The World Rally Championship is an awesome spectacle which goes to places and touches different fans compared to other kinds of motorsport. For many, the “Group B” years of the eighties represent a high water mark, a golden era.
The cars featured two key innovations: turbocharging and four wheel drive. Power grew from 240hp to 500+ in under five years, and mildly hot-rodded road cars evolved into purpose-built prototypes using the finances, methods, and personnel normally reserved for Formula 1. Yet the rallies themselves were unchanged from when competitors used two-wheel drive cars with under 200hp. They were designed to test driver and navigator endurance, over far greater distances than modern WRC events. The speed and drama captured the imagination of two small suburban boys, Jon in England and Eric in America.
Recently, these cars have re-entered popular consciousness via computer and console games, with high end auctions and car brokers offering examples which have sold for record prices. In discussing this, Jon and Eric discovered they had fundamentally different ideas about which drivers and cars were fastest/best, leading Jon to focus research on this topic.
Part 1 of the presentation will be a synopsis of Group B; part 2 will be a synopsis of the debate. By doing this we shed light on the eternal question, “who was the best driver?” and answer whether “he only won because of the car”.
Tune in everywhere you stream, download or listen!
 |  |  |
- Bio
- Notes
- Transcript
- Highlights
- Livestream
- Learn More
Bio
Jon Summers is a teaching assistant and guest lecturer at Stanford University. He’s an independent automotive historian, podcaster, and Pebble Beach Docent.
Notes
Transcript
Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast, and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
Jon Summers: Have you seen that movie, 2001 A Space Odyssey? Yes,
Crew Chief Eric: I have.
Jon Summers: You know, the black rock where the monkeys are like, uh, uh, uh, uh, with the, that’s me with technology.
Crew Chief Eric: It’s like the IT crowd where the internet is in the box with the blinking light.
Jon Summers: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it is directly related to what we’re going to talk about tonight because I’ve been down this group B rat hole for the last however many hours.
All I’ve done is watch group B rallying videos. [00:01:00] And what I’m struck by is how fast the technological Changes came. Yeah. You basically had today’s world rally car competing against Steve and Mike in an Escort Mk2. They prepared in Mark’s dad’s shed. That’s been my learning. The changes were incremental, but the increments were so incredibly fast.
The organizers just did not keep up with it. In other words, from. A 270 horse Opel Ascona 400 in 1982 at the beginning of Group B to 320 horse for the first Audis. And I’ve heard different figures and you’re probably better informed than me. But that’s a big jump and there’s the jump around traction as well.
But early on there was the unreliability and, you know, the first year of Group B, well, should we? Actually do an intro here.
Crew Chief Eric: I think we [00:02:00] should, because we’re going to talk about one of my favorite topics, which I often feel completely alone in the world with respect to rally. And it’s, I think one of the, probably the most interesting disciplines of motorsport, maybe one of the most divisive when we really dig deep into the golden era of rally, which is group B.
Jon Summers: I’m really keen to do this Eric. Let me do my, uh, traditional beginning of the episode. Good day. Good morning. Good afternoon. And welcome to the motoring historian with John Summers and with Eric, his producer, Eric, there are two British comedians called the two Ronnies. One of them was fat and funny. And the other one was little and not so funny.
And the little one would always do a talk to the camera. And it always used to be very boring to me when I was a small boy about Ollie’s age, watching it, just because I wanted to stay up and not go to bed, as you want to do when you’re a small boy. And he would always tell a story sitting in his chair, where he said, the producer said this, and the producer said that.
And I was like, who the fuck is [00:03:00] this producer character? Is it his wife? And it was only when I got involved in TV stuff that I was aware that there was always a producer there and you know in the world of reality tv each star has their own producer right if the star gets cut from the show the producer loses their income as well so the production team is structured so that they wind up the reality tv stars to do the absurd things that they do and we only see one side of the equation the Sistine Chapel do you know who paid Michelangelo to paint that it was the Pope So that image on the Sistine Chapel where there’s all the completely inappropriate, is this, what am I actually looking at here on the wall of a church stuff that Michelangelo painted that was a direct dig at the Pope.
He was biting the hand that fed it. And I use that metaphor with the Sistine Chapel on purpose, right? That behind the artist, there’s always the financier is what I’m, uh, what I’m trying to say. And look, we’re going to talk about Group B rally. today and we’re [00:04:00] going to take it from a perspective that we’re going to set the scene a little bit Then we’re going to talk about the cars a little bit because you know These are the power behind the throne right the pope vartanen is not vartanen without a really decent rally car
Crew Chief Eric: It is said that group b rally was more popular than Formula One at the time.
Jon Summers: That wasn’t what I witnessed in period. What the was, was a capture of the zeitgeist, right? Right. People who wouldn’t turn on the TV to watch a Formula One race, but people who were just like, you know, Pamplona running of the bulls types. Those were the types who came from the farms and it would stand at the side of the road in stupid places.
Crew Chief Eric: Yes, and we’ll get into that. Real
Jon Summers: rally fans, because I was nearly run over by Bruno Sabe one time because I was standing in a stupid place. Sorry, Bruno. But, you know, it’s really short period, right? It’s 82 to 86. So it’s a very short period. And in that period, the spectacle is incredible. The danger was palpable to everybody then.
I was [00:05:00] spat by it. For God’s sake, I won’t fall down that rat hole. I won’t do an aside now. I’ll stay on course somewhat. So this fascinating thing with group B is that it has resonated in a way that, oh my God, this group B stuff, it is hot as you like, isn’t it? And that’s why I felt like it was worth talking about it.
So, so look, our title today is. Related to the presentation that I promised I would give at the IMRRC, and I dare say, will appear in a future episode, so by the time you’re listening to this, that might have been published, and then you yourself can see how well I’ve interpreted what Eric and I talk about, how well I’ve turned that out.
into what I present at the IMRRC, which is The Real History.
Crew Chief Eric: I think this is going to be absolutely entertaining, but I feel underdressed today. Like, I don’t have enough quattro paraphernalia. I have a ton in the house. I just wanted to keep it subtle. I have no bias, no bias for this. So if you’re watching this behind the scenes on Patreon, you’ll understand what we’re talking about.
Jon Summers: See, with me, not only do you get [00:06:00] Rembrandt’s Night Watch, but you also get all the sketches as well. I always like to go for the jugular with this stuff. Everyone wants to know who the greatest driver was. So you have to talk about that. But we can’t talk about that without talking about the cars. And we can’t talk about that without talking about the actual drivers.
Canvas the actual backdrop against which these events took place because that seems to be really important and I’ll talk about that in a minute, but let’s begin at the beginning with that rules package of what Group B really means.
Crew Chief Eric: So the rules are very strange because early Group B was all about homologation cars and around 1983.
Um, When the horsepower numbers doubled, they became evolution cars. So I think we need to split hairs in terms of the rules package. You know, we’re going to talk about Lancia. We’re going to talk about Audi. You mentioned the Citroen BX4TC, which was designed to meet Group [00:07:00] B regulations. But we also have to look at the cars That carried over prior to group B.
So I’ll give a prime example. The lunch at 037 was adopted into group B, but it was the replacement for the Stratos, which had just exited in 1978 1979 with Marco lane behind the wheel. So homologation rules versus. The evolution rules where that all stems from. We have to go back and talk about John Marie Balestra, who was at the head of world rally.
It wasn’t called WRC like it is today, but as part of the FIA, he was at the head of what we would call WRC today. And the pages were mostly blank as far as he was concerned. When you look back over reports and documentaries that talk about Balestra. They talk about him more as a businessman. He was very coin operated.
He could have cared less about racing. It was all about making money for the FIA.
Jon Summers: There was a cultural divide [00:08:00] between the frustration, both in Formula One, that these British garage Easters were winning with these Ford V8s. 100%. And you know who was winning in rally? Oh, it would have been lovely if it was those Stratos.
Yeah, it would have been, wouldn’t it? But it wasn’t. It was those. Fucking Fords again, wasn’t it? It was. So there was this frustration. I learned this just last night. The rules were developed in partnership with the manufacturer.
Crew Chief Eric: Yes.
Jon Summers: So just like in Formula One, the turbos were a deliberate attempt to destabilize The British hegemony, if you will, that at least is one argument that you could make.
I’m not trying to make it, but it just occurred to me. How come the Metro 6R4 wasn’t turbocharged? How come when Malcolm Wilson was interviewed in the rally that he does in Equatro, he moans about turbo lag when the Metro 6R4 is not laggy. Oh, I guess there was a lot of politics lurking even behind the technical decisions that were made.
Crew Chief Eric: There was, [00:09:00] and the Metro 6R4 falls into the evolution period of Group B, rather than the homologation period. Though it looked like an MG Metro that was off the street, because that was always the facade, that was that illusion that they wanted to paint.
Jon Summers: One thing though, Eric, you might not be aware of this, being American and all.
Peugeot ran very successful or very memorable advertising campaign. It was in magazines. It was also advertisement hoardings, and it was a picture of a 205 GTI and then reflected in a puddle nighttime. And it was like neon lights and the car was black when reflected in the puddle. It was a T 16. So you’ve got the 205 on the 1.
9 GTI. Alloys. And then in the reflection, you’ve got the T16 on the rally car wheels. That ad alone lets you know how widely understood, you know, the British public, the viewing public wouldn’t recognize what was going [00:10:00] on here, that that was not just a car reflected in the puddle. It was a rally car reflected in the puddle and it was the rally car that had won everything.
Crew Chief Eric: And that’s what drove Balestra was that you would walk into the dealership and buy a Peugeot 205 Rally, but that was a front wheel drive, front mount, 100 horsepower, GTI type of hatchback versus the Peugeot 205 T16 that you saw on the rally stage. They were selling the dream. They were selling the fantasy.
If you think about Formula One at that time, at the same time, yes, In period, Formula One was exciting, you have Senna doing his thing in the rise, you have Andretti clinching his Formula One championship, you have the rivalry quote unquote between Pironi and Villeneuve, you have a lot of things happening there, but Formula One couldn’t sell the dream.
The same way that Raleigh could. So to your point for the FIA and for Balestra, Raleigh is the golden child. It’s where the money is being made. It’s Indy
Jon Summers: versus NASCAR. [00:11:00] Exactly. In that sense, Balestra is sort of a big bill. Exactly. Who knew? Fascinating concept.
Crew Chief Eric: So the evolution period of Group B is just absolutely mental.
But the thing is, we have to step back to the homologation period. So again, that rules package, as dictated by the FIA, said you have to build 200 cars based on a production vehicle. Okay, well that’s doable. That lasted until 1984. And for
Jon Summers: that, I would say the Audi was forward looking, right? Yes. Feel like you could buy a road car.
The other Group B cars at that time were stuff that was not so different from, you know, the Escorts of the 1970s.
Crew Chief Eric: Opel Manta, all those kinds. The Manta
Jon Summers: 400 is the key evolution, isn’t it? The previous version of the Manta is the Escona, I now understand, and, you know, the Manta was better balanced than the Bit more power according to Jimmy [00:12:00] McCray, but this is fundamentally 270 horse.
Yeah, normally
Crew Chief Eric: aspirated, but there was a lot of games that were being played by the different manufacturers. It wasn’t hard for Audi to crank out 200 cars. I mean, they sent 627 UR Quattros to the United States. They sold 10 times that amount in the United Kingdom alone. So the homologation rules were really strange and the way they worked was sort of like Stock car used to be where it needed to be based on a production car, just like Trans Am was in the 80s.
