Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Group B Rally: The Wild, Brief, Brilliant Era That Changed Everything

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Group B Rally: The Wild, Brief, Brilliant Era That Changed Everything · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  John Summers is the motoring historian.
• 0:02
  He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into
• 0:06
  a fairly inept sports bike rider.
• 0:08
  Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of
• 0:12
  cheap and fast, and not much reliable.
• 0:15
  On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new
• 0:18
  and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
• 0:32
  Have you seen that movie, 2001 A Space Odyssey?
• 0:35
  Yes, I have.
• 0:36
  You know, the black rock where the monkeys are like, uh, uh, uh, uh,
• 0:39
  with the, that's me with technology.
• 0:41
  It's like the IT crowd where the internet is in the box with the blinking light.
• 0:45
  Yeah.
• 0:47
  Yeah.
• 0:47
  And you know, it is directly related to what we're going to talk about tonight
• 0:52
  because I've been down this group B rat hole for the last however many hours.
• 0:57
  All I've done is watch group B rallying videos.
• 1:00
  And what I'm struck by is how fast the technological Changes came.
• 1:05
  Yeah.
• 1:05
  You basically had today's world rally car competing against
• 1:10
  Steve and Mike in an Escort Mk2.
• 1:13
  They prepared in Mark's dad's shed.
• 1:17
  That's been my learning.
• 1:18
  The changes were incremental, but the increments were so incredibly fast.
• 1:24
  The organizers just did not keep up with it.
• 1:28
  In other words, from.
• 1:30
  A 270 horse Opel Ascona 400 in 1982 at the beginning of Group B
• 1:37
  to 320 horse for the first Audis.
• 1:42
  And I've heard different figures and you're probably better informed than me.
• 1:46
  But that's a big jump and there's the jump around traction as well.
• 1:50
  But early on there was the unreliability and, you know, the first
• 1:55
  year of Group B, well, should we?
• 1:57
  Actually do an intro here.
• 1:59
  I think we should, because we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics,
• 2:02
  which I often feel completely alone in the world with respect to rally.
• 2:07
  And it's, I think one of the, probably the most interesting disciplines of
• 2:10
  motorsport, maybe one of the most divisive when we really dig deep into the
• 2:14
  golden era of rally, which is group B.
• 2:16
  I'm really keen to do this Eric.
• 2:18
  Let me do my, uh, traditional beginning of the episode.
• 2:23
  Good day.
• 2:24
  Good morning.
• 2:24
  Good afternoon.
• 2:25
  And welcome to the motoring historian with John Summers and with Eric, his
• 2:32
  producer, Eric, there are two British comedians called the two Ronnies.
• 2:36
  One of them was fat and funny.
• 2:37
  And the other one was little and not so funny.
• 2:40
  And the little one would always do a talk to the camera.
• 2:42
  And it always used to be very boring to me when I was a small boy about Ollie's
• 2:46
  age, watching it, just because I wanted to stay up and not go to bed, as you
• 2:50
  want to do when you're a small boy.
• 2:52
  And he would always tell a story sitting in his chair, where he said, the producer
• 2:56
  said this, and the producer said that.
• 2:58
  And I was like, who the fuck is this producer character?
• 3:00
  Is it his wife?
• 3:01
  And it was only when I got involved in TV stuff that I was aware that there was
• 3:06
  always a producer there and you know in the world of reality tv each star has
• 3:11
  their own producer right if the star gets cut from the show the producer loses
• 3:15
  their income as well so the production team is structured so that they wind up
• 3:20
  the reality tv stars to do the absurd things that they do and we only see one
• 3:25
  side of the equation the Sistine Chapel do you know who paid Michelangelo to
• 3:30
  paint that it was the Pope So that image on the Sistine Chapel where there's all
• 3:36
  the completely inappropriate, is this, what am I actually looking at here on the
• 3:41
  wall of a church stuff that Michelangelo painted that was a direct dig at the Pope.
• 3:46
  He was biting the hand that fed it.
• 3:48
  And I use that metaphor with the Sistine Chapel on purpose, right?
• 3:51
  That behind the artist, there's always the financier is what
• 3:54
  I'm, uh, what I'm trying to say.
• 3:56
  And look, we're going to talk about Group B rally.
• 3:58
  today and we're going to take it from a perspective that we're going to set the
• 4:02
  scene a little bit Then we're going to talk about the cars a little bit because
• 4:05
  you know These are the power behind the throne right the pope vartanen is not
• 4:09
  vartanen without a really decent rally car It is said that group b rally was
• 4:15
  more popular than Formula One at the time.
• 4:17
  That wasn't what I witnessed in period.
• 4:20
  What the was, was a capture of the zeitgeist, right?
• 4:24
  Right.
• 4:25
  People who wouldn't turn on the TV to watch a Formula One race, but
• 4:28
  people who were just like, you know, Pamplona running of the bulls types.
• 4:33
  Those were the types who came from the farms and it would stand at the
• 4:37
  side of the road in stupid places.
• 4:39
  Yes, and we'll get into that.
