From November 15-18, the picturesque countryside around Coffs Harbour in NSW will be the location for one of the great events on the Australian motorsport calendar as the World Rally Championship (WRC) comes to our shores.

The Kennards Hire Rally Australia is the final event of the WRC season and is set to be an absolute barnstormer – the race for the title has come down to the wire with championship leaders Sebastien Ogier and co-driver Julien Ingrassia, in the M-Sport Ford Fiesta, leading Thierry Neuville and Nicolas Gilsoul, in a Hyundai i20 Coupe, by just three points. Ott Tanak and Martin Jarveoja are a further 20 points adrift in a Toyota Yaris.

It’s going to be a humdinger of a rally, but even if the race to the title wasn’t so tight, it would still be spectacular because there is something truly epic about top-level rallying.
Unlike its race track-bound motorsport cousins, rallying is, arguably, motorsport at its most raw – race stages take place on surfaces that range from dusty gravel to slippery ice, from dirt to asphalt, and through the tight streets of towns to narrow forest tracks to roads that cling to the sides of mountains.

It’s exhilarating to watch these incredibly nimble and powerful cars being driven at their limit by drivers at the absolute top of their game.

And the cars really are something else. While a Ford Fiesta, a Hyundai i20 and a Toyota Yaris are names that don’t necessarily sound like world beating speed machines, the truth is these rally cars are works of genius. Tuned, tweaked and worked to performance perfection, they are pretty extraordinary – all the top WRC cars are four-wheel drive monsters powered by 1.6-litre, turbocharged, 4-cylinder engines that pump out 380hp (280kW) and 400-450Nm of torque.

Potent stuff.

A LITTLE HISTORY
While rallying has been around for more than 100 years, the WRC was formed in 1973, creating a championship from some of the already established races and running 13 events, each in a different country.

For the first five years of the championship, only manufacturers were awarded titles as the event was seen very much as a battle of the manufacturers and a testing ground for new technology.
It wasn’t until 1977 that a winning driver was recognised, and that year Italian Sandro Munari won the title, then known as the FIA Cup for Drivers, piloting a Lancia Stratos HF. The manufacturer title went to Fiat.

It was all great stuff. the drivers were brilliant, the racing exhilarating and the cars were excellent – along with the Lancia Stratos HF, there was the Ford Escort RS1800, the Fiat 131 Abarth, the Toyota Celica 2000GT, the Renault 5 and more.

However, as good as these cars were and as exciting as the racing was during the late ‘70s and very early ‘80s, there was a revolution just around the corner and things were about to get very spicy indeed.

GROUP B
The mid-’80s has been called the ‘golden era’ of rallying, and that was all down to the Group B cars.

‘Group B’ was a harmless and rather dull name for a category of rally cars that was anything but – unless, that is, the ‘B’ stood for ‘bonkers’.

Why bonkers? Well, it basically boils down to regulations, or rather the lack thereof.

A reorganisation of rally car categories in the early ’80s would see just four emerge – A, B, C and N – with Group B regulations, introduced in 1982, allowing manufacturers plenty of scope for modifications, with little restriction on power development or technology and requiring only 200 models be built for homologation purposes. Additionally, there was an ‘evolution’ clause that meant developments on a car would only have to see a further homologation 20 cars be built to reflect that change.

There were some further regulations around engine displacement, weight and wheel width – and the cars had to have at least two seats – but compared to what is commonplace for motorsport teams today, the rules couldn’t have been more relaxed.

The result? While the manufacturers took a few months to work out what exactly they could do, from the 1983 season onward, the Group B category was the place to be, and it was the competition that fans in their hundreds of thousands lined the stage courses to watch.

With few restrictions, Group B car development was swift. Over the next three years, cars became lighter and more powerful as manufacturers looked to find the best mix of technologies that would work across the testing and varied conditions of the rally circuits, and by 1985 some true fire-breathing, lightning-quick monsters had emerged – cars that were called, in some quarters, Formula One cars in disguise.

They were often not the best-looking race cars – many would sport massive front and rear wings and awkward-looking vents designed to suck in cooling air to the engine – but they were at the cutting edge of motorsport design and engineering and the power they generated and the speeds they could travel had moved from being exhilaratingly quick
to downright dangerous.

In 1981, for example, the Audi Quattro A1 – a car rightly considered as one of the gems of rally history with its game-changing all-wheel drive technology – boasted a 2.1-litre turbocharged, 5-cylinder engine that was good for 320hp. In 1984, the championship-winning Quattro A2 was producing 360hp and doing 0-100km/h in 4.4 seconds. By 1985, the S1 Quattro was now banging out nearly 450hp, while the last Group B Quattro, the S1 E2, was cranking more than 500hp.