It needed to be based on the Firebird that you could buy from Chevrolet and that you could do whatever you wanted with the motor. Even at 300 horsepower when the Audis hit the scene. That was not what was in the street car. The Audi’s five cylinder was a 20 valve, 2. 1 liter turbo making somewhere between 275 and 320.
The numbers are all over the map. The homologation car made 165 horsepower with a 10 valve turbo. [00:13:00] So the homologation rules, you had to have 200 at a minimum production cars sold in dealerships. It didn’t matter where it was in the world. And then you could qualify to modify it for WRC. And again, that lasted until 1984, and to your point, the Opel Manta 400 was one of the first cars, but the one that really kind of just punched everybody in the gut was when Audi decided to cut almost 13 inches out of the wheelbase on the Quattro and created the Shorty, or the short wheelbase Quattro, or the sport Quattro, it’s referred to.
They had to then produce 200 of those for the street, of which they sold six in the United States. And then the rest went all over the world. But the shorty is where you suddenly saw in 1983 and 84. It’s like Peugeot, Renault, Lancia. And everybody’s going, wait, hold on a second. What do you guys wait? We’re allowed to cut the cars now.
This isn’t a production chat. What do you guys, what are you doing here? And so now begin the period of the evolution cars. And so [00:14:00] Balestra stands back and he goes. The fans are loving it. We’ve got 300, 000 people lining the roads in Portugal to watch you crazy bastards go down at 130 miles an hour and hope that nobody gets killed.
And so the power numbers continue to increase. It became like a space race. Oh, like the Mille Miglia in the fifties.
Jon Summers: Exactly. It was completely an accident waiting to happen. I’ve watched, as I say, for the last 24 hours, all I’ve done. Is watch all of the rally reports from the 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1986 RAC rallies.
So that was the lens that I had when I was a boy. I’m just stupefied that when you’ve got guys like Mikkola saying, you know, the straights are getting shorter and the corners, they are coming quicker. Oh man, it was.
Crew Chief Eric: I mean, if you go back to the early days of rally with the Lancia Fulvias and stuff like that, they did 85 miles an hour downhill.
If they were lucky. So as we said in the beginning, you know, Group B started in 81 and you had a lot of carryover cars. The Lancia [00:15:00] 037 is still in Group B by the rules because they sold homologation versions of it on the street and things like that. But it was based on the Lancia Beta Monte Carlo.
Jon Summers: It wasn’t really, was it?
I mean, I always think Lancia completely took the piss with the designer cars. I always felt like Audi, at least it vaguely. Yes. Whereas Lancia, you were like, what, what, that, like that Delta S4. I mean, that looked like nothing, like no fucking road car you could ever buy. The Stratos. Was the beginning, arguably the Stratos was the first prototype rally car, although I just think the Alpine A110 is more of that.
Crew Chief Eric: I would agree. That was sort
Jon Summers: of positioned as a road car to like slide under the rules. Whereas again, Lancia just completely took a piss and put a Formula One engine in a bespoke chassis and.
Crew Chief Eric: Well, the Stratos was a Dino 246 motor.
Jon Summers: Yeah, it was a Ferrari derived from the engine that bloody Tony Brooks had used to win the 1959 British Grand Prix.
You know, really it was, it was that engine, which, uh. Lancia invented the V6, did you know that?
Crew Chief Eric: I did [00:16:00] know that, yeah, in the Aurelia, if I remember correctly.
Jon Summers: Yeah, well, so let’s talk about events, right, because that is really, I, I think, worth talking about that, you know, for me, I’ve said in the past that I fell in love with, you know, motorsport really through rallying and it was because rallying made the equivalent of wide world of sport it was called grandstand and rallying made grandstand and looking back it captured the imagination of the british people so the lens for me is the traditional season ending event the lombard rec rally of great britain the thing about this event is no pace notes every other event you’re allowed pace notes for I guess the striking thing for me is that the season will begin with Monte Carlo, the Monte Carlo rally.
So this is snow and ice. They do the one in Finland called the Thousand Lakes, which is when you’ve seen rally cars jumping, that’s where it’s going to be. The one in Africa, the safari rally, that was always won by local people. Yeah. Like they [00:17:00] weren’t even sent the first time. Valtteror, Valtteror had been a rally driver.
He’d been world rally champion. Once before he even went to the thousand lakes, because he was like, why would I go there? It’s like a pissing competition between these fins. And I just, you know, I didn’t grow up driving these roads. I’m just not gonna be a madman to try and, you know, mix it with them. So the events are from a spectacle perspective, perhaps similar to the way that they are at the moment, but the endurance that was expected of cruise is just.
boggles the mind today.
Crew Chief Eric: We have to put it in perspective for those that don’t know as much as we do about Group B. So first of all, 1981 to 1986, 12 countries in a season all over the world, to your point. It could be Corsica, it could be Portugal, it could be Kenya, it could be up in Scandinavia. They did over 5, 000 kilometers of driving.
And this wasn’t driving down the highway down the A1 or the M1. This [00:18:00] is 5, 000 hard kilometers at breaking
Jon Summers: speeds. The 1985 RAC Rally, I learned that from Tuesday night until Thursday morning, the end of the rally, there was 10 hours of halt. So you could expect to get perhaps five hours sleep, not counting the time that you can sleep in the passenger seat whilst the co drivers driving.
The route around England in five days was 2, 000 miles. Vartanen was like, you know, are they trying to do a parry dakka? That. Did not mix and that’s this is something this is why I wanted to start out by talking about the events because that didn’t mix With the cars as they were coming along and and involving let’s Talk first about the cars.
Then we’ll talk about the drivers and then You know, hopefully come to some kind of conclusions. So clearly these early [00:19:00] cars, the Ascona 400, the Renault 5 Turbo, these two wheel drive things were not competitive as time went on. I watched one event from the, like the British Open Rally Championship from the beginning of 1982.
You’ve got Vatanen fully brain out in an Escort, which has got to have the same horsepower as the Opel Manta. And you’ve got Micola with a quattro struggling to come to terms with not knowing the roads as well, the car being understeery and then bits and pieces breaking on it all the time because it was so many revolutionary technology.
Crew Chief Eric: The cars were popular, they were hot, but we also saw them at Geneva in 1980 and they were prototyped in 1979. And so people were already excited about this. production car with all wheel drive and it’s unique and it’s different and
Jon Summers: [00:20:00] Volkswagen thing it was based on. When did that come out?
Crew Chief Eric: So the Iltis, if we go all the way back to World War II.
Jon Summers: Oh, all right. Oh, it’s right the way back there. Yeah, it comes post World War II. All the language the British commentators talk about Audi’s approach. William Woolard talks about military precision, you know, they’re not quite there. British commentators flirt with that kind of thing all the time, very noticeably.
Crew Chief Eric: So if we drop the pin all the way back there, you have to realize In World War II, the Germans used the Kübelwagen, which was sold in the United States as the VW Thing. So that was their military jeep. But remember, it’s based on a Beetle. It’s rear wheel drive, rear engine, every problem that a Beetle has, the Kübelwagen had as well.
Post war, when they were still able to develop and refine and this and that, they were building other military vehicles because there were other wars that were happening, right? You had the war in Korea, and later on you had Vietnam and all these kinds of things. So the Iltis Was born and you can look this up.
The Volkswagen Iltis I L T I [00:21:00] S was the first for Volkswagen, all mechanical, all wheel drive system, punching in the nose, other mechanical all wheel drive systems that existed. Ahead of the Jeep. I’d have to look at who did it first, but I will say the Iltis was better because if you look at the trials that they did with the Iltis, that thing could almost climb a vertical wall.
Right. Is it insane how good it was? So they basically lifted that. Longitudinal design and they’re like, we’re going to put that in a production car. And that was the result of the brainchild of Roland Gumper, who, as we know, later designed his own car company. He was at the head of Audi development for a long time.
Very famous in German circles.
Jon Summers: Pieck is team manager. Am I correct? Yes. Okay. So that’s for people who don’t know, that’s the dude that did the Porsche 917. The dude that will go on to do the Bugatti Veyron because, you know, cars are going to be all green in the 21st century. So we need a quad turbo V16, don’t we?
Crew Chief Eric: Most people will associate Ferdinand [00:22:00] Piëch with the Volkswagen Phaeton. That was sort of his swan song. You mean the Bentley Continental? Yeah, you mean the Audi 88L?
Jon Summers: This is why I’m faintly uncomfortable with what Audi and Lamborghini are a wild bull. Bentleys are occasionally faster than them. You can’t snack rank them in your nice little German brand thing.
No, I rebel. But all that to
Crew Chief Eric: say, it is a bit of a coven or a mafia when you think about it, because Audi, Volkswagen, and Porsche have really always been almost in bed together, if you use that analogy. But the thing is, Audi, being the auto union going all the way back to the days of the silver arrows been around for forever already had a racing pedigree and those kinds of things and just as an aside it’s a footnote audi didn’t become part of the volkswagen audi group officially until 1985 bear that in mind they were getting the support because talks were already there and this and that but audi was this Cutting edge, very [00:23:00] different, always thinking outside of the box, one of the biggest problems having owned many Audis from the 80s and the 90s especially, they used the public as their test bed for new technologies.
And it’s like, well it might work, it might not work, they’re plagued with electrical gremlins, but the ideas were way ahead of their time.
Jon Summers: First car I ever had to stop start on was uh, an Audi 80. On the way to a rugby match, aged about 9 or 10, it completely made up for the fact that I hated rugby. You know, I’d never known a car do that before.
It was, I felt the same way about that technology now as I do then, which is that the kind of old Fords my dad had in damp England, when they started, you generally didn’t want to turn them off. In case they might not want to start again early on. Right. I think we can say that probably in the very early days of group B, the best car was not the Audi as we move through, certainly by 83, you can say.
very much that it was, but then [00:24:00] the moment somebody else did a new car, so when the Peugeot 205 T16 came, that car made the champion. When the Lancia Delta S4 came, that car made the championship. Arguably the RS200, the Ford was the next step over that. So I think this whitewash of the question, which car was best, is it depends exactly which year you’re asking.
Our debate Has Audi versus Lancia versus Peugeot.
Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, and I agree with what you’re saying. It’s almost like debating the vintages of wines, you know. Is the 71 bottling of Chateau whatever as good as the 72 and the 73? And that’s sort of where we’re at, and we do have to split hairs because as you mentioned in the beginning, the technology jumps.
Very, very quickly, but some of it is a bit quid pro quo. Some of it is tit for tat. Some of it is completely reactionary. So I want to highlight the years because it’s really important to understand this reaction and why the technology moves. So you mentioned it before looking at [00:25:00] 1982. You have Hana Mikola struggling.
With the long base quattro coupe and it just understeers like a broken ox cart through every turn and you can see it. I mean the amount of wheel deflection and everything that’s happening and having owned a UR quattro that polar moment. Of having that cast iron five cylinder hanging out over the front end of that car.
That was not the best design from a weight balance proportionally. So that’s why it makes sense. The mid engine cars came later. But the thing is they worked with what they had because that’s how the Iltis was laid out. It was front mount longitudinal with this boat anchor hanging out over the front wheels.
So they’re like, we’re going to keep refining this technology. It’s very German. We’re going to evolve it until it’s perfect. Just look at the 911. It’s incredibly German. It really is.
Jon Summers: Yeah.