• 4:40
  Real rally fans, because I was nearly run over by Bruno Sabe one time because
• 4:44
  I was standing in a stupid place.
• 4:46
  Sorry, Bruno.
• 4:46
  But, you know, it's really short period, right?
• 4:49
  It's 82 to 86.
• 4:51
  So it's a very short period.
• 4:52
  And in that period, the spectacle is incredible.
• 4:56
  The danger was palpable to everybody then.
• 4:59
  I was spat by it.
• 5:01
  For God's sake, I won't fall down that rat hole.
• 5:03
  I won't do an aside now.
• 5:04
  I'll stay on course somewhat.
• 5:05
  So this fascinating thing with group B is that it has resonated in a way
• 5:09
  that, oh my God, this group B stuff, it is hot as you like, isn't it?
• 5:15
  And that's why I felt like it was worth talking about it.
• 5:18
  So, so look, our title today is.
• 5:21
  Related to the presentation that I promised I would give at the IMRRC,
• 5:27
  and I dare say, will appear in a future episode, so by the time you're listening
• 5:30
  to this, that might have been published, and then you yourself can see how well
• 5:34
  I've interpreted what Eric and I talk about, how well I've turned that out.
• 5:38
  into what I present at the IMRRC, which is The Real History.
• 5:42
  I think this is going to be absolutely entertaining, but
• 5:44
  I feel underdressed today.
• 5:46
  Like, I don't have enough quattro paraphernalia.
• 5:49
  I have a ton in the house.
• 5:51
  I just wanted to keep it subtle.
• 5:52
  I have no bias, no bias for this.
• 5:54
  So if you're watching this behind the scenes on Patreon, you'll
• 5:56
  understand what we're talking about.
• 5:58
  See, with me, not only do you get Rembrandt's Night Watch, but you
• 6:00
  also get all the sketches as well.
• 6:05
  I always like to go for the jugular with this stuff.
• 6:08
  Everyone wants to know who the greatest driver was.
• 6:10
  So you have to talk about that.
• 6:12
  But we can't talk about that without talking about the cars.
• 6:15
  And we can't talk about that without talking about the actual drivers.
• 6:19
  Canvas the actual backdrop against which these events took place because that
• 6:24
  seems to be really important and I'll talk about that in a minute, but let's
• 6:28
  begin at the beginning with that rules package of what Group B really means.
• 6:34
  So the rules are very strange because early Group B was all about
• 6:39
  homologation cars and around 1983.
• 6:43
  Um, When the horsepower numbers doubled, they became evolution cars.
• 6:48
  So I think we need to split hairs in terms of the rules package.
• 6:53
  You know, we're going to talk about Lancia.
• 6:54
  We're going to talk about Audi.
• 6:56
  You mentioned the Citroen BX4TC, which was designed to meet Group B regulations.
• 7:00
  But we also have to look at the cars That carried over prior to group B.
• 7:06
  So I'll give a prime example.
• 7:07
  The lunch at 037 was adopted into group B, but it was the replacement for the
• 7:12
  Stratos, which had just exited in 1978 1979 with Marco lane behind the wheel.
• 7:18
  So homologation rules versus.
• 7:20
  The evolution rules where that all stems from.
• 7:24
  We have to go back and talk about John Marie Balestra, who
• 7:28
  was at the head of world rally.
• 7:30
  It wasn't called WRC like it is today, but as part of the FIA, he was at the
• 7:35
  head of what we would call WRC today.
• 7:37
  And the pages were mostly blank as far as he was concerned.
• 7:42
  When you look back over reports and documentaries that talk about Balestra.
• 7:48
  They talk about him more as a businessman.
• 7:50
  He was very coin operated.
• 7:52
  He could have cared less about racing.
• 7:54
  It was all about making money for the FIA.
• 7:56
  There was a cultural divide between the frustration, both in Formula One,
• 8:03
  that these British garage Easters were winning with these Ford V8s.
• 8:08
  100%.
• 8:09
  And you know who was winning in rally?
• 8:11
  Oh, it would have been lovely if it was those Stratos.
• 8:14
  Yeah, it would have been, wouldn't it?
• 8:15
  But it wasn't.
• 8:16
  It was those.
• 8:17
  Fucking Fords again, wasn't it?
• 8:19
  It was.
• 8:20
  So there was this frustration.
• 8:21
  I learned this just last night.
• 8:23
  The rules were developed in partnership with the manufacturer.
• 8:25
  Yes.
• 8:26
  So just like in Formula One, the turbos were a deliberate attempt to destabilize
• 8:32
  The British hegemony, if you will, that at least is one argument that you could make.
• 8:39
  I'm not trying to make it, but it just occurred to me.
• 8:42
  How come the Metro 6R4 wasn't turbocharged?
• 8:45
  How come when Malcolm Wilson was interviewed in the rally that he
• 8:48
  does in Equatro, he moans about turbo lag when the Metro 6R4 is not laggy.
• 8:54
  Oh, I guess there was a lot of politics lurking even behind the
• 8:57
  technical decisions that were made.
