Rallycross
When 600bhp cars got too dangerous for rallying, they quickly found a new home.
1973 was a big moment for both rallying and rallycross. It was in this year that rallying was taken under the wing of motorsport’s governing body, the FIA, and shaped into a regimented series, the World Rally Championship, while 1973 also marked the first ever season of the European Rallycross Championship.
Check out the final of the 1989 Estering European Rallycross Championship round in the video above.
Fast forward 13 years to May 2, 1986. The European Rallycross drivers had just arrived at the Nordring, close to the village of Horn in Austria, for the first round of their season, as 1300 kilometres away on the island of Corsica, a fluey Henri Toivonen and his co-driver Sergio Cresto climbed aboard their brutish Group B-spec Lancia Delta S4and set off onto Stage 18 of the WRC’s Tour de Corse round. The pair never made it to the stage end, falling off the road 7km into the special on a tight left-hander with no guardrail, before plunging down a ravine and losing their lives when the Lancia burst into flames.
The end of Group B
With Toivonen’s tragic accident, Group B, the WRC’s set of rules which had, since 1982, allowed cars to compete in the championship with unlimited levels of turbo boost and often pumping out upwards of 500bhp, was banned. Many saw it as the end of the golden age of the rallying; others, a logical conclusion to a format which placed spectacle and noise ahead of driver and crowd safety. (The latter group may have had a point; tests later showed that the Group B cars were so fast that the drivers were getting tunnel vision).
Think you could have handled a Group B car? Watch the legendary Walter Röhrl in WRC action in the Audi Quattro S1 in the video below.
In practical terms, for the WRC’s teams it meant that the extraordinary beasts they’d spent millions developing – cars like the Audi Quattro S1, the Ford RS200 and the Austin Metro 6R4 – were rendered practically worthless to them overnight. But the European Rallycross and World Rally Championships’ stories were about to merge again to provide a solution.
Rallycross inherits some monsters
The WRC’s homeless Group B cars were welcomed into the European Rallycross Championship with open arms in 1987.
Will Gollop, who’d won his class in the 1986 British Rallycross Championship in a 220bhp Saab 99, had cannily written to British Leyland’s Motorsport Manager John Davenport in late 1986 to see if he’d be interested in parting with one of the company’s 200 homologated Austin Metro 6R4s on the cheap. Gollop was told to head to Gaydon, Austin Rover’s test track, to try out the car. “Bring a trailer, and we’ll see what we can do,” Davenport added.
“I couldn’t believe how good the car was,” Gollop recalls 29 years later. “With the four-wheel drive, even standing starts on mud were quicker than I’d been doing on tarmac.”
The deal was done, and Gollop came away from Gaydon with the 6R4, a load of free parts and a bit of factory backing to boot. Meanwhile all over Europe, Gollop’s competitors were doing the same thing, getting hold of Metro 6R4s like his own, as well as Audi Quattro S1s, Lancia Delta S4s and Peugeot 205 T16s – “by far the best car” according to Gollop – and kickstarting a new era in the European Rally Championship.
Hitting 700bhp
The Group B cars ruled rallycross until 1992 – with their power figures going up all the time.
“In the 6R4, we got about 435bhp from the naturally aspirated V6 3.0-litre,” says Gollop. “Then we built a very special turbocharged 2.3-litre V6, and by the time 1992 came along, we were doing a calculated 700bhp.”
But with regulations changed for 1993, European Rallycross’ Group B era was over. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, says Gollop.
“It was a great time for rallycross because there were a lot more high-performance four-wheel drive vehicles available. It went downhill a little after that, but now rallycross has gradually come back to having a World Championship, which I think is brilliant.”
