Nathan Kennedy and his father spent eight years building a Lancia Stratos replica from scratch, starting with nothing more than a bare spaceframe chassis. The pair worked out of a shipping container, turning a teenage idea sparked by an old episode of Top Gear into a fully functional kit car.

The finished machine weighs 950 kilograms, or roughly 2,094 pounds, and runs a mid-mounted 3.0-liter Alfa Romeo Busso V6 sending power to the rear wheels through a limited-slip differential. Kennedy detailed the build in a video posted by the 9caars YouTube channel.

The idea took root when Kennedy was 13 or 14, after he and his father watched a Top Gear segment where the hosts built a Caterham Seven kit car in a single day and raced it against the Stig. That sparked a simple pitch: build a project car together.

What arrived was not a car so much as a promise of one. "It literally came as just a chassis. Like it is literally just like a big roll cage and that was it," Kennedy said. Every bracket had to be fabricated, drilled, and threaded by hand, often more than once.

Kennedy's father had rallied and built cars before, but according to Kennedy, even he found this project unlike anything he had tackled previously. Progress was slow enough that entire Saturdays went into a single bracket, with parts frequently removed and refitted until they sat right.

It took about eight years of weekend work before the Stratos was running and ready for the road.

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