• 8:59
  There was, and the Metro 6R4 falls into the evolution period of Group B,
• 9:04
  rather than the homologation period.
• 9:05
  Though it looked like an MG Metro that was off the street, because that
• 9:09
  was always the facade, that was that illusion that they wanted to paint.
• 9:13
  One thing though, Eric, you might not be aware of this, being American and all.
• 9:18
  Peugeot ran very successful or very memorable advertising campaign.
• 9:24
  It was in magazines.
• 9:25
  It was also advertisement hoardings, and it was a picture of a 205 GTI and
• 9:32
  then reflected in a puddle nighttime.
• 9:34
  And it was like neon lights and the car was black when reflected in the puddle.
• 9:38
  It was a T 16.
• 9:39
  So you've got the 205 on the 1.
• 9:43
  9 GTI.
• 9:43
  Alloys.
• 9:43
  And then in the reflection, you've got the T16 on the rally car wheels.
• 9:49
  That ad alone lets you know how widely understood, you know, the British public,
• 9:56
  the viewing public wouldn't recognize what was going on here, that that was
• 10:01
  not just a car reflected in the puddle.
• 10:03
  It was a rally car reflected in the puddle and it was the rally
• 10:05
  car that had won everything.
• 10:07
  And that's what drove Balestra was that you would walk into the dealership and buy
• 10:11
  a Peugeot 205 Rally, but that was a front wheel drive, front mount, 100 horsepower,
• 10:18
  GTI type of hatchback versus the Peugeot 205 T16 that you saw on the rally stage.
• 10:24
  They were selling the dream.
• 10:26
  They were selling the fantasy.
• 10:27
  If you think about Formula One at that time, at the same time, yes, In period,
• 10:33
  Formula One was exciting, you have Senna doing his thing in the rise, you
• 10:37
  have Andretti clinching his Formula One championship, you have the rivalry quote
• 10:42
  unquote between Pironi and Villeneuve, you have a lot of things happening there,
• 10:46
  but Formula One couldn't sell the dream.
• 10:49
  The same way that Raleigh could.
• 10:51
  So to your point for the FIA and for Balestra, Raleigh is the golden child.
• 10:56
  It's where the money is being made.
• 10:58
  It's Indy versus NASCAR.
• 11:00
  Exactly.
• 11:00
  In that sense, Balestra is sort of a big bill.
• 11:03
  Exactly.
• 11:04
  Who knew?
• 11:05
  Fascinating concept.
• 11:06
  So the evolution period of Group B is just absolutely mental.
• 11:11
  But the thing is, we have to step back to the homologation period.
• 11:14
  So again, that rules package, as dictated by the FIA, said you have to build 200
• 11:20
  cars based on a production vehicle.
• 11:24
  Okay, well that's doable.
• 11:25
  That lasted until 1984.
• 11:27
  And for that, I would say the Audi was forward looking, right?
• 11:32
  Yes.
• 11:33
  Feel like you could buy a road car.
• 11:35
  The other Group B cars at that time were stuff that was not so different from,
• 11:42
  you know, the Escorts of the 1970s.
• 11:46
  Opel Manta, all those kinds.
• 11:46
  The Manta 400 is the key evolution, isn't it?
• 11:51
  The previous version of the Manta is the Escona, I now understand, and, you know,
• 11:56
  the Manta was better balanced than the Bit more power according to Jimmy McCray,
• 12:00
  but this is fundamentally 270 horse.
• 12:03
  Yeah, normally aspirated, but there was a lot of games that were being
• 12:08
  played by the different manufacturers.
• 12:10
  It wasn't hard for Audi to crank out 200 cars.
• 12:14
  I mean, they sent 627 UR Quattros to the United States.
• 12:18
  They sold 10 times that amount in the United Kingdom alone.
• 12:21
  So the homologation rules were really strange and the way they worked was
• 12:25
  sort of like Stock car used to be where it needed to be based on a production
• 12:31
  car, just like Trans Am was in the 80s.
• 12:33
  It needed to be based on the Firebird that you could buy from
• 12:36
  Chevrolet and that you could do whatever you wanted with the motor.
• 12:39
  Even at 300 horsepower when the Audis hit the scene.
• 12:42
  That was not what was in the street car.
• 12:45
  The Audi's five cylinder was a 20 valve, 2.
• 12:48
  1 liter turbo making somewhere between 275 and 320.
• 12:52
  The numbers are all over the map.
• 12:53
  The homologation car made 165 horsepower with a 10 valve turbo.
• 12:59
  So the homologation rules, you had to have 200 at a minimum
• 13:04
  production cars sold in dealerships.
• 13:06
  It didn't matter where it was in the world.
• 13:08
  And then you could qualify to modify it for WRC.
• 13:12
  And again, that lasted until 1984, and to your point, the Opel Manta 400 was
• 13:17
  one of the first cars, but the one that really kind of just punched everybody
• 13:21
  in the gut was when Audi decided to cut almost 13 inches out of the wheelbase
• 13:26
  on the Quattro and created the Shorty, or the short wheelbase Quattro, or
• 13:30
  the sport Quattro, it's referred to.
