LAUGH RIOT

Nothing funny about the Zagato-bodied Lancia Hyena, though few cars will make you grin more broadly, Glen Waddington takes the wheel

- Glen Waddington 

Guessing I might not be alone in this, but 'Zagato' for me has always been shorthand for 'exotic. Think Alfa 6C, Fiat 8V, Aston Martin DB4 GT and it's no wonder. Yet maybe it's a semantic thing, the fact that a name beginning with 'Z' somehow stands out on a page and is innately alluring. Because as well as clothing the outer limits of the automotive firmament, Zagato has clad many a more homely motor and thus imbued it with a sense of otherness that goes beyond the sum of its parts.

How else do we assimilate our expectations with the notion of the diminutive Abarth 750 in this month's Overdrive? Similarly, we are expected to be appropriately calibrated to the prospect of the ultra-modern alloy-bodied coupé you see here. It's difficult enough to believe by the look of it that the Lancia Hyena dates back to the early 1990s; even more so that its engineering roots go back beyond the humble Fiat 128 to the 1964 Autobianchi Primula, the car that took the Mini template and refined it well before VW redefined the 'people's car' as the Golf a decade later.

Yes, those are the modest origins of the unlikely-looking rally winner that the Hyena is based on. The Lancia Delta was a Milanese shopping car for the moderately well-heeled, benefitting from an elegant pertness imparted by the pen of Giorgetto Giugiaro, though it looked pretty much superannuated by the time it had progressed to become the HF Integrale. Then it won five World Rally Championships. On the trot, from 1987 to 1991.