Z Cars: Alfa Romeo SZ versus Lancia Hyena

It was a question I had always wanted to answer, and the only strange thing was I had no intention of asking it. I’d gone over to our friends at Girardo & Co with quite another plan in my head, which was finally to discover for myself whether the Lamborghini Countach really was as bad as the only one I’d ever driven, or whether it was merely a terrible and unrepresentative example.

Thankfully, it was the latter. But tucked away in a corner of the new showroom was another car, a car I’d not thought about for years, more likely decades. It was a Lancia Hyena.

And if you’re now squinting at your screen and trying to recall the time when Lancia named one of its cars after an ugly, dog-like African scavenger, fret not. It didn’t. Not only was the Hyena not primarily the work of Lancia, it is so rare you can be forgiven for having never heard of it at all. In total just 24 were made, making that traditional barometer of seriously scarce cars, the Ferrari 250 GTO, half as common again.