Crew Chief Eric: If you look at the Audi, you’re right, they struggled every time they won, it was a miracle that they did. [00:26:00] And they were getting beat by Vauxhall Chevettes and Talbot would be equivalent to like the Omni.
Jon Summers: Oh, no, no, Eric, not the equivalent of the Omni. I just wanna, the Omni we got as the Horizon. Yes. It was a shortened, narrow version of that with a Lotus twin cam. Yes. Which in silver and black, those really look the business. They were a tasty car. And I say that as a committed Ford guy, as a committed, which of the seventies rally cars would I have had?
I’d probably have an escort even now over Stratos. I would.
Crew Chief Eric: So in that mix, you still have Nissan, you have some Toyotas in there, all rear wheel drive layouts. And the reason they were beating the Quattro in the early days. And Quatro did finally show its superiority is that they could rotate through a corner.
And that understeer, that polar moment, that big brick that’s up in front of the Audi was its Achilles heel. Eric, let’s call a spade a spade. It looked crap. [00:27:00] It looks
Jon Summers: crap. It sounds amazing. Steering your way to victory, like there’s no glory in that. The glory lies in Ari Vartanen with one wheel in the ditch and all the dirt out of the back.
Oh, 100%, 100%. When he won the RAC Rally in 1984, he was leading the whole event, apart from a few minutes after he had a roll on the last day.
Crew Chief Eric: You would roll it on the last, like, what? He was so cavalier about that, he’s like, well, that’s my weekend, it’s over. So Audi’s response to getting beat by rear wheel drive cars, That the all wheel drive could and would be superior in the long run.
They had to make the car pivot somehow, but they couldn’t move the motor because the homologation rules said it had to be based on a production vehicle. They didn’t have a mid engine production car at that time. Now there’s some other concepts and prototypes we can go down rabbit holes about, but the point is their solution was.
The wheelbase of the Audi is longer than all of these rear wheel drive cars. What if we shorten it? So if they [00:28:00] shorten it, which they shortened it almost 13 inches, it caused the car to become extremely twitchy and it made it easier for them to rotate. Now what people with the lens of today’s WRC don’t understand is, We’re still running three pedals back then, and nobody had Billy Club hydraulic handbrakes that they could just wrap on next to their sequential gearboxes.
You weren’t yanking the handbrake to get the car to come around. That wasn’t an emergency type of thing. So that’s why you see the famous videos of Walter Rural jumping on the pedals and left foot braking, and left foot braking became a thing because of Rally, because they needed to keep the turbos spooled up.
But it also helped them to get the car to pitch in.
Jon Summers: Eric Carlson did that in those two stroke Saabs. They had so little power, he would just, like, you never wanted to let them lose weight. He’d just keep his foot on the throttle and dab at the brake.
Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, exactly. So the other thing that they did was, when the Sport Quattro came out in 83, they also started to reduce the weight.
What people don’t realize is the long wheelbase cars, We’re still [00:29:00] sheet metal. They were still very much a factory car that you could buy, but with a lot more horsepower. The thing was, the five cylinder is an overbuilt engine. It’s extremely reliable even to this day. It revs like a four. It has the torque of a six.
But when you put it with a turbo, suddenly it wakes up. It’s alive. It has like tremendous horsepower and it can turn to 10, 000 RPM without batting an eye. Audi brought the turbos to WRC, but that was being borrowed from Formula One technology because the turbo era had already come to Formula One. But in a strange way, turbos made more sense in rally, even though they were laggy.
Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche working together. Where did the turbo technology come from? From the 9 11 that had already come out in the late 70s in 1975 78 with the 9 thirties, you know, things like that. So it wasn’t a foreign concept. So, when the sport quattro came out slightly bigger engine 2. 2 liter all the way up to 2.
3 at 1 point and things [00:30:00] like that. And that motor continued to evolve. Suddenly it was made of. Carbon kevlar and it had crank fire ignition and it had some other tricky bits that later became the torsion torque sensing differentials and all this stuff that they were working on and in one of the videos you know that we looked at together dual clutch direct sequential gearboxes which We all go, well, Volkswagen invented that with the GTI in the 2000s.
Well, Audi worked on that 30 years before that point. So a lot of experimentation, a lot of development happening. And every year they kept upping the ante. So as soon as Audi shortened the car and Balestra raised his hands and said, you all do whatever you want. I don’t really care because sales are up.
He’s making money on the back end somehow. And well, the sport
Jon Summers: was generating so much money at that point. It was when you said he was more, I’d not thought of him as a businessman before, but when you said that I had a sort of like, duh moment with it, because the reason that everyone was ignoring the obvious accident waiting to happen was that everyone was [00:31:00] getting rich off it because, you know, you weren’t living in Europe at the time.
Well, we were watching it in the States, but it was, there was a real buzz. I mean, the BBC sponsored an Audi Quattro in the 1984 Lombard IRC rally. They actually sponsored a car themselves so that they could have proper camera access and all of that. The Lancias though, you talked a bit there about the Audis.
Talk about the Lancias though, because we talked about how the Stratos is the 70s thing. Yeah. The 037 or the Lancia Rally as it seemed to be known in period. Yes, it was based on what we in Europe called the Monte Carlo and what I think in the States was called the Lancia Scorpion. Correct. But it wasn’t really, was it?
I mean, my understanding is you really didn’t want to crash head on in it. Because there’s basically just a spare tire and some suspension bits and your feet and the pedal box, you know, and you’re just going to get your legs all mangled up. So in that sense, the things like a formula one car. So that was supercharged.
Wasn’t it? That was Lancey’s experiment supercharger. Was that [00:32:00] not more developed than the short wheelbase Quattros, even though it was a earlier car. Exactly. But only two wheel drive, so awesome on the tarmac events, okay on like the safari and the endurance kind of event, crappy on events like the RAC.
Yeah.
Crew Chief Eric: So Lancia, or Lancia, depending on how you want to pronounce it, it all goes back to a, the race director. Of the motor sports program there. So we have to talk about Cesare Fiorio for just a second. And there’s a great way to summarize this for anybody that wants to dive off the deep end. Go watch last year’s movie, Race to Glory.
And it’s about the sort of dogfight between Audi and Lancia. And some of it is a dramatization, but it’s a really interesting way to engage with Group B. But again, going back to the Stratos, to your point, The Stratos was the beginning of, like, the prototype cars, but going even further back, Lancia had its racing heritage buried in Rally, going back to the Fulvia [00:33:00] and other cars, and they just continued to evolve.
When you’re the incumbent, sometimes the rules are bent in your favor, but then when you have somebody like Fiorio at the helm, who says, If you can’t be as strong as your competitors, you must be more clever. And he was known for doing all sorts of shenanigans, but the Oh, 37, even though it looked, it was reminiscent to the beta Monte Carlo or the Scorpion in its shell, the reality of the situation was as a completely tube frame car, the homologation rules were written that it forced.
Lancia to build street versions of that car. And there’s a really funny scene and it’s based on a true story where Lancia couldn’t build the 200 cars. They played the shell game. And when the inspectors from the FIA came, they had a hundred cars in one location. They said, well, there’s only a hundred here.
Where’s the rest of them? Well, Well, let’s go to lunch. We’ll do lunch, blah, blah, blah. And then we’ll take you to where the other cars are. Meanwhile, they load up those hundred cars, move them to another facility. And then after [00:34:00] lunch, drive those guys over and they go, Oh, there’s a hundred cars over here.
Now we have 200. So again, if you can’t be stronger, be more clever. So these are the kinds of shenanigans that Lance is doing because they want to maintain. Their reputation as the kings of rally, but when it came to group B, the Oh, 37, unless it was a completely tarmac rally like Corsica, which it was predominantly in the dry.
And that’s where the 37 failed was in the rain at the RAC Lombard rallies. Is it just it couldn’t do the job of the other cars. They carried it as long as they could. And once you sort of scrambling going, what do we do? What do we do? We are now the also rams. They have great drivers. They got Marco and I lane Toyvan and all these folks driving for them.
And it’s like, we can’t make this work. The Oh 37 wasn’t a failure. It was just past its prime because the beta. Monte Carlo that it was based on was a car from the 70s. It was old technology. So what did they do? They said, you know what? Jujaro built us a really cool [00:35:00] car, the Delta, which was also a 70s car.
I want to point that out. By that point, by 1984, 1985, we had moved away from homologation into the Group B evolution period. And now, and I think it was In Lancia’s favor that they changed the rules, they developed the Lancia Delta S4, which, to your point, the only thing that reminds you of a Delta is the backside of it, that it’s still a hatchback.
Jon Summers: And it was a little con, right? I remember I spent Christmas, when I was first getting into reading car magazines, and I spent a Christmas in Germany, Christmas 1985, and my uncle, very kindly, had bought me all these car magazines. For me to read, because you knew I had an interest in cars and in a couple of these were pictures of the launch of the Delta S4 and the pictures of it, it looks like a normal Delta with like big wheels at the back.
It looks nothing like what the actual Delta S4 looked like [00:36:00] when it rocked up on the street, because what the actual Delta S4 looks like is nothing like. What the five door hatchback, the Giugiaro ped, you know, no element,
Crew Chief Eric: the windshield might’ve been the same. That was about it. You know, Lancia comes to the table with the S4, but that wasn’t until 1985.
And what’s interesting about that is that’s when the horsepower wars really started to ramp up because the S4 came to the table and Lancia said, we just broke the 500 horsepower mark. And they’re like, well, how did you do that? And to your point from earlier, they used the supercharging technology and then partnered with the turbocharger.
So they twin charged the engine to reduce turbo lag. And now they have linear power, almost unlimited power compared to everybody else, a huge rev range in a four cylinder package in an extremely light car, mid engine, all wheel drive. And they’re just kicking everybody’s butt. But that’s at the tail end of Group B.
So now you have to remember, it’s a quid pro quo [00:37:00] situation. So Audi says, well, we got the sport quattro. It only makes 350 and we’re limited at 135 miles an hour. And the Delta is just 200 more horsepower. So what are we going to do? Here comes the Evo S1. And there’s another iteration beyond that when we go beyond Group B.
So Audi reacts. It takes the sport quattro and puts it on steroids. And then Peugeot, though they had already introduced the 205 T16 at that point, and everybody went, whoa. Lancia I think copied the 205 T16 because who in their right mind puts a motor in the middle of a three door hatchback?
Jon Summers: Absolutely. I felt like when the Delta S4 came along, the permission for the Delta S4 had come from the Peugeot 205 T16, and I felt like the T16 had been allowed to have a longer wheelbase and have this engine in the backseat, which no real Peugeot 205 ever had.
It was allowed to have that partly because Peugeot Sport and Ballest were based about 50 miles apart in [00:38:00] Paris there.
Crew Chief Eric: Well, not only that, Jean Todd, who went to lead Peugeot Motorsport, which brought Peugeot back from the brink of extinction. Everybody’s French, we all get along, so Countrymen alike, we need to support each other, patriotism, all these kinds of things.
So you don’t think Ballester is going to turn a blind eye to Peugeot developing a car that makes absolutely no sense.
Jon Summers: And if it had the original wheelbase, it would have been too twitchy. Yes. I mean, again, listening to these rally reports, the Metro 6R4, Tony Pond on that first RAC rally on the straights, he couldn’t keep it straight.
It was so twitchy because the wheelbase is so short.
Crew Chief Eric: Same thing. What Austin Rover, MG Metro on the planet. came with a six cylinder that made 400 horsepower. Zero.
