NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

Markku Alen tells the story far better than most could. And it comes as a salutary lesson to those who think stepping down to an R5-based World Rally Car would be the end of the world in performance terms.

It wouldn’t. If it’s the end of the world you want, rewind to the WRC’S very own winter of deep discontent in 1986. Group B was gone. And Group A was coming, in Lancia’s case in the form of the Delta HF (below).

Running a pre-event test for the Delta S4 late in 1986, Alen watched suspiciously as the mechanics wheeled out a plain white Delta from the back of a truck. What was this thing?

“The boys told me to take it out and test it,” says Alen. “I did this and came back. They told me this is the car for 1987. I told them, ‘Very funny. This is a recce car. Go and fetch me the rally car.’ That was the rally car.”

An even more graphic illustration of the feeling inside the car, coming from full-bore Group B madness to the more sedate pace of the following year’s mildly tuned road car hardware, was provided by Christian Geistdorfer. Used to saying hello to the horizon in Audi’s brutal

Quattro Sport S1 E2, the German admitted that the big, wobbly, breathless 200 Quattro took some getting used to when he and Walter Rohrl started the 1987 Monte

Carlo Rally. “It was like stepping off a rocket and sitting on a bicycle,” said Geistdorfer.

At their peak and boosting to the max, Group B cars were capable of delivering outputs north of 600bhp.

And, rudimentary as they were, the snowplough-style front splitters and ironing-board rear wings still produced significant downforce.

It’s little wonder that 250bhp on a cold morning in the French Alps, with aerodynamics apparently modelled on a house brick, did little to whet the appetite for the

FIA’S new world order of 1987 and Group A.

Suddenly, and by comparison, a step down to an R5-based World Rally Car doesn’t sound so bad…