Welcome
As carheads it’s all too easy to become obsessed with the numbers, but the real meaning comes from a deeper place
What’s the best car you’ve driven? Or, the greatest classic car ever built? Inevitably, some variant of the big question is one that I hear often. Intuitively, the answer is never based on anything that can be measured or counted, like engine output, performance statistics, Nürburgring lap times or competition victories. Instead, it’s everything to do with the emotions that a car can fire up, even fear.
Take Group B rally cars, long since surpassed by the performance of World Rally Championship descendants, but secure in their position as the most exciting machines ever to take on the most treacherous and demanding gravel, snow and tarmac stages on the planet. We revere them for their raw, uncompromising approach to speed, but partly for the fact that they were compromised; flawed in a way that never could be allowed to happen again. The surviving cars serve as time capsules of a thrilling, dangerous and, at times, lethal era. To find out what it’s like to get behind the wheel of one and unleash its unrestrained fury, we’ll have to ask our brave and just a little Group B-obsessed writer, Sam Dawson. The car – the Lancia 037 that Henri Toivonen drove to third in the 1984 1000 Lakes Rally, a two-wheel driven outsider who beat the four-wheeldrive Audi Quattro A2s of both Stig Blomqvist and Per Eklund.
The outsiders concept covers this month’s Big Test as well. None of our seven cover stars would win a contest based on statistics, missing out on boasts for first of breed or most muscular specification. Consequently, neither do they attract the loftiest of prices. But viewed in isolation from more prized siblings, they’re bursting with stimuli to spark up our senses in ways that make them deeply satisfying to own. Bring price comparison into the process, and they become irresitible.
This year is shaping up to be one where much making up for lost time is needed. Treating yourself to a life-enhancing classic car is a good place to start.