Jon Summers: Before we talk about the Metro 6R4, I want to talk about this Astra 4S. Had you heard of that? I had not heard of that before doing research for this presentation and I wonder if Voxel were feeling like, you know, as if they had to do something because Austin Rover and everybody else was.
But my [00:39:00] understanding is that this was a four wheel drive Astra, but it used a Zaxpeed Turbo Formula One engine.
Crew Chief Eric: Like the Capri had.
Jon Summers: Oh, like the Capri 1700 Zaxpeed. Oh, one of my all time favorite cars, that car. I love a Ford Capri like nothing else. Those Zaxpeed ones are just so awesome. Yeah. Wow. So let’s talk about the 6R4 then for a little bit.
Crew Chief Eric: What an awe inspiring car, but a disappointment at the same time. Like, I could never get on board with the 6R4. I have more appreciation for it today with the eyes of a veteran WRC fan than I did in period. In period, I was like, what a joke. What a weird car. This is never going to work, especially when you compared it to the Peugeot, or to the Lancia, and even the Audi, which at that time was sort of falling behind the curve.
But the sound of the 6R4 is one of those things that, at first, you’re like, is that the [00:40:00] 939? Which most folks don’t know is the rally edition of the 911, which then later they developed into the 959 and all those kinds of things. And so, no, it’s not a 911. That’s Austin Rover. Like, wait, what?
Jon Summers: Yeah,
Crew Chief Eric: 400 naturally aspirated horsepower in a car.
That’s the size of a Fiat 500 or Fiat Panda. Really? I mean, it’s absolutely microscopic compared to the other cars. And to your point, the early six R four was short. If you listen to Pond and Wilson, they talk about how they had to make the car longer and slightly wider to make it less twitchy and make it more maneuverable.
But again, all of this comes as part of this space race. Everybody’s trying to catch up with Pujo until Lancia came on the scene and suddenly now the bar was, well you only have 400 horsepower? We’ve got 520.
Jon Summers: I had the same sense as you, Eric, that I was disappointed in Pyrrhage, and for me it was like yet another, like, Austin Rover, wah wah.
Right? It was like yet another [00:41:00] Red Robbo on strike. It was just like wet cardboard, just like England, like, get out of my face. Right. Like, that’s how I felt about it. And I, so I remember reading the article about the launch and being like, it’s not fucking turbocharged. Why are we even turning up? Yeah, whereas my thought now is if it could put the power down better watching these RAC rallies, it’s clear that Pond is expecting Arlen and Teuvenin to crash.
Yes. And they do. It just so happens they get back on the road. You know, by freakness, they get back on the road, you know, literally it. So at the time I was all about Lancia, but looking back now, I’m like Austin Rover had a super pragmatic approach and certainly the events that, you know, the RAC rally that I watched, they, they were.
Competitive ish and didn’t seem to feel the need to put it off the road or roll it or all of this other tomfoolery that those awesome fins that I so loved in period did
Crew Chief Eric: and I think when we look [00:42:00] back on it now with more education about the mechanics of these cars and things like that what you can come to respect about a non turbo six cylinder metro 6r4 making 400 horsepower compared to everybody else is that the torque was immediate.
They didn’t have to wait and so when you look at some of those time trials and special stages from, let’s say, Lombard and other parts of the and other parts of the, you realize the Metro was quicker out of the corners, even though it didn’t have the top end that everybody else had. So, yes, the could go into a situation.
Speed trap at 100 miles an hour and the Audi was right behind it at 90 and the metro would come trundling along at 88. But the difference was as Hanu Mikola would say, you know, the corners came up a lot faster. So you had to break harder. You had to drop so much more speed. And when you drop that kind of speed in a corner, now you’re outside of the optimal torque band and rev range and boost parameters that the motor is looking for.
And they’re absolute. [00:43:00] Dogs versus the metro was small. It was agile. They could toss it in the corner and just stand on it and wring its neck, but they had six cylinder torque. And that was what made that car extremely special.
Jon Summers: So I feel like the Peugeot had to do an extended wheelbase. And if you look at later iterations, Of the T 16, you know, the Pikes Peak car that Vartanen uses.
That’s a 405 that was a four door sedan, bigger class of car. And, and it allowed them to do that longer wheelbase to balance it a bit more. And this is exactly the right opportunity then to be like, well, what the F happened to Ford, given they were the dominant force all the way through. And it goes right back to the place that we started with this two stages of homologation, because they had a car, I guess they were caught wrong footed because of the whole like.
Silhouette issue that in 1980, the old escort was replaced by a new escort. The escort mark three, that was a front wheel drive hatchback. Well, that was shit for rally.
Crew Chief Eric: It was shit in general. I mean, come on.
Jon Summers: [00:44:00] No, no, it wasn’t. It was actually a really good car. It was the beginning of Ford. The ones we got in America were terrible.
Oh, you did get that body style in America. Didn’t you? I’m sorry. The European ones, they were light on their feet and faster than the The first generation Astra was better than that first generation Escort, but the rest of the time through the eighties, the Escorts were okay, but front wheel drive, right?
No good for rallying. So Ford developed this thing called the RS 1700 T. There were about three of them built. And by the time Audi were there with the Quattro, I think Ford thought this thing’s just not fast enough for us to be competitive with. So they were like, right back to the drawing board and created this thing, the RS 200, the.
Right at the end of group B, so it launches and in those early warmup events is involved in one of the accidents that ends group B.
Crew Chief Eric: I always looked at the RS 200 as a day late and a dollar short . To summarize that thought.
Jon Summers: No, no, not a dollar short. I think it would’ve [00:45:00] been, I think it was a day late. I think it, it could have been developed into a, I mean, fundamentally, who do you trust to organize winning rallies more?
Ford or Lancia, I mean. Ford, right? If
Crew Chief Eric: I look at the stats, I’d lean on Lancia.
Jon Summers: Had the accidents not happened? Yes. The RS 200 would’ve been destroying, and I say this as a committed RL fan, he would not have been competitive. ’cause I think the Fords would’ve been faster. I think the RS 200 was right at the bottom of its development care.
Crew Chief Eric: True. But the RS 200 took us back 10 years, if you think about it, because. The reason I looked at it as a day late and a dollar short, not because Ford didn’t spend an exorbitant amount of money developing the RS200. When you really stood back and looked at it, that’s a really interesting 037 with all wheel drive.
It’s basically the same principle, the same idea. The drivers like Stig and Marco Alain and other people that got behind the wheel of an RS200 were the same guys that drove [00:46:00] 037s and cars like that. So did they design that car for them or did they design it? To compete, there wasn’t a clear motivation for the RS 200 other than Ford wanted to come in and win.
And Ford didn’t become dominant in WRC until now with M Sport and all those other things with the Puma and the Fiesta and all those cars that we can talk about it in a later date. To me, the RS 200 was the beginning of something good. But it’s a day late and a dollar short because of how Group B ended prematurely.
And we’ll, we’ll get into that.
Jon Summers: So Ford like miscoordinated, right? The timing was just unfortunate for them. They had one car that was uncompetitive, developed another one that would have been competitive. Classic Ford, I think, but you know, it just arrived a bit too late.
Crew Chief Eric: I think with a couple more seasons, had they been going the way they’d been going, we’d be also not just talking about the RS200, we’d be talking about the battle between Ford.
An MG.
Jon Summers: Yeah. Before this recent research, I’d have not felt like that was the case at all. But with this recent research, [00:47:00] I have felt like that because I just feel fundamentally the Austin Rover package was going to be more reliable.
Crew Chief Eric: Yeah.
Jon Summers: than this turbocharged, supercharged space frame driven by these crashy fins.
That feels like
Crew Chief Eric: Lotus. It feels like Lotus. That’s what it feels like.
Jon Summers: Yeah.
Crew Chief Eric: But to talk about Lancia, the story continues. The Delta lives on a car as it hit its zenith in the nineties in Group A with that Delta HF Integrale, which is Take the S4 motor and detune it and put it at the front of the car with a synchro style all wheel drive system similar to a rally golf and some of the other products that were out there.
Then you had a car that won from 87 to 93 and Lancia cemented itself. Because a new class was born around that car. But it
Jon Summers: was tiddlywinks, Eric. It was. It was tiddlywinks. And I have respect for Mickey [00:48:00] Biazion, who was the winning driver of that period. You’ve told a nice story about how it was, but no, it wasn’t right.
This was the Giugiaro car from the early seventies. Exactly. Hatchback with the slab side body with the transverse inline four cylinder engine, making a feeble hundred horsepower with a turbo on it. It was a bloody yawn in comparison to the way that it had to be. Bit. The music was gone. Oh yeah. A hundred percent.
But I so loved it in period. Oh, absolutely. I love the Lanius Imper. And you can’t understate that Martini livery looked good. Oh, that martini livery really looked good,
Crew Chief Eric: but they all looked good. I mean, let’s be real. I mean, they’re iconic. Even to this day. I mean, if I could. paint my cars or my house or myself in, you know, an Audi sport livery or the Peugeot livery or the Martini of old Rothmans cars.
They’re all gorgeous. Never to be done again in some respects. I mean, we pay tribute to those cars. There’s all sorts of things like that that exist today, but it’s just not the same.
Jon Summers: [00:49:00] Citroën. They too are gorgeous. We’re caught with their pants down. The Visa GTI was meant to be what Group B was meant to be.
It was meant to be budget rallying, but then Audi and everyone kind of got ahead of themselves. And so Citroen too were caught on the hot and then they did that BX. Before TC. Right at the end. And we were talking about this sort of before we came on air. I was talking with my producer before we came on air.
Yeah.
Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, the 4TC was their answer to Group B, but again, another car that showed up in 1985. It took them two years to figure out what they were going to build, and then by 85 into 86, Group B was disbanded. Again, a day late and a dollar short, right?
Jon Summers: I’ll tell you, it wasn’t a day late or a dollar short, and I was watching my rally and thinking, Oh, cool cars.
The Toyota Celicas. Celica Sika with the two JayZ. These would’ve been early examples of Turbocharging two [00:50:00] Jay-Z’s, and they’re big and long. This is full on Dukes of Hazard stuff. Oh yeah. And awesome. And the Nissans were the same, but not Turbocharged. They were Nissan two forties that were similar and, and not Turbocharged.
Crew Chief Eric: Maybe we look on it with a bit of nostalgia, rose colored glasses. But I tell you what, you made the comment earlier about. The virtual world and how it’s paid homage to these cars.
Jon Summers: That’s exactly what I was going to say, right? Because when I’d been knocking around the idea of revisiting Group B for ages, because I noticed how it had come along in the games, and I noticed the way that my gamer mates love the cars.
I’m not a gamer myself, but I was sufficiently aware of the gaming community to see how the cars of Group B had continually made themselves relevant.
Crew Chief Eric: Group B was the motorsport that I imprinted on as a kid. I’m less than 10 years your junior, let’s say. So I had a different way of absorbing the data. You were there [00:51:00] at some of those events.
I was watching them here through very expensive cable feeds and whatnot. But I’m watching them happen. I’m watching the videos later. My dad would buy them from the UK and we’d watch the replays. And I still have them on the shelves to this day. I wanted to be a rally driver. Formula one was amazing. And I, and I love Senna and we did that whole tribute episode to him, but I wanted to be Hanu Mikola.