• 13:32
  They had to then produce 200 of those for the street, of which
• 13:35
  they sold six in the United States.
• 13:37
  And then the rest went all over the world.
• 13:39
  But the shorty is where you suddenly saw in 1983 and 84.
• 13:45
  It's like Peugeot, Renault, Lancia.
• 13:48
  And everybody's going, wait, hold on a second.
• 13:50
  What do you guys wait?
• 13:50
  We're allowed to cut the cars now.
• 13:52
  This isn't a production chat.
• 13:53
  What do you guys, what are you doing here?
• 13:55
  And so now begin the period of the evolution cars.
• 13:59
  And so Balestra stands back and he goes.
• 14:01
  The fans are loving it.
• 14:02
  We've got 300, 000 people lining the roads in Portugal to watch you crazy
• 14:08
  bastards go down at 130 miles an hour and hope that nobody gets killed.
• 14:12
  And so the power numbers continue to increase.
• 14:14
  It became like a space race.
• 14:16
  Oh, like the Mille Miglia in the fifties.
• 14:18
  Exactly.
• 14:19
  It was completely an accident waiting to happen.
• 14:21
  I've watched, as I say, for the last 24 hours, all I've done.
• 14:24
  Is watch all of the rally reports from the 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1986 RAC rallies.
• 14:32
  So that was the lens that I had when I was a boy.
• 14:34
  I'm just stupefied that when you've got guys like Mikkola saying, you know,
• 14:39
  the straights are getting shorter and the corners, they are coming quicker.
• 14:43
  Oh man, it was.
• 14:45
  I mean, if you go back to the early days of rally with the Lancia
• 14:49
  Fulvias and stuff like that, they did 85 miles an hour downhill.
• 14:52
  If they were lucky.
• 14:53
  So as we said in the beginning, you know, Group B started in 81 and
• 14:57
  you had a lot of carryover cars.
• 14:59
  The Lancia 037 is still in Group B by the rules because they sold
• 15:04
  homologation versions of it on the street and things like that.
• 15:06
  But it was based on the Lancia Beta Monte Carlo.
• 15:09
  It wasn't really, was it?
• 15:11
  I mean, I always think Lancia completely took the piss with the designer cars.
• 15:15
  I always felt like Audi, at least it vaguely.
• 15:17
  Yes.
• 15:18
  Whereas Lancia, you were like, what, what, that, like that Delta S4.
• 15:21
  I mean, that looked like nothing, like no fucking road car you could ever buy.
• 15:26
  The Stratos.
• 15:27
  Was the beginning, arguably the Stratos was the first prototype
• 15:30
  rally car, although I just think the Alpine A110 is more of that.
• 15:35
  I would agree.
• 15:35
  That was sort of positioned as a road car to like slide under the rules.
• 15:39
  Whereas again, Lancia just completely took a piss and put a Formula One
• 15:42
  engine in a bespoke chassis and.
• 15:44
  Well, the Stratos was a Dino 246 motor.
• 15:47
  Yeah, it was a Ferrari derived from the engine that bloody Tony Brooks had used
• 15:51
  to win the 1959 British Grand Prix.
• 15:54
  You know, really it was, it was that engine, which, uh.
• 15:57
  Lancia invented the V6, did you know that?
• 15:59
  I did know that, yeah, in the Aurelia, if I remember correctly.
• 16:02
  Yeah, well, so let's talk about events, right, because that is really, I, I think,
• 16:08
  worth talking about that, you know, for me, I've said in the past that I fell in
• 16:12
  love with, you know, motorsport really through rallying and it was because
• 16:16
  rallying made the equivalent of wide world of sport it was called grandstand
• 16:21
  and rallying made grandstand and looking back it captured the imagination of the
• 16:27
  british people so the lens for me is the traditional season ending event the
• 16:32
  lombard rec rally of great britain the thing about this event is no pace notes
• 16:37
  every other event you're allowed pace notes for I guess the striking thing
• 16:42
  for me is that the season will begin with Monte Carlo, the Monte Carlo rally.
• 16:46
  So this is snow and ice.
• 16:48
  They do the one in Finland called the Thousand Lakes, which is when
• 16:51
  you've seen rally cars jumping, that's where it's going to be.
• 16:54
  The one in Africa, the safari rally, that was always won by local people.
• 16:59
  Yeah.
• 16:59
  Like they weren't even sent the first time.
• 17:01
  Valtteror, Valtteror had been a rally driver.
• 17:04
  He'd been world rally champion.
• 17:05
  Once before he even went to the thousand lakes, because he
• 17:09
  was like, why would I go there?
• 17:10
  It's like a pissing competition between these fins.
• 17:13
  And I just, you know, I didn't grow up driving these roads.
• 17:16
  I'm just not gonna be a madman to try and, you know, mix it with them.
• 17:20
  So the events are from a spectacle perspective, perhaps similar
• 17:26
  to the way that they are at the moment, but the endurance that
• 17:31
  was expected of cruise is just.
• 17:35
  boggles the mind today.
