What can I say? We’ve now moved on to a post I’ve been looking forward to writing. All about quite simply the greatest, if not very short, era of rallying to ever occur. A class of race car so unrestricted and outrageous, it brought thousands of spectators lining the stages. Power levels were astronomical, the crowds were ridiculously huge and the drivers some of the finest ever lived. Its popularity and success brought about its demise after spectator and driver deaths forced the FIA to ban it. This is a collection of cars that became too fast to race. This…is Group B.The story begins, believe it or not, in 1980, when Audi decided to embark on a project to go rallying. They came up with the unique Quattro, which was so because it was the first competition rally car with four-wheel-drive. The FIA were sceptical at first, as the drivetrain wasn’t allowed in the rules and it was also considered too bulky and heavy to be successful. Taking this into the final verdict, they went ahead and allowed the Quattro to compete, thinking that their 4WD system would just slow it down and make it uncompetitive. How very, VERY wrong they were. A Quattro driven by Hannu Mikkola was used as a course car on an event. It’s a fact that had he been entered as a participant, he would have won by 9 minutes.
The car won it’s first actual event, the Austrian round of the European championship and from there just set the rallying world alight. In 1982, French female driver Michele Mouton became the first woman to win an international motorsports event and so narrowly missed out on becoming World Rally Champion had it not been for the Audi’s transmission failing in the final stages of the Ivory Coast Rally, allowing Opel’s Walter Rohrl to sweep in and claim it. In the same year, Group B was announced. The rules stated that only 200 examples of the car being entered had to be produced before it could be homolgated. It was also a much more relaxed class, with a kind of “anything goes” approach allowing manufacturers to pretty much do what they liked. A further 20 could be produced to allow “Evolution” models, which really were extreme versions of the original car.Lancia were the first to build a true Group B car with the 037, a modified version of the Beta Monte Carlo. It was rear wheel drive and initially carried 265hp before being boosted to 325 in the Evo model. It won the manufactuers championship for Lancia but Audi’s Hannu Mikkola took the marque’s first Group B driver’s title. Also entering that year had been the little Renault 5 Turbo with a punchy little turbocharged engine mounted in the middle of the car giving it perfect weight distribution and almost go-kart like handling. It won 3 WRC events in it’s lifetime, the Monte Carlo once and the Tour de Corse twice.
Greatest Rally Cars
Greatest Rally Cars
Greatest Rally Cars
Greatest Rally Cars
Greatest Rally Cars
Greatest Rally Cars
Greatest Rally Cars
Greatest Rally Cars
Greatest Rally Cars