I wanted to ride shotgun with Michel Mouton. I wanted to meet Walter Rural, Stig Blumfuss, all these guys, like they were incredible. Now, granted I’m, I’m listing all of the works teams, drivers for Audi, but Marco Alain, all the same, right? Today, and ever since then, I started playing The Sims, the original Dirt series by Codemasters, the Network Q Rally series that existed on the PC, and now it’s all WRC, this and that, and Electronic Arts has bought them all.
What’s interesting is, the really hardcore Sims, the stuff that’s on par with the Assetto Corsas and the iRacings of the world, They’ve done a very [00:52:00] good job of studying those cars, analyzing those cars, testing those cars, doing the 3d renderings, all those. And when I get behind the wheel on a sophisticated SIM of a rally car, yes, I’m, I’m sort of living through the digital experience, having driven some of these homologation versions, the R5 turbo two owning a UR quattro lunch at Delta, you know, some of these other cars I get behind the digital wheel.
And it translates to me. I have a feeling of what it was like and I watched the videos and I’m like the car reacts the way it does in the file footage. They’ve done a very good job of that. And so my only analysis of the actual group B cars and their performance. Is through the digital world. What is interesting is they’re so vastly different handling characteristics, acceleration.
The Audi is like a missile when it comes to off the line and at high speed, because it can turn 10, 000 RPM. It’s just unbelievably good at the [00:53:00] top end, but you get it into a corner and you’re like, Oh God, it’s just plowing a field and it doesn’t matter if it’s the evolution versions either. But the Peugeot is quick and it’s nimble.
But then suddenly, because it’s not designed to be a mid engine car, its polar moment is completely wrong. And when you think it’s going to lift throttle oversteer, it just completely snaps. And it’s all over the place. And then you can’t control it. And it’s tank slapping. And it’s a mess. And when you watch the videos, it does the exact same thing.
You’re like, why did he spin there? Because the cars are twitchy. The Metro 6R4 the same. The Delta S4. They did a lot of learning and studying the mistakes of everybody else. It’s very smooth, but it has this, if you scruff it a little too hard, it’s going to bite you back. You know, those kinds of things. I recommend people, if you want to get a first hand experience, go try the latest version of WRC, which is WRC 11 by Electronic Arts, where they bought Codemasters and they’re one big happy family [00:54:00] now.
You get a sense of these cars. It’s unlike anything else. I prefer the Group A cars, they’re easier to drive, they’re a lot more fun. Your stage times are actually quicker with half the horsepower.
Jon Summers: Well, that’s why I wonder if that Metro mightn’t have been, uh, a bit of a world beater, had the Binscope to do it.
So, I’ll put you on the spot now, Eric, which was the best car of the era? I don’t mind going first whilst you’re thinking. I think, probably, based upon what we’ve said here, Delta S4.
Crew Chief Eric: A lot of people would agree with you that it is the halo car of the Group B, period. As legendary as the Audi S1 is, as legendary as the 205 T16 is, as quirky as the Renault 5 Turbo 2 is, and some of the other cars that are in the field, my heart Always sort of leans Audi.
I bleed Audi. But if I have to pick one, the best? The Lancia is on paper the best, but I think the Peugeot, [00:55:00] as proven with the right drivers, and this is where we get into the conversation of is it the car or is it the driver, I think the Peugeot is something to respect. But I also think it was probably the best car.
It was the most well thought out. It was constantly refined, but in an iterative way, not in a gigantic way like the Audi was, or like the Delta S4, just outlandish coming on the scene and being ostentatious. The Peugeot was just there, and their changes, like I said, were subtle. Think about when they added the aerodynamics package to the 205 T16.
Is that all you guys are doing? You’re putting a spoiler and an airfoil on the front? Like, really? That’s all you’re going to do because if you listen to the drivers, all we needed was a little bit more control over the jumps to keep the rear end down so we could continue to maintrain traction, you know, things like that.
So it doesn’t seem very French because they do very big and outlandish things with their cars. But the Peugeot, I think, was the best. If it had gotten more time, it would have continued to [00:56:00] evolve. They would Lanta
Jon Summers: and Vatanen. Would have come back, wouldn’t he? Yes. People may or may not be aware, but sort of midway through 85 Argentina, Vartan had a horrible accident where the car did that jumping business.
Yep. Didn’t land properly and he end over ended and the seat fell off inside the car. So he got all knocked around in the car and really
Crew Chief Eric: flattened his knees, broke his back. He was in. Traction basically for like a year and a half or something. I believe he said in an interview.
Jon Summers: So, so we’ve, uh, we’ve talked about the cars there.
Let’s pivot now. We’ll talk about the drivers, see if we can do a little thumbnail on each. I’ve sort of stack rank, the ones that we mentioned in the title of our presentation here. And it begins at ends where if you look at any footage of Ari Vartanen driving a Ford Escort, You’ve got the car being driven completely out of control, completely wildly.
And then when he’s interviewed afterwards, his English is perfect, [00:57:00] his demeanour is completely calm. The theatre of that made it an awesome TV spectacle. So the spectacle was almost there before the cars came along and made it a thing. But what I realized that I’m predisposed to feel very positively towards Hannu Mikkola, because he had an amazing run at the RAC rally.
You talk about being imprinted as rallying and motorsport was imprinted on me. The superiority of Hannu Mikkola and first the Escort and then the Quattro, that was really impressed upon me. In our notes here I put the comeback king and when you watch the videos of events now that’s what’s really striking about him is that he can have issues but he will still be there at the finish and he seems to have incredible stamina.
He seems to get better the longer the event goes on.
Crew Chief Eric: Hanumikola is a legend. He’s one of those people that big [00:58:00] fish stories are written about. It’s so unbelievable, the stuff that happened to him, but it’s also true. And he also kind of epitomizes what I call the full send. Sort of mentality. I mean, there’s one of the videos that you and I reviewed where they broke the front suspension and I won’t talk about the stupidity of the steering box design on those cars.
You know, it all makes sense when you put it in the context of rally, but he’s like, you know what, to your point, I’m bringing the car home with my shielder on it. Very Greek in that sense. So he decides, well, we can’t go forward. So I’ll drive it backwards for the next eight miles to the service stop. And you’re like, what?
There’s another one where he lost a front wheel and he tells his co pilot to get out on the back of the car to counterbalance the fact that he doesn’t have a front wheel. And he continues to go just full out with only three wheels and just. The nuttiest stuff happened to him, but he would get out of the car and they’re like, I don’t know what’s going on.
And he’s got this cat ate the canary grin on his face. He was always [00:59:00] so happy. He’s just one of these people that would light up an interview. And you’re like, how could you find fault with Hanu Mikola? Not only that, he was sort of the elder statesman, when you compare him to Alain, who was in his 30s, Toivonen, who was in his late 20s, Walter Rural was sort of there, but Hanomikola was in his 40s.
And I don’t want to say he was an original flying fin, but he’s of that generation of rally drivers growing up in Scandinavia, where to go to school every day, it was like driving a rally for him. So, he was The guy, you know, he was the man, if you will. And so I realized that as a kid, I’m like, this is somebody to aspire to be.
Hannu Mikkola, unbelievable.
Jon Summers: He’s from that part of Finland, right up in the north, fought the Russians in the war. And there’s definitely a difference between these sort of blonde Finns in the north and the guys like Toivonen and Arlen. who have dark hair and dark eyes and are from around Helsinki and I need to do more [01:00:00] research but wasn’t Arlen’s dad like an ice racing champion?
So you feel like their skills are more the way that Kenny Roberts grew up racing dirt track and therefore he could slide a two stroke sports race bike in exactly the same way. You felt like there was that translation for Arlen and Teuvenin. There doesn’t seem to be any of that for these guys like Vartanen and Mikkola, who live in the far north.
Crew Chief Eric: What’s also interesting about Hanno is he was the first to come over to the works team, and then they brought over other popular drivers. You look at Stig Blomqvist, you look at Walter Röhrl, Michel Mouton. They were already successful with other cars, rear wheel drive cars, and so was Hanno Mikkola. But the thing was, when you looked at the progression, Audi didn’t favor him as their prized calf.
If you look, while everybody else was running the Sport Quattro, he was still driving the long wheelbase car. And when the S1 came out, then he got the Sport Quattro. And it’s like, he was always a generation behind, even though all of these things [01:01:00] happened in very rapid succession. It was like, your most experienced guy, Doesn’t have
Jon Summers: your best card.
No, because I think they gave him the card of finning.
Crew Chief Eric: Yeah.
Jon Summers: I think Mouton was a like, go out and win or crash. And I hadn’t realized to be honest that she was just that much. Super aggressive. She was like that until I did some research for this. I think Rawl, the RAC rally that I watched where he was using that DSG gearbox.
In the interview, he talks about how the team just wanted to get as far as possible. And there was no way he was going to, I mean, that whole no pace notes thing on the RAC rally, really that benefits the local runners, right? Anybody, any British rally guys, they’re going to have used these stages for local rallies.
So it was a way of tipping the tables a little bit in our favor. And somebody like Roel, who’d only came for the international event, you know, inevitably he’s at a bit of a disadvantage. So I can understand, you know, why would you want to commit to an event like that where you’re at a disadvantage? I rate.
More and more as the years go by. Partly because of stuff [01:02:00] I’ve seen him do with Porsche in the years since World Rally. He was World Rally Champion in 1980, he was Champion in 82, even when the Audi was borderline a developed car. And he did that by not trying to beat it on sheer speed, but just by doing the best that he could with his Ascona 400.
and letting the reliability of the Audi be its own undoing. Apart from Mouton, he and Mouton are the only, I would describe those two as the only non Scandinavian front rank drivers.
Crew Chief Eric: At that time, yes, there were a handful of Italians and a couple of other Frenchmen in there and things like that. Not front runners.
Because what you don’t realize about WRC at that time is, there was still, A clear delineation between the four wheel drive cars, the two wheel drive groupies, and then everybody else. And today, you know, we call that WRC1, WRC2, and WRCJr. And so back then they sort of didn’t do that. It was like, you know, here’s everybody.
Yes, your front runners are going to be the works [01:03:00] teams drivers that we’re talking about. But when you specifically talk about Walter Wuerl, you have to remember that his legacy starts in rally. But continues with Audi for many years after that, because he came to the States and then partnered with Hans Stuck and Hurley Haywood and ran in Trans Am and then in IMSA.
Audi used Walter to teach Hans, who was already a well established driver and Hurley, this is how you drive an Audi. This is how you drive a turbo all wheel drive car. We need to use rally techniques in road racing to get these cars to be competitive. We have quote unquote an unfair advantage here because of Quattro and we won’t get into that, but Walter always compared himself to Ari Vatanen.
They were rivals without being rivals because for whatever reason you would think rally would be one of these disciplines of motorsport where it’s like coming after a football match and you know bloody noses and smelling of beer and sweat and things like that, but it was actually very civilized.
polite in some ways.
Jon Summers: Well, because what you’re doing is so [01:04:00] dangerous. Exactly. You know, I read Kankanen, the next car through the stage, comes upon Arlen in trouble, stops, helps Arlen get back on the road, helps push the Lancia back on the road, doesn’t just drive by. And that’s a legacy of that business of when the events were less about speed and more about endurance.
Yeah, there is a camaraderie, isn’t there, about rallying that you get a sense that they’re all friends with each other and certainly there’s a theater about the interview which take place where it seems like the interviewer always says, you know, do you know what position you’re in? And the driver who’s competing in the rally says, No, I’ve no idea.
what position I’m in. And you can see that there’s a banter about that, which is all sort of summed up by that phrase that we all know so well, associated with rallying. How will you be driving Markku? Oh, maximum attack.