Engineers continued to work on upping the power and cutting weight and in its final incarnation, with which Audi won the Pikes Peak Hill Climb in 1987, the Quattro, with gargantuan wings front and back, was good for 600hp and could reach 100km/h in less than 3 seconds.

And this was the story for Group B – manufacturers building and developing their cars into mind-bogglingly powerful performance beasts.

Cars like the all-conquering Peugeot 205 T16, which monstered everybody else in taking the manufacturers’ and drivers’ titles in 1985 and 1986, and even the Metro 6R4 from Britain’s Rover company. On the surface, the 6R4 resembled a popular but very dull and not particularly pretty or fun-to-drive small city car (this writer should know as he owned one). However, the 6R4 only resembled that car – the 1-litre, 44hp engine of the road-going version was somewhat overshadowed by the thundering 3-litre, V6, 410hp engine of its rallying cousin!

Another star of the era was Lancia which, with its Delta S4, may have built the ultimate Group B car. The company had enjoyed much success in the ’70s with its purpose-built Stratos HF, but built the 037 for the inaugural 1982 Group B season. The 037, powered by a 4-cylinder, supercharged, mid-mounted 2-litre engine, was good for 310hp and even though it was rear-wheel drive, it won the 1983 manufacturers title for Lancia under the guiding hands of driver’s Markku Alen and Walter Rohrl.

However, when Audi snapped up the 1984 title with driver Stig Blomqvist, it was clear that the 037’s lack of four-wheel drive would be a problem. So, Lancia went off to develop the Delta S4 – a beast that boasted a uniquely supercharged and turbocharged 1.8-litre, 4-cylinder engine capable of a 0-100km/h time of under three seconds, and with 550hp on tap (if rumour were to be believed, an upgraded engine available in 1986 delivered 750hp!).

In its first outing at the 1985 RAC Rally in Britain, the Delta S4 came in first, driven by the supremely talented Henri Toivonen, and second in the hands of Markku Alen. The following year, Toivonen won the championship’s opening round at Monte Carlo and then . . . well, then, things started to go wrong, very wrong.

It was becoming clear by 1986, to some people anyway, that the Group B cars were becoming too powerful and too quick. Incidents and accidents were many and the category had not only turbocharged the cars, but support for the competition too – support that would see spectators in their thousands take absurd risks in an effort to get close to the action.
Their enthusiasm to be as close to the action as possible meant that drivers would often be driving at full speed through crowds of people who would part ways to let them through just in the nick
of time.

Watching footage taken from the period is jaw-dropping and that sort of enthusiasm, coupled with cars that were becoming ferociously quick was a recipe for disaster and only luck seemed to stay any massive disaster.

That luck, however, would run out eventually, and Group B became hampered by ever-growing numbers of incidents.

In 1985, driver Attilio Bettega died after crashing at the Corsican Rally. That same year, former world champion Ari Vatanen, driving a Peugeot 205 T16, suffered life-threatening injuries after his car somersaulted and crashed off the road at over 120mph during the Argentina Rally. At the Rally of Portugal in 1986, three people were killed and 30 injured when a Ford RS200 ran off the road at a corner massed with spectators, and two months later, at the Corsica Rally, Henri Toivonen and co-driver Sergio Cresto were killed in a colossal accident when their Delta S4 left the road, plunged down the side of a cliff and burst into flames.

Realisation finally set in that the whole enterprise was becoming too dangerous and the Group B category was banned by the end of the year.

THE MODERN ERA
Not surprisingly, following the banning of Group B cars – and indeed the proposed Group S that was expected to be launched in 1987 – rules and regulations were changed to reduce the dangers. Group A cars – production-derived vehicles limited in terms of power, weight, allowed technology and overall cost – became the standard.

Over the years, the regulations have continued to be changed and tweaked with the current World Rally Car regulations introduced in 2017.

Under those rules, the WRC cars fighting for the drivers’ and manufacturers’ titles are based on normal road-going equivalents of which a defined minimum number (25,000) must be made available at dealers around the globe. They have 1.6-litre, fuel injection, turbocharged, four-cylinder engines fitted with a 36mm air intake restrictor and power output restricted to about 380bhp.
There are plenty of other regulations around such areas as aerodynamics and overall weight etc, but, if you focus on the good stuff, the current WRC cars can clock 0-100km/h in less than 4 seconds and record top speeds of more than 200km/h. That’s quick!

The WRC of today is as good as it has ever been. And the fans know it and turn up in droves.

In 2017, the WRC events welcomed more than four million spectators – an increase of 20 per cent over five years – and marked a TV audience of more than 840 million across 155 markets. Social media numbers are also gigantic with millions of Facebook and Youtube users.

So, if you’ve got time, you’re in or around Coffs Harbour on November 15-18, and you’re curious about what it’s all about, do yourself a favour and get along to one of the greatest motorsport shows on the planet.

Source: Motor Trader E-Magazine (November 2018)

11 Nov 2018