (2078 coupés and 1757 spiders) in its first series from 1975 to 1978, and 1940 (1123 coupés and 817 spiders) in its second in 1980 and 1981, the later cars being badged simply as Montecarlos after Lancia decided to remove the implication that they were closely related to other Betas.
Pininfarina also built a version adapted for the US market, where it was sold as the Scorpion.
Lancia Beta Monte-Carlo in competition
In a sense, the Beta Monte-Carlo was a competition car before it was a road car.
Giorgio Pianta and Christine Beckers drove the prototype, known as the Abarth SE 030, in the 1974 Giro d’Italia – a year before the production car was launched – and finished second overall behind a Lancia Stratos.
The Group 5 Beta Monte-Carlo, sharing little with the production car other than the centre section and, powered by a turbocharged engine, won Lancia the 2-litre class in the world championship for endurance sports-car racing in 1978, 1979 and 1980.
In the latter two years, Porsche (running in the over 2-litre category) and Lancia scored the same number of points, but on each occasion overall honours went to Lancia after a tie-break had been applied.
Lancia Gamma (1976)
For its new flagship model, Lancia retained the flat-four engine layout (though the unit itself was new) and front-wheel drive previously used in the Flavia and 2000.
The standard capacity of the engine was 2.5 litres, but a 2-litre version was sold in Italy, where it usefully placed the car just below a significant tax threshold.
As with the Beta, the berlina model (pictured) was a fastback saloon, and there was also a short-wheelbase coupé with two doors rather than four, both bodies being designed by Pininfarina.
The Gamma was produced for eight years, up to 1984, and there were several updates, including the introduction of fuel injection for the 2.5-litre engine in 1980.
Lancia Delta (1979)
The Delta was the first, and may prove to be the only, Lancia named Car of the Year by a jury of European journalists, scooping 1980’s accolade.
The straight-edged hatchback was initially available only with 1.3- and 1.5-litre engines, but across its 15-year lifespan many new variants – some with turbochargers and four-wheel drive – were introduced, including the formidable Delta HF 16v Evoluzione of 1991.
As we’ll see, the more technically advanced roadgoing Deltas would contribute enormously to Lancia’s motorsport history, but it would have been difficult to predict this when the car was launched in 1979.
One of the more curious Delta variants was a version sold only in Nordic countries, where it was marketed as the Saab-Lancia 600.
Lancia Rally 037 (1982)
After the successful interlude with the Fiat 131 Abarth, responsibility for top-level rallying was handed back to Lancia, which created the Beta Monte-Carlo-adjacent Rally 037, an extraordinary sports car with a tubular chassis and a supercharged, mid-mounted engine.
What it didn’t have was four-wheel drive, which was problematic now that the Audi quattro had arrived, and indeed Audi driver Hannu Mikkola won the drivers’ section of the World Rally Championship in 1983.
Be that as it may, the 037 was capable of winning events, not only on the tarmac of Monte Carlo, Corsica and Sanremo, as might be expected, but also on the loose-surfaced roads of Greece and New Zealand, and even managed third place in the Finnish forests.
Because of this, the 037 allowed Lancia to win the WRC manufacturers’ title, the last two-wheel-drive car, as of the 120th-anniversary year, to be capable of such a thing.
Lancia Thema (1984)
Positioned at the top of the Lancia range for 10 years, the front-wheel-drive Thema was known for its aerodynamic cleanliness and its wide variety of engines, which included four-cylinder Fiat units, Peugeot-Renault-Volvo and later Alfa Romeo V6s, as well as turbocharged diesels produced by the Sofim combine.
1986 saw the introduction of not only an estate version but also a saloon, whose 2.9-litre V8 engine with 32 valves (the last two of those numbers inspiring the name 8.32) was an adaption of the Ferrari unit used in the 308.
There was also a limousine derivative, though this was built only to special order and was not intended for regular customers.
Lancia Delta in rallying: the S4
The first Lancia Delta derivative to take part in global rallying was even more extreme than the 037, with a similar tubular chassis and mid-engined layout, but this time with twin compressors (one supercharger, one turbocharger) and four-wheel drive.
Delta S4s finished first and second on the 1985 RAC Rally, the final round of the world championship, which seemed like a promising start.
In 1986, the S4s battled with the similarly astonishing Peugeot 205 T16s, and might conceivably have won the drivers’ and manufacturers’ titles due to the Peugeots being disqualified en masse from the Rallye Sanremo.
However, the sport’s governing body decided that this should not have happened, and annulled the results of the event.
Peugeot therefore won both championships, and the S4’s one and only shot at world rallying glory during the Group B era came to nothing.
Lancia Delta in rallying: the Group A cars
When Group B was replaced by the more production-based Group A as the main category in the World Rally Championship in 1987, Lancia was forced to abandon the S4, and base its new contender on the HF and Integrale models, which had been available with turbocharging since 1983 and with four-wheel drive since 1986.
The project was so successful that Delta drivers won four drivers’ crowns in five years (two each for Juha Kankkunen and Miki Biasion), and Lancia was the highest-placed manufacturer every year from 1987 to 1992.
Including the three for the Stratos and one for the 037, this brought Lancia’s total of WRC manufacturers’ titles to 10, an achievement unmatched by any other manufacturer for more than 30 years.