Crew Chief Eric: My other favorite phrase of his was, My mechanic is fantastic.
Jon Summers: Like, come on. I wasn’t gonna talk about him first, but now we’ve started talking about him.
[01:05:00] There’s one interview where he’s like, he’s got those Frankenstein dour brows, and he’s like, leaning over the interview, and it’s a dark rally stage, and they’re talking about the Delta S4. And then they mention to him about the Stratos, and How much he must have enjoyed and his face lights up. He’s like a child, like a child.
He’s been given a gift. Like his face lights up and oh man, I was struck in that moment. I realized that again, you talk about the imprinted. That was the moment. It was those interviews that made me such a Marco Arlen fan. But what about Michel Mouton? Because I have to say you bigged her up before we did this.
And I thought. You know what? She was a great piece of marketing fluff. And, you know, she could drive a bit, but she was great marketing fluff. Oh, on the contrary, she could drive a lot and the marketing fluff was good too. You know, 100%. So what was her background? Because I know very little about her.
Crew Chief Eric: She’s very private.
It’s really [01:06:00] hard to get her backstory. What I’ve been able to collect over the years, she’s still on my, you know, Mount Everest of People that I would love to interview on break fix is that she came from money, Southern France, everything that goes along with that. And so how she got into racing is still a little bit foggy, but she got in.
Cause she’s French and she got in with a French team and then they realized she was really fast and she could do all these things. And then moved around like all the rally drivers did. If you follow them, you’re like, man, Stig Blumfuss drove a Talbot? Really? Like, I always thought he just drove for Audi.
And, you know, Walter Ruhl drove an Opel. They all had to start somewhere. So her beginnings are a little foggy. How she came to Audi, I have never been able to figure out. Other than the fact that if you look at what Audi did, they sort of cherry picked the best drivers at the time. Stig Blumfuss, Walter Ruhl, Hannu Mikkola, Michel Mouton.
And they said, Let’s do this. They talk about it a little bit in that movie, Race to Glory. They [01:07:00] introduce her as the new kid compared to Hanu, compared to Walter, but they don’t go much more into that. What makes her more important in some ways than just the marketing fluff and her speed, because she’s still fast to this day when she gets behind the wheel of a rally car, Is that there were a surprising number of women in rally.
Even one of the commentators from Top Gear, Sue Baker, was a former rally co driver. We saw that in some of those interviews. You know, her and Fabrizia Pons, an all woman team on an underdog. Audi had never done rally before. They were the new kid on the block. Everything was new. All wheel drive was new.
All of it was new. And here we have a woman and a female co driver and they’re out running with the bulls, kicking butt and taking names. Now, Is she as winning as the others? Yes and no. On paper, maybe not. Hanu Mikala had 20 rally wins under his belt by the time he had gotten to Audi. Again, he was the elder statesman, right?
He had already seen it, been there, done that, [01:08:00] gotten the t shirt. But Michelle, she’s someone to aspire to. In the face of everything, in the face of the early 80s, and all the tropes and the stereotypes and the discrimination and everything that goes along with motorsport at that time, she persevered. But what’s interesting is, Rally supported her.
It didn’t hold her back. They didn’t say, well, you’re just a third rate, we need a fourth driver, and you’re going to drive the slowest car. Those kinds of things. They let her shine. They let her excel.
Jon Summers: Isn’t there something of the sort of Margaret Thatcher thing? They always said that, you know, in a cabinet meeting that Margaret Thatcher just outmanned all the men.
In the room. In some ways you could say that. And in that sense, there’s almost an argument that she sort of knocked back equality because she was just so fucking awesome. Yeah. You know, almost like a Barack Obama was another, you know, his sheer ability as an individual overcame. Whatever prejudices there might’ve been knocking around, her speed overcame.
You know, I’ve had that revelation now that I really [01:09:00] thought it was clever marketing for Audi because Audi always did have clever marketing and I’m sure as shit it was that, but she’s really fast. And that decision in one of those RAC rallies to give her the short wheelbase car with more power, like absolutely give her the fast car and give Mikkola the car that’s more likely to get home.
Like that’s exactly what I would have done if I was the team manager. What a awesome pairing. There is film I’ve seen, this was some years ago, of her and Mikkola communicating with each other basically where it’s a safari rally and Mikkola has stopped to help and the teamwork there with Mikkola making the effort to help her with it being about Audi.
Finishing that I remember feeling was, uh, was really cool.
Crew Chief Eric: Audi viewed it more as an endurance than a race. They were proving their technology in a big way. They needed those cars to finish because think about it. If the Quattros failed consistently and they broke, they didn’t fail, but they broke. But if they had failed miserably, [01:10:00] where would we be with Audi today?
Think about that for a second.
Jon Summers: Yeah. Well, my granddad had an Audi coupe in 1970. There were hundreds of Audis in Britain, only hundreds, you know, it was that. By 1980, and when the Quattro came along, the brand was established. They did that very famous Vaux Brun Duc technique advertising campaign, which was based around the Quattro.
Crew Chief Eric: Not to wax poetic about Michelle Mouton, but one thing I want to point out about her, when you watch her drive, she’s not as Ham fisted, like Hanumikola is, where he’s willing to take the risk. He brings the car home, but he’s going to bring it home again, come hell or high water, but she’s not as precise.
As Walter rural, Walter is very exact. He’s very consistent. You know, it’s just his very German way of being and of driving. So we got a flamboyant Flynn and we got a very stoic German. And then we have this French woman who sort of blends the two together. Watching her drive was like watching [01:11:00] someone ballroom dance.
She had this relationship with the quattro, especially with the sport quattro. Once they got her away from the long wheelbase car, that’s where she began to blossom. She could get it to rotate. It’s like watching a formula drift person today. Where it’s just like, it’s like no sweat to have the car completely out of control.
And she is composed and as cool as a cucumber. So, that’s the magic. Of Michel Mouton is when you understand that she’s the middle ground. And then sadly you have Stig Blumfist, who’s the quiet guy in the background, but is an absolute unbelievable driver behind the wheel. And he gets out and he’s just.
Very mild mannered Clark Kent type and you’re just like, oh, okay, but again, behind the wheel, you’re Superman.
Jon Summers: We should draw a distinction between the true Scandinavians, the Swedes and the Norwegians. We’re not mentioning Norwegians. The Swedes like Blomqvist. And of course, Stig Blomqvist is the reason why Top Gear had the Stig.
That’s where the name came from.
Crew Chief Eric: So the Audi Works team, superstars. In [01:12:00] some respects. Here’s the thing, I want to go back to rural for a second, just a second, because it brings us to Peugeot. As you and I have been studying this and talking about this, I began to reanalyze it with a whole new lens.
Something started to emerge from this. Listening to interviews where Walter would say something about Ari Vatanen, and he’s like, well, don’t tell Ari I said that, and Ari would be like, well, don’t tell Walter I said that, you know, and they would critique each other. You know, again, very stoic, very German, Walter World.
This is how we do things. This is the moment that we turn. This is the time at which we break and all these kinds of things. And Ari Vatanen talks about playing music with his eyes closed and how driving a rally car was like playing the piano and this and that. And I began to realize There was two other drivers, very notable rivalry, that you and I have talked about quite a bit, that paralleled the two of them, and that is, the professor himself, Alan Prost, is like Walter Rural, and Ari Vatanen is like Ayrton Senna.
Jon Summers: I mean, [01:13:00] Vatanen’s appeal to me is similar to the appeal that Senna had. Exactly. I mean, the two of them both leapt off the screen for me. Vartanen, the level of commitment that Vartanen shows is just God is protecting him, let’s be clear. There’s also, especially with the escorts, And you talk about the artistry of the drift, the length of the slide, the elegance of the slide, that is just what Ari Vatanen did.
Just feel like nobody else.
Crew Chief Eric: I didn’t come to respect Vatanen until he broke Audi’s record at Pike’s Peak. If you go back and watch the film, and you can search for this on YouTube, it’s called Climb Dance. It’s set to music with the sound of the 205 engine in that 405, the whole way up Pike’s Peak. Then you see the magic.
of Ari Vatanen, because he’s by himself, as are the rules of the Pikes Peak Hill Climb, in the old days of Pikes Peak. Not today, where it’s asphalt all the way to the summit. This is back when it was loose gravel [01:14:00] and dirt and changing weather conditions. 13 miles of hell. To get to the top
Jon Summers: of Pikes Peak.
I’m not going to spoil it. If Ollie and I, my son, we’ll talk about the Ari Vatanen sun visor, because there’s one moment where he comes around the corner and the sun’s right in his eyes. And he’s holding the car in a slide right on the edge of the mountain. And he puts his arm up to block the sun. Yep.
And I always think of that. You know, I have a class of students every year and they quite often come up with that as students are wont to do. They’re quite into solving problems that don’t really exist. And a couple of students have talked about how the sun in the eyes is really dangerous and what you need is one of these windshields that light shade, light.
And I’m like, you know, I’ve got something that’s really going to work well for you. It’s the Vatanen. The Vatanen Sun Visor!
Crew Chief Eric: And again, that whole trip to the summit is incredible. And if you’ve never seen it, you have to watch it. But what you do need to realize, though, is even though Ari Vatanen broke the record [01:15:00] at Pike’s Peak at that time, in period, it wasn’t by that much.
If you go back and look at the timesheet, it’s enough. But it’s not like, oh, we destroyed it by 10 seconds, like what the Peugeot 205 T16 was doing when it first came on the scene way ahead of everybody. So it’s a glorious run. It’s sort of like the lap of the gods at Monaco. When you’re watching Senna, he’s just in the zone.
He’s doing his thing. Although I don’t think Senna ever put his hands up to the sun, but the point is, I began to draw a parallel between Prost and Senna. and Volta Rural and Ari Vatnan. I think it works. I think it’s valid.
Jon Summers: Yeah, I mean, I feel like rallying is so much more random than Formula One. I mean, I feel like Rural.
Well, I don’t know, Prost was too, weren’t you? You produced a calculated approach. You didn’t just throw caution to the wind in the way that people like Senna and Vatnan did. There was a definite sense that they threw caution to the wind and, and if you were an event competing with them, if you were going to win, you needed to be able to have that same kind of brain out.
[01:16:00] commitment because the British stuff they always talk about how only Roger Clark could like compete with the Scandinavians and it’s yeah only Roger Clark had the courage to slide the car that much all the others British guys prior to that time they just didn’t have the commitment level. So we talked about Vartan in there.
Final thing I would say about him is like Mikkola, he’s from the north from that. So there’s that kind of sort of stoicism about him. The other thing I’d say about him is, and you and I’ve talked about this before, Eric, there’s a wonderful biography that’s about him. And it’s, I mean, he had this terrible accident and then he convinced himself he had AIDS and couldn’t rid himself of the idea that he had AIDS.
It was a. full on like and as bonkers as he was behind the wheel this was as bonkers as a whole that he fell down and somehow managed to drag himself out of it’s really an incredible kind of a story and then he goes on and does like pike peak and harry dakar and it’s like no slower than he was before and then he goes on to be a member of the european parliament because obviously [01:17:00] that’s you know that’s
Crew Chief Eric: what you do i mean you know that’s
Jon Summers: what you do yeah so we’ll move to my favorite Now, you described Lancia as the sort of grandee team of rallying.
