Hi all,
As this is a motoring forum and we are all enthusiasts I Just wanted to put a post on here regarding Group B rallying, just to see if there is any interest at all.
Quite often when I am out with friends or in discussions with work colleagues the subject often talked about is football, rugby, cricket ETC but when I say I have little or no interest and mention that I prefer motorsport people automatically presume it is formula 1. When a say no I enjoy the WRC they have no idea what I am on about and then when I mention group B rallying from the 80’s no-one has a clue.
I have a fond memory in 1981 (aged14) when I went to my first RAC Lombard rally at Trentham Gardens. I distinctly remember standing behind some feeble piece of diagonally red and white striped piece of plastic tape wrapped around a few tree trunks, the marshall’s whistle blew and just at that time I thought a plane was flying over low, typical I thought-just as the first car is due………It was no plane it was Hannu Mikkola in the works quattro, OMG !!!..what a noise, it made me tremble with fear, nervousness and sheer excitement. I will never forget that noise as long as I live. It marked the start of my passion for rallying and added to this it was the start of the onslaught of the “Group B Monsters”
Group B rally cars had few restrictions on technology, design and the number of cars required for homoligation to compete was only 200 which was far less than other classes. Weight was kept as low as possible, high-tech materials were permitted, and there were no restrictions on boost resulting in the power output of the winning cars being around 500BHP to 800 BHP. By 1986, the final year of Group B the power output had almost doubled with the RS 200 being tuneable to over 800 BHP. These was formula 1 cars in the forest !!
The performance of these cars was just insane, as an example my all time favourite car the Audi Sport Quattro S1 E2 has a 0-62mph time of just 3.1 seconds !. The Peugeot 205 TI 16 had a similar blistering pace and then we had the Lancia Delta S4, both turbo & super charged raising the benchmark again with the 0-60 time of just 2 seconds, don’t forget this was in the 80’s. Clarkson commented that this was and still is the most insane car ever made.
As the group B series got ever more competitive and cars got even quicker, crowds were growing and standing closer to the cars than ever before, which led to the death of a number of spectators, added to this at the 1986 Tour de Corse Henri Toivonen lost control of the 550bhp S4 and was killed along with his co-driver Sergio Cresto. The crash brought Group B to an end, with the FIA — the sport’s governing body — ruling that the regulations would be outlawed at the end of the 1986 season.
I guess that by now some of the WRC cars currently running are close to the group B performance figures but there is just something so special about those cars that can never be repeated in my opinion. They sat that “WRC is for boys and Group B is for men” not sure I would agree with the former but would certainly agree with the latter.
Just in closing……the 200 road going versions of these cars were priced at around £30,000 - £50,000 at the time and many of them have increased in value 10 fold !!! I have seen a Delta S4 expected to fetch over $500,000 at an auction very soon, and people say cars loas money !
Anyway……just thought I would open up a discussion on the best ever years of rallying, please post if you have any comments, thoughts or experiences.
Thanks for reading.