• 17:36
  We have to put it in perspective for those that don't know as
• 17:40
  much as we do about Group B.
• 17:41
  So first of all, 1981 to 1986, 12 countries in a season all
• 17:47
  over the world, to your point.
• 17:48
  It could be Corsica, it could be Portugal, it could be Kenya,
• 17:50
  it could be up in Scandinavia.
• 17:52
  They did over 5, 000 kilometers of driving.
• 17:55
  And this wasn't driving down the highway down the A1 or the M1.
• 17:59
  This is 5, 000 hard kilometers at breaking speeds.
• 18:05
  The 1985 RAC Rally, I learned that from Tuesday night until
• 18:12
  Thursday morning, the end of the rally, there was 10 hours of halt.
• 18:17
  So you could expect to get perhaps five hours sleep, not counting the time
• 18:23
  that you can sleep in the passenger seat whilst the co drivers driving.
• 18:27
  The route around England in five days was 2, 000 miles.
• 18:32
  Vartanen was like, you know, are they trying to do a parry dakka?
• 18:36
  That.
• 18:36
  Did not mix and that's this is something this is why I wanted to start out
• 18:40
  by talking about the events because that didn't mix With the cars as they
• 18:45
  were coming along and and involving let's Talk first about the cars.
• 18:50
  Then we'll talk about the drivers and then You know, hopefully
• 18:55
  come to some kind of conclusions.
• 18:57
  So clearly these early cars, the Ascona 400, the Renault 5 Turbo,
• 19:04
  these two wheel drive things were not competitive as time went on.
• 19:10
  I watched one event from the, like the British Open Rally Championship
• 19:15
  from the beginning of 1982.
• 19:17
  You've got Vatanen fully brain out in an Escort, which has got to have the
• 19:23
  same horsepower as the Opel Manta.
• 19:25
  And you've got Micola with a quattro struggling to come to terms with not
• 19:32
  knowing the roads as well, the car being understeery and then bits and pieces
• 19:36
  breaking on it all the time because it was so many revolutionary technology.
• 19:42
  The cars were popular, they were hot, but we also saw them at Geneva in
• 19:46
  1980 and they were prototyped in 1979.
• 19:51
  And so people were already excited about this.
• 19:54
  production car with all wheel drive and it's unique and it's different
• 19:58
  and Volkswagen thing it was based on.
• 20:01
  When did that come out?
• 20:02
  So the Iltis, if we go all the way back to World War II.
• 20:07
  Oh, all right.
• 20:08
  Oh, it's right the way back there.
• 20:09
  Yeah, it comes post World War II.
• 20:12
  All the language the British commentators talk about Audi's approach.
• 20:16
  William Woolard talks about military precision, you know,
• 20:19
  they're not quite there.
• 20:20
  British commentators flirt with that kind of thing all the time, very noticeably.
• 20:25
  So if we drop the pin all the way back there, you have to realize
• 20:28
  In World War II, the Germans used the Kübelwagen, which was sold in
• 20:32
  the United States as the VW Thing.
• 20:34
  So that was their military jeep.
• 20:36
  But remember, it's based on a Beetle.
• 20:38
  It's rear wheel drive, rear engine, every problem that a Beetle
• 20:41
  has, the Kübelwagen had as well.
• 20:43
  Post war, when they were still able to develop and refine and this and
• 20:47
  that, they were building other military vehicles because there were other
• 20:50
  wars that were happening, right?
• 20:51
  You had the war in Korea, and later on you had Vietnam and all these kinds of things.
• 20:54
  So the Iltis Was born and you can look this up.
• 20:57
  The Volkswagen Iltis I L T I S was the first for Volkswagen, all mechanical,
• 21:04
  all wheel drive system, punching in the nose, other mechanical all
• 21:08
  wheel drive systems that existed.
• 21:10
  Ahead of the Jeep.
• 21:11
  I'd have to look at who did it first, but I will say the Iltis was better
• 21:16
  because if you look at the trials that they did with the Iltis, that thing
• 21:19
  could almost climb a vertical wall.
• 21:21
  Right.
• 21:21
  Is it insane how good it was?
• 21:23
  So they basically lifted that.
• 21:25
  Longitudinal design and they're like, we're going to
• 21:27
  put that in a production car.
• 21:28
  And that was the result of the brainchild of Roland Gumper, who, as we know,
• 21:33
  later designed his own car company.
• 21:34
  He was at the head of Audi development for a long time.
• 21:36
  Very famous in German circles.
• 21:38
  Pieck is team manager.
• 21:40
  Am I correct?
• 21:41
  Yes.
• 21:41
  Okay.
• 21:42
  So that's for people who don't know, that's the dude that did the Porsche 917.
• 21:46
  The dude that will go on to do the Bugatti Veyron because, you know, cars are going
• 21:51
  to be all green in the 21st century.
• 21:53
  So we need a quad turbo V16, don't we?
• 21:57
  Most people will associate Ferdinand Piëch with the Volkswagen Phaeton.
• 22:02
  That was sort of his swan song.
• 22:03
  You mean the Bentley Continental?
• 22:05
  Yeah, you mean the Audi 88L?