You know, I think they were, right? Because they had this continual presence. And you would expect them, therefore, to pick the best driver. And this is why I feel like, although I love Vartanen, he’s like Mouton. I mean, the guy just couldn’t finish.
Crew Chief Eric: No.
Jon Summers: He finished more than Mouton. He couldn’t finish enough.
And your comparison with Roar. I mean, Roar was a finisher. With him, it was done in a very, very study. I’d have no fear sitting next to him driving fast. Sitting next to Vartanen, fucking hell, you were taking your life in your hands, right? Because Extra insurance policy. I mean, the bloke, he drove it like it was like a computer game, right?
Where it doesn’t matter if you crash. Literally, that’s how he was. Now, I feel like I’ll end. Was like that as well. And Arlen was at Lance here for 20 years. When you see interviews of him, [01:18:00] his Italian’s like mine. The Finns would call him like the Italian Finn, because he like lost his temper and was all like gesturing and was passionate.
You know, it was like the Finns were like, this is, he’s not one of ours anymore. He’s like, he’s gone native. Sort
Crew Chief Eric: of like
Jon Summers: Schumacher in that way, right? So many years of Ferrari. No, because Schumacher never humanized Arlen. He was Dauer, and then there was the moment of humanity. So comical. In the interviews, whenever they ask him what’s happening, he always beats up his own performance.
They’re like, oh, you crashed off down a fire road, and he’s not like, oh, I’m lucky to still be in the rally. He’s like, oh, Two minute penalty that penalized us two minutes and 12 seconds kind of thing. It’s, it’s like all of this. I’ve an auto sport that I, I wish I’d found the quote before we did this, but that where the journalist interviews him and throughout the interview, it’s San Remo or something like that.
And it’s like between throughout the interview, he just keeps muttering too fast, too fast, or he’s just set [01:19:00] fastest stage times, but he just keeps muttering too fast. On one of the RAC rallies, he spins the S4 flat in fifth, and then he’s able to recover. And in the next two stages, sets fastest stage time.
I mean, the bloke just had, I wouldn’t say no fear, because I feel like that’s Vartanen. I feel like he just erred the right side of the Vartanen. But he would be my number one. Like Lancia, I would have picked him. And I might have picked Mikkola. As a backup, if I was gonna pick a dream team.
Crew Chief Eric: And then if you talk about like Toivonen, his teammate in the other car, who had also been rallying forever.
And unfortunately, Toivonen died in a horrific accident.
Jon Summers: Well, and let’s be clear, if people aren’t aware, it’s the accident that ends Group B. There were other accidents, and we don’t want to dwell on that. But really, it’s Toivonen’s accident, which ends Group B. And something that I hadn’t learned until I was reading about that, was that, without getting into details.
It was the design of the [01:20:00] car. Yes. The fact that the car was fundamentally a Formula One car, not like a Skoda 400, a converted road car. No, it was a Formula One kind of construction, which then meant that it was particularly delicate and vulnerable when the worst happened.
Crew Chief Eric: To be explicit about it, it was a bomb.
They were sitting on top of the gas tank, much like a series one Land Rover, where you sit on top of the gas tank. So those cars were made out of tube frame and carbon Kevlar. They were super light. They had none of the crash impact and safety things because again, this was the middle eighties and developed on top of 1970s ideas.
So the protection wasn’t there. And the rules of the FIA didn’t dictate like they do now where the gas tank must be protected in this way and so many inches from the driver and blah blah blah blah blah and all these systems that exist there was no fire prevention there was maybe a fire extinguisher if they were lucky That crash was absolutely [01:21:00] horrific and, and there’s others that go right along with it.
But the thing about Toivonen though is when you listen to his interviews, you know, with his big gradiated aviator glasses that he always wore, like a lot of other Scandinavians of the style of that time, you know, those big ski glasses that they would wear. But the thing is, he reminds me so much of, like, an Oittanic, if you follow today’s WRC.
He’s one of those types. Like, there’s a certain aura in the new drivers that remind me of Toivonen. If you ask me, paint me a picture of a rally driver, It’s Toivonen. That’s the guy that you go to as sort of the stereotypical rally driver, especially from Scandinavia. And he was entertaining, you know, his English wasn’t so great.
He always made for a good interview. Like, Hannu Mikkola, he was always kind of happy. And that’s also part of the tragedy because he’s another one of these cast of characters of Group B. That today we have, as you say, there’s this bit of theater, it’s [01:22:00] almost artificial drama, if you think about it, like is painted even in formula one, they want to make racing more exciting.
Back then there was a camaraderie and you could tell that they were partying the night before and things were happening. And it was just the spirit of rally and of motorsport at that time was very different than it is today. And I think he epitomized all of it in one person Toivonen was that example of what it was to be group B rally.
He was another one, like Pond, who was the MG driver. These guys were relentless. They had this tenacity, and it was stupid, and it was foolish, to get behind the wheel of a car knowing that you’re suffering from influenza. Today, your doctor would not clear you to get on track, or to get on a rally, knowing that you’re sick.
They’d be like, look, we’re gonna call another driver, you’re gonna lose your driver points, whatever it is. There’s a lot more precaution. Taken today than there was back then launches putting pressure. They’ve got two cars, especially at Corsica and a lot of the other [01:23:00] tracks. We need to get this done. I don’t care if you’re sick, get out there race.
But they had that drive. They had that foolish determination.
Jon Summers: I feel like Toyford in his head was just farther above the parapet that anybody else is. The car was faster and more fragile than the others. And he. was a Vatanen of a driver. Yes. Rather than an Ahlen of a driver. He fell on the wrong side of the two fast.
Crew Chief Eric: And I think Ahlen was lucky. That’s the word I’d use to describe. It was always, he was on the edge. But to your point, I think he drove at 11 tenths. Whereas Vatanen and Teuvenen drove at 13 tenths. They were well over their skis.
Jon Summers: Yeah.
Crew Chief Eric: When something went wrong.
Jon Summers: Yeah, I think so as, uh, as well. Of course, Arlen and Teufel and both from the Helsinki area, you know, as I say, I, I feel like there’s further investigation around whether or not it was the ice racing stuff, how they got involved in longer stage rallying in the first place, because I feel like for [01:24:00] Vatanen and for Mikkola growing up in the North, it would have been natural for them to be on those dirt roads all the time.
Less so for people living in Helsinki.
Crew Chief Eric: So I want to come back to your lead in question, to this whole discussion, to your presentation, to what you’re doing at the symposium, you laid it out. Who was the best? Was it the Audi works team? Was it Lancia? Was it Peugeot? And when you say the best, not necessarily the manufacturer, but we’re talking about the driver specifically.
And we’ve been talking about them now for a little bit.
Jon Summers: My research, rather than making it easier for me to answer the questions about the driver, it’s actually made it harder. Because the opportunity to show greatness was so based on the car,
Crew Chief Eric: you
Jon Summers: know, like Vatanen was only great when he had the Peugeot, Arlen was only actually competing on the rallies when the Delta S4 was there.
So it, cause let’s be clear, right? Audi won in 18. to 83. Audi won some events, but Roar won in 82 with a Niscona 400, which then evolves into the Manta later on. In 83, [01:25:00] Blancas is champion for Audi. 84 is the year that the Peugeot comes and is dominant. And then 85, you have the Lancia come in and that being dominant, don’t you?
And yes, absolutely. Maybe we should have talked about the Audi, then the Peugeot, then the Lancia. That is the progression, that is the progression.
Crew Chief Eric: My response to that, my only pushback to the question is, if you look at how Rally was organized before Group B, and even after Group B, where the drivers would switch teams, if Group B had lasted longer, On the global stage, and we had shuffled the deck, let’s just say Vatnan got behind the wheel of the Audi and Marco Alain broke his relationship with Lancia and maybe went to Peugeot and Walter Rural went to, you know, lots of, we shuffled it around.
It goes back to, is it the car or is it the driver? So can we really quantify who was the best? And if we’re going to say who is the best, what criteria do we use? I think [01:26:00] this actually goes a lot back to our conversation. We had. about the greatness of Senna. Where does he stack rank against a Lewis Hamilton or a Michael Schumacher or a Fangio?
So if you look at it just between 1981 and 1986, how do we quantify who’s the best?
Jon Summers: I picked a question that was going to provoke us talking. I didn’t necessarily pick a question that I thought was something that we could answer in a meaningful way. I suppose I hedged my bets already, didn’t I? I picked somebody who errs if there’s a line.
with crashing on this side and being too slow on the other side. I picked Arlene, who I feel sits on the crashing too much side, but just by a little bit. And I’d pick Mikala, who I feel sits on the slow side of the line, but just by a little bit. For me, the other people we’ve had, they fall too far on one side or the other.
You don’t think
Crew Chief Eric: Michelle is most iconic of the bunch, based on all the other facts involved?
Jon Summers: No, [01:27:00] maybe that’s because, for me, it is that childhood imprint, right? And am I thinking specifically about that period, 81, 82 to 86? Maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m thinking about the earlier period as well. And maybe that’s why Mickela and Vartanen, uh, sort of loom large for me.
I do feel like, you know, you can measure it in different ways, can’t you? You can look at the statistics and say who won the most events, and you can see who won the most points. And you can also use these satiric measures and say, you know, you could just see. By the way that Vartanen drives, there’s an artistry there, which is a kind of greatness.
That work that I did around Senna and the strange way that he’s moved to being considered the greatest of all time in Formula One, whether or not he really is, that sort of weird beatification thing that I’ve done. Talked about with Senna, the hard thought coming out of that work is that maybe greatness is about the way in which you do things rather than what you do.
So it’s not about whether you win 50 [01:28:00] million championships. It’s about whether you do it with style and class and panache. And then it’s about what appeals, right? So definitely Vatanen appeals to me for that. You know, in this presentation that we’ve done tonight, I feel like my passion for Arlen’s method of communication and the fact that he is in just the right place for me, right?
As I say, if I was, he’s the first guy that I would want to sign. Absolutely no question. And I’d go for Vatanen afterwards as well, because my thought would be, I’ve got two cars, so one of them will probably finish. Yeah.
Crew Chief Eric: I think if we played the pit stop question game, where it’s like, well, who do you want to have a beer with?
It’s sort of like, Alain, Hannu Mikola, and Vatanen. Those are the guys you want to sit down at a pub and have a pint and drink. Talk war stories about rally because they’re entertaining. They’re personal.
Jon Summers: Oh, pond is yeah. To love to have a beer with Tony pond because he’s so understated. It would have to be a pub in the Midlands, like a pub in the Midlands in [01:29:00] England, right?
It would have to be, I would just want to meet him, you know, because he died very young. 56 in 2002 pancreatic cancer. My God.
Crew Chief Eric: So the problem is in period. You can only go based on the time sheets and the results and the rally stage wins and the points and all that kind of stuff to say, who is the best?
Was it Walter? Was it Hanu? Was it Marco, et cetera. But 40 years later, when you look at it under new eyes, this is the conclusion that I came to when you talk about who was the best, and it was very simple. If we just stay within the confines and the parameters of Lancia, Peugeot, and Audi. Launcher doesn’t exist anymore.