• 22:07
  This is why I'm faintly uncomfortable with what Audi and Lamborghini are a wild bull.
• 22:14
  Bentleys are occasionally faster than them.
• 22:16
  You can't snack rank them in your nice little German brand thing.
• 22:21
  No, I rebel.
• 22:23
  But all that to say, it is a bit of a coven or a mafia when you think about
• 22:27
  it, because Audi, Volkswagen, and Porsche have really always been almost in bed
• 22:32
  together, if you use that analogy.
• 22:34
  But the thing is, Audi, being the auto union going all the way back to the days
• 22:39
  of the silver arrows been around for forever already had a racing pedigree
• 22:43
  and those kinds of things and just as an aside it's a footnote audi didn't
• 22:48
  become part of the volkswagen audi group officially until 1985 bear that in mind
• 22:53
  they were getting the support because talks were already there and this and
• 22:56
  that but audi was this Cutting edge, very different, always thinking outside
• 23:01
  of the box, one of the biggest problems having owned many Audis from the 80s and
• 23:04
  the 90s especially, they used the public as their test bed for new technologies.
• 23:09
  And it's like, well it might work, it might not work, they're plagued
• 23:12
  with electrical gremlins, but the ideas were way ahead of their time.
• 23:16
  First car I ever had to stop start on was uh, an Audi 80.
• 23:20
  On the way to a rugby match, aged about 9 or 10, it completely made
• 23:26
  up for the fact that I hated rugby.
• 23:29
  You know, I'd never known a car do that before.
• 23:31
  It was, I felt the same way about that technology now as I do then, which is
• 23:36
  that the kind of old Fords my dad had in damp England, when they started, you
• 23:40
  generally didn't want to turn them off.
• 23:41
  In case they might not want to start again early on.
• 23:44
  Right.
• 23:44
  I think we can say that probably in the very early days of group B, the
• 23:49
  best car was not the Audi as we move through, certainly by 83, you can say.
• 23:57
  very much that it was, but then the moment somebody else did a new
• 24:01
  car, so when the Peugeot 205 T16 came, that car made the champion.
• 24:07
  When the Lancia Delta S4 came, that car made the championship.
• 24:11
  Arguably the RS200, the Ford was the next step over that.
• 24:16
  So I think this whitewash of the question, which car was best, is it
• 24:20
  depends exactly which year you're asking.
• 24:23
  Our debate Has Audi versus Lancia versus Peugeot.
• 24:27
  Yeah, and I agree with what you're saying.
• 24:29
  It's almost like debating the vintages of wines, you know.
• 24:32
  Is the 71 bottling of Chateau whatever as good as the 72 and the 73?
• 24:37
  And that's sort of where we're at, and we do have to split hairs
• 24:40
  because as you mentioned in the beginning, the technology jumps.
• 24:43
  Very, very quickly, but some of it is a bit quid pro quo.
• 24:47
  Some of it is tit for tat.
• 24:48
  Some of it is completely reactionary.
• 24:51
  So I want to highlight the years because it's really important to understand this
• 24:55
  reaction and why the technology moves.
• 24:58
  So you mentioned it before looking at 1982.
• 25:01
  You have Hana Mikola struggling.
• 25:03
  With the long base quattro coupe and it just understeers like a broken ox cart
• 25:10
  through every turn and you can see it.
• 25:11
  I mean the amount of wheel deflection and everything that's happening and having
• 25:17
  owned a UR quattro that polar moment.
• 25:20
  Of having that cast iron five cylinder hanging out over
• 25:23
  the front end of that car.
• 25:25
  That was not the best design from a weight balance proportionally.
• 25:30
  So that's why it makes sense.
• 25:31
  The mid engine cars came later.
• 25:33
  But the thing is they worked with what they had because that's
• 25:36
  how the Iltis was laid out.
• 25:38
  It was front mount longitudinal with this boat anchor hanging
• 25:42
  out over the front wheels.
• 25:44
  So they're like, we're going to keep refining this technology.
• 25:46
  It's very German.
• 25:47
  We're going to evolve it until it's perfect.
• 25:49
  Just look at the 911.
• 25:50
  It's incredibly German.
• 25:51
  It really is.
• 25:53
  Yeah.
• 25:53
  If you look at the Audi, you're right, they struggled every time they
• 25:57
  won, it was a miracle that they did.
• 25:59
  And they were getting beat by Vauxhall Chevettes and Talbot would
• 26:04
  be equivalent to like the Omni.
• 26:06
  Oh, no, no, Eric, not the equivalent of the Omni.
• 26:09
  I just wanna, the Omni we got as the Horizon.
• 26:13
  Yes.
• 26:13
  It was a shortened, narrow version of that with a Lotus twin cam.
• 26:17
  Yes.
• 26:18
  Which in silver and black, those really look the business.
• 26:22
  They were a tasty car.
• 26:24
  And I say that as a committed Ford guy, as a committed, which of the
• 26:28
  seventies rally cars would I have had?
• 26:30
  I'd probably have an escort even now over Stratos.
• 26:33
  I would.
• 26:34
  So in that mix, you still have Nissan, you have some Toyotas in
• 26:37
  there, all rear wheel drive layouts.
• 26:39
  And the reason they were beating the Quattro in the early days.
• 26:43
  And Quatro did finally show its superiority is that they
• 26:47
  could rotate through a corner.
• 26:49
  And that understeer, that polar moment, that big brick that's up in front
• 26:55
  of the Audi was its Achilles heel.
• 26:57
  Eric, let's call a spade a spade.
• 26:58
  It looked crap.
• 27:00
  It looks crap.
• 27:01
  It sounds amazing.
• 27:02
  Steering your way to victory, like there's no glory in that.
• 27:06
  The glory lies in Ari Vartanen with one wheel in the ditch and
• 27:10
  all the dirt out of the back.
• 27:11
  Oh, 100%, 100%.
• 27:14
  When he won the RAC Rally in 1984, he was leading the whole event,
• 27:18
  apart from a few minutes after he had a roll on the last day.
• 27:21
  You would roll it on the last, like, what?
• 27:24
  He was so cavalier about that, he's like, well, that's my weekend, it's over.
• 27:27
  So Audi's response to getting beat by rear wheel drive cars,
• 27:32
  That the all wheel drive could and would be superior in the long run.
• 27:37
  They had to make the car pivot somehow, but they couldn't move the motor because
• 27:41
  the homologation rules said it had to be based on a production vehicle.
• 27:45
  They didn't have a mid engine production car at that time.
• 27:48
  Now there's some other concepts and prototypes we can go down
• 27:50
  rabbit holes about, but the point is their solution was.
• 27:54
  The wheelbase of the Audi is longer than all of these rear wheel drive cars.
• 27:57
  What if we shorten it?
• 27:59
  So if they shorten it, which they shortened it almost 13 inches, it caused
• 28:03
  the car to become extremely twitchy and it made it easier for them to rotate.
• 28:07
  Now what people with the lens of today's WRC don't understand is, We're
• 28:12
  still running three pedals back then, and nobody had Billy Club hydraulic
• 28:17
  handbrakes that they could just wrap on next to their sequential gearboxes.
• 28:21
  You weren't yanking the handbrake to get the car to come around.
• 28:24
  That wasn't an emergency type of thing.
• 28:25
  So that's why you see the famous videos of Walter Rural jumping on the pedals and
• 28:29
  left foot braking, and left foot braking became a thing because of Rally, because
• 28:34
  they needed to keep the turbos spooled up.
• 28:35
  But it also helped them to get the car to pitch in.
• 28:40
  Eric Carlson did that in those two stroke Saabs.
• 28:43
  They had so little power, he would just, like, you never
• 28:45
  wanted to let them lose weight.
• 28:46
  He'd just keep his foot on the throttle and dab at the brake.
• 28:48
  Yeah, exactly.
• 28:50
  So the other thing that they did was, when the Sport Quattro came out in 83,
• 28:54
  they also started to reduce the weight.
• 28:56
  What people don't realize is the long wheelbase cars, We're still sheet metal.
• 29:00
  They were still very much a factory car that you could buy,
• 29:05
  but with a lot more horsepower.
• 29:06
  The thing was, the five cylinder is an overbuilt engine.
• 29:10
  It's extremely reliable even to this day.
• 29:13
  It revs like a four.
• 29:15
  It has the torque of a six.
• 29:17
  But when you put it with a turbo, suddenly it wakes up.
• 29:20
  It's alive.
• 29:20
  It has like tremendous horsepower and it can turn to 10, 000
• 29:24
  RPM without batting an eye.
• 29:25
  Audi brought the turbos to WRC, but that was being borrowed from Formula
• 29:30
  One technology because the turbo era had already come to Formula One.
• 29:34
  But in a strange way, turbos made more sense in rally,
• 29:38
  even though they were laggy.
• 29:40
  Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche working together.
• 29:43
  Where did the turbo technology come from?
• 29:45
  From the 9 11 that had already come out in the late 70s in 1975 78 with the 9
• 29:50
  thirties, you know, things like that.
• 29:51
  So it wasn't a foreign concept.
• 29:54
  So, when the sport quattro came out slightly bigger engine 2.
• 29:57
  2 liter all the way up to 2.
• 29:58
  3 at 1 point and things like that.
• 30:00
  And that motor continued to evolve.
• 30:02
  Suddenly it was made of.
• 30:03
  Carbon kevlar and it had crank fire ignition and it had some other tricky
• 30:08
  bits that later became the torsion torque sensing differentials and all
• 30:11
  this stuff that they were working on and in one of the videos you know
• 30:14
  that we looked at together dual clutch direct sequential gearboxes which
• 30:19
  We all go, well, Volkswagen invented that with the GTI in the 2000s.
• 30:22
  Well, Audi worked on that 30 years before that point.
• 30:25
  So a lot of experimentation, a lot of development happening.
• 30:29
  And every year they kept upping the ante.
• 30:32
  So as soon as Audi shortened the car and Balestra raised his hands and
• 30:36
  said, you all do whatever you want.