Stellantis has no plans. They’ve teased, you know, the Epsilon might be coming. There’s some tribute cars out there, like singer style, Delta HFs and O37s and Stratos’s and things like that, that have been developed at the factory. Launcher doesn’t really exist. So they’re gone. [01:30:00] Peugeot Sport. No,
Jon Summers: it’s gone. I read that they closed it a couple of years ago, the original place on the road out of Paris, South of Paris.
That
Crew Chief Eric: they’re sort of still around only in LMP one GTP now in WEC, the world endurance championship with the Peugeot nine X eight, you could say Peugeot sport is still around their branded as Peugeot sport, you know, but it’s different, it’s not the Peugeot sport of John Todd of the eighties and all that.
One could say Lancia doesn’t exist as a brand, Peugeot is still around making cars, they make some really interesting stuff. I’d love to drive some of the new 208s and some of those cars that I’ve seen even last year when I was in Europe. But on the racing scene, not so much. They did a couple of things in the past with Le Mans.
They’ve done Formula 1, if you think about Jordan Peugeot based. So that’s great. And then Audi. Audi has come well beyond anybody’s expectations. If you think about Audi in 1980, when it [01:31:00] approaches rally with a new car and a new technology and a team of all stars, but really an underdog and unknown Roland Gumpert, who’s this guy, the head of Audi development, what, who Audi, what?
You think about it. Audi went, proved what they needed to prove. And this is a very German thing, right? We’ve done what we needed to do. Now we move on. They go to Trans Am and they kick butt and they get banned. Then they go to DTM and they kick butt and they get banned. They go to IMSA and they kick butt and they get banned.
Then they end up in ALMS forever. They end up winning at Le Mans. And now next year they’re going to be in Formula One. So if you think about it from that perspective, who’s the best? It’s still Audi. And people like Walter Rural and Michelle Mouton who are still with us are still associated with the brand that to me and I’m trying to put my bias aside, but they’ve proven themselves to be the best.
And I think they will continue in any discipline that they apply themselves. But they have to realize that their roots came from [01:32:00] WRC.
Jon Summers: That’s an interesting perspective, Eric. I’m not sure if I agree. I, I still feel like you have to look at it from the perspective of the period itself. And in that period, you have to pick the Lancia.
It’s the most technologically advanced.
Crew Chief Eric: Just to bring this full circle for those that are maybe now Googling Group B, learning more about it. Maybe you knew something about it before. Maybe you’ve learned something from this. I want to let people know that group B did continue after it was disbanded. So there’s a couple things that we have to myth bust here at the tail end of this.
So Toivonen’s death was the turning point. That’s when Balestra said it’s time to pump the brakes. The space race is over. We’re not doing this unlimited horsepower thing anymore. We’re not letting you do evolution cars, all this kind of stuff. He did a complete 180 on group B and he shut it down. What people don’t realize is.
Audi had already pulled out basically the tail end of the season before, because of a death that had occurred at Portugal. And they were like, this is getting [01:33:00] crazy. Crowd control is an issue, which begs the question, if we had better crowd control, would the rally stage times have been faster? Because the drivers had to really compensate for people in the middle of the road and the journalists and all this kind of thing.
There were other deaths before that point, you know, they call the Group B years also the killer years in motorsport. And so, Toivonen’s death is that moment in which Group B died. But, it got two extra years everywhere else around the world because of special events like Perry Dakar, Pike’s Peak Hill Climb, where Group B cars were still used in official events, but they weren’t sanctioned WRC Group B class events, those kinds of things.
Group B, like I said before, was disbanded and replaced by Group A. And that’s where the Delta HF Integrale comes on the scene. This is where you start to see Mitsubishi coming to play.
Jon Summers: And of course, the Subies. That’s the
Crew Chief Eric: Exactly. Subaru is making a bigger splash. The
Jon Summers: Celica GT4. That’s right. That’s the other car that the [01:34:00] young’uns like now.
Real rally pedigree
Crew Chief Eric: and that’s a whole new generation of rally fans coming into the 90s into the early 2000s the lower horsepower cars to this day even the current WRC cars with their hybrid systems on their tricky bits and all the stuff that they have going on are not as powerful and Has been proven.
They’re not as fast As the group B cars, the group B cars are the monsters of rally. And they always will be never to be repeated again. I think it’s like in the rule book at FIA that nothing like it will ever happen again, you know, because of everything that went down and Toyvan and his death and all that.
So for those of you listening to this and listening to us pontificate about group B for so long now, it’s one of those things that if you’re not familiar with it, you will suddenly become addicted to it. And then follow rally. It’s really interesting. And I try to remind people all the time, you don’t have to buy WRC plus.
Although it’s awesome to go back [01:35:00] just like Formula 1 subscription service. You can go back and watch all the old footage and all the old rallies, which is really cool because rally, there’s a lot of it captured in the 80s. They had amazing footage considering how long a rally stage is and how complicated they are and things like that.
But today you can watch Red Bull’s coverage. Of WRC on the Red Bull app for free. And I highly recommend people do that. You can jump into the cars. You can watch Terry Neuville live, Oitanic, Esa Pekka Lappi, all the current drivers and the hilarity of rally hasn’t changed the danger. It’s the riskiest, if not the riskiest, one of the riskiest motor sports out there.
But their car control is second to none. Now, granted, they’re two pedal cars, they’re ruddering, hybrids and hydraulic this and flappy paddle that and all that. And it’s not, it doesn’t have the same appeal, let’s say, as Group B does. But go back and check out Group B footage. It’s all over YouTube. Group A footage for that matter.
It’ll get you excited. And I wish there was a drive to survive sort of thing for Rally because I [01:36:00] think more people would be interested in it. And you get to see some of the most unique. Biomes and the planet by watching rally. You don’t get that. Yeah. Formula one, you’re like, Oh yeah, they go to Singapore and they go to Austin and they go to Australia, but it’s on a paved circuit in rally.
You never know what’s going to happen. The weather is constantly changing. Sometimes it’s at night. Sometimes it’s a day, something torrential downpour. You never know what you’re going to get.
Jon Summers: Ah, well, thank you for that insight into, uh, into Modern Rally there, Eric. That’s, uh, that’s really useful for me.
We’ve come to the end of the agenda here now. So I feel like I have more than enough material, not just create a pod here, but also to create something for the IMRRC.
Crew Chief Eric: I always jump at the opportunity to do a crossover episode with you, John.
Jon Summers: Thank you very much, Eric. Good stuff.
Crew Chief Eric: Well, anyway, I look forward to seeing.
What you come up with for the, uh, symposium. So I want to know how you’re going to boil all this down.
Jon Summers: Yeah. Well, I want to know I’m going to do it as well. And yeah, I’m going to really get on the case and do this [01:37:00] sooner rather than later, because I’m just not going to have time. Otherwise.[01:38:00]
Crew Chief Eric: This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part of our motoring podcast network. For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational content from organizations like the Exotic Car Marketplace, The Motoring Historian, BrakeFix, and many others. If you’d like to support Grand Touring Motorsports and the Motoring Podcast Network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at www.
patreon. com forward slash GT Motorsports. Please note that the content, opinions, and materials presented and expressed in this episode are those of its creator. And this episode has been published with their consent. If you have any inquiries about this program, please contact the creators of this episode via email or social media, as mentioned in the [01:39:00] episode.
Highlights
Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.
- 00:00 Introduction to John Summers and His Show
- 00:47 Group B Rallying: A Technological Revolution
- 02:07 The Golden Era of Rally: Group B
- 03:01 The Role of Producers in Reality TV and Motorsport
- 03:56 Setting the Scene: Group B Rally Cars
- 06:19 The Evolution of Group B Rally Cars
- 11:06 The Impact of Group B on Motorsport
- 35:04 The Rise of Lancia and the Delta S4
- 43:29 Ford’s Struggle and the RS200
- 47:21 The Legacy of Group B and Its Cars
- 49:33 Group B Disbandment and Nostalgia
- 50:15 The Influence of Virtual World on Group B
- 50:47 Personal Connection to Rallying
- 51:36 The Evolution of Rally Cars in Games
- 52:35 Analyzing Group B Cars’ Performance
- 54:20 Best Car of the Group B Era
- 56:30 Legendary Drivers of Group B
- 57:13 Hannu Mikkola: The Comeback King
- 01:05:33 Michel Mouton: Breaking Barriers
- 01:12:33 Ari Vatanen: The Artistry of Drift
- 01:19:42 The Tragic End of Group B
- 01:32:22 Legacy and Modern Rallying
- 01:36:30 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Livestream
Learn More
If you enjoyed this History of Motorsports Series episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. That would help us beat the algorithms and help spread the enthusiasm to others. Subscribe to Break/Fix using your favorite Podcast App: | | |
Consider becoming a Patreon VIP and get behind the scenes content and schwag from the Motoring Podcast Network
Do you like what you've seen, heard and read? - Don't forget, GTM is fueled by volunteers and remains a no-annual-fee organization, but we still need help to pay to keep the lights on... For as little as $2.50/month you can help us keep the momentum going so we can continue to record, write, edit and broadcast your favorite content. Support GTM today! or make a One Time Donation.
Tune in everywhere you stream, download or listen!
| | |
This episode is sponsored in part by: The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), The Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), The Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argetsinger Family – and was recorded in front of a live studio audience.
There's more to this story!
Be sure to check out the behind the scenes for this episode, filled with extras, bloopers, and other great moments not found in the final version. Become a Break/Fix VIP today by joining our Patreon.
All of our BEHIND THE SCENES (BTS) Break/Fix episodes are raw and unedited, and expressly shared with the permission and consent of our guests.
Ari Vatenan’s Climb Dance
Climb Dance is a cinéma vérité short film, which features Finnish rally driver Ari Vatanen setting a record time in the highly modified four-wheel drive, all-wheel steering Peugeot 405 Turbo 16 at the 1988 Pikes Peak International Hillclimb in Colorado, United States. The film was produced by Peugeot and directed by Jean Louis Mourey. The record time set was 10:47.77
Reliving Group B in the Virtual World
Crew Chief Eric entered the historic WRC Group B event for Kenya, defaulting to the rear-wheel-drive Lancia 037. He could have done much better, taking a 90 second penalty for a puncture, no real engine damage, tires were shot, but survived relatively unscathed. Battered and bruised, but not defeated, it gives you an idea of what it might have been like. Check out the footage below of how you can relive the glory days of Group B using simulators like EA WRC 24.
Other episodes you might enjoy
Michael R. Argetsinger Symposium on International Motor Racing History
The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), partnering with the Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), presents the annual Michael R. Argetsinger Symposium on International Motor Racing History. The Symposium established itself as a unique and respected scholarly forum and has gained a growing audience of students and enthusiasts. It provides an opportunity for scholars, researchers and writers to present their work related to the history of automotive competition and the cultural impact of motor racing. Papers are presented by faculty members, graduate students and independent researchers.The history of international automotive competition falls within several realms, all of which are welcomed as topics for presentations, including, but not limited to: sports history, cultural studies, public history, political history, the history of technology, sports geography and gender studies, as well as archival studies.
The symposium is named in honor of Michael R. Argetsinger (1944-2015), an award-winning motorsports author and longtime member of the Center's Governing Council. Michael's work on motorsports includes:- Walt Hansgen: His Life and the History of Post-war American Road Racing (2006)
- Mark Donohue: Technical Excellence at Speed (2009)
- Formula One at Watkins Glen: 20 Years of the United States Grand Prix, 1961-1980 (2011)
- An American Racer: Bobby Marshman and the Indianapolis 500 (2019)
This content has been brought to you in-part by support through...