• 30:37
  I don't really care because sales are up.
• 30:40
  He's making money on the back end somehow.
• 30:42
  And well, the sport was generating so much money at that point.
• 30:46
  It was when you said he was more, I'd not thought of him as a businessman
• 30:49
  before, but when you said that I had a sort of like, duh moment with it,
• 30:53
  because the reason that everyone was ignoring the obvious accident waiting
• 30:57
  to happen was that everyone was getting rich off it because, you know, you
• 31:02
  weren't living in Europe at the time.
• 31:04
  Well, we were watching it in the States, but it was, there was a real buzz.
• 31:07
  I mean, the BBC sponsored an Audi Quattro in the 1984 Lombard IRC rally.
• 31:14
  They actually sponsored a car themselves so that they could have
• 31:17
  proper camera access and all of that.
• 31:20
  The Lancias though, you talked a bit there about the Audis.
• 31:23
  Talk about the Lancias though, because we talked about how
• 31:25
  the Stratos is the 70s thing.
• 31:28
  Yeah.
• 31:28
  The 037 or the Lancia Rally as it seemed to be known in period.
• 31:32
  Yes, it was based on what we in Europe called the Monte Carlo and what I think in
• 31:37
  the States was called the Lancia Scorpion.
• 31:40
  Correct.
• 31:40
  But it wasn't really, was it?
• 31:42
  I mean, my understanding is you really didn't want to crash head on in it.
• 31:46
  Because there's basically just a spare tire and some suspension bits
• 31:49
  and your feet and the pedal box, you know, and you're just going
• 31:52
  to get your legs all mangled up.
• 31:53
  So in that sense, the things like a formula one car.
• 31:55
  So that was supercharged.
• 31:57
  Wasn't it?
• 31:57
  That was Lancey's experiment supercharger.
• 31:58
  Was that not more developed than the short wheelbase Quattros,
• 32:04
  even though it was a earlier car.
• 32:06
  Exactly.
• 32:06
  But only two wheel drive, so awesome on the tarmac events, okay on like
• 32:11
  the safari and the endurance kind of event, crappy on events like the RAC.
• 32:16
  Yeah.
• 32:16
  So Lancia, or Lancia, depending on how you want to pronounce it, it all
• 32:21
  goes back to a, the race director.
• 32:23
  Of the motor sports program there.
• 32:25
  So we have to talk about Cesare Fiorio for just a second.
• 32:28
  And there's a great way to summarize this for anybody that
• 32:31
  wants to dive off the deep end.
• 32:33
  Go watch last year's movie, Race to Glory.
• 32:36
  And it's about the sort of dogfight between Audi and Lancia.
• 32:41
  And some of it is a dramatization, but it's a really interesting
• 32:44
  way to engage with Group B.
• 32:46
  But again, going back to the Stratos, to your point, The Stratos was the
• 32:50
  beginning of, like, the prototype cars, but going even further back, Lancia had
• 32:55
  its racing heritage buried in Rally, going back to the Fulvia and other
• 33:00
  cars, and they just continued to evolve.
• 33:03
  When you're the incumbent, sometimes the rules are bent in your favor,
• 33:08
  but then when you have somebody like Fiorio at the helm, who says,
• 33:12
  If you can't be as strong as your competitors, you must be more clever.
• 33:16
  And he was known for doing all sorts of shenanigans, but the Oh, 37, even
• 33:20
  though it looked, it was reminiscent to the beta Monte Carlo or the
• 33:23
  Scorpion in its shell, the reality of the situation was as a completely
• 33:27
  tube frame car, the homologation rules were written that it forced.
• 33:33
  Lancia to build street versions of that car.
• 33:37
  And there's a really funny scene and it's based on a true story where
• 33:41
  Lancia couldn't build the 200 cars.
• 33:44
  They played the shell game.
• 33:45
  And when the inspectors from the FIA came, they had a hundred cars in one location.
• 33:49
  They said, well, there's only a hundred here.
• 33:50
  Where's the rest of them?
• 33:51
  Well, Well, let's go to lunch.
• 33:52
  We'll do lunch, blah, blah, blah.
• 33:54
  And then we'll take you to where the other cars are.
• 33:55
  Meanwhile, they load up those hundred cars, move them to another facility.
• 33:59
  And then after lunch, drive those guys over and they go, Oh,
• 34:01
  there's a hundred cars over here.
• 34:02
  Now we have 200.
• 34:03
  So again, if you can't be stronger, be more clever.
• 34:06
  So these are the kinds of shenanigans that Lance is doing
• 34:09
  because they want to maintain.
• 34:11
  Their reputation as the kings of rally, but when it came to group B,
• 34:16
  the Oh, 37, unless it was a completely tarmac rally like Corsica, which
• 34:21
  it was predominantly in the dry.
• 34:22
  And that's where the 37 failed was in the rain at the RAC Lombard rallies.
• 34:26
  Is it just it couldn't do the job of the other cars.
• 34:30
  They carried it as long as they could.
• 34:32
  And once you sort of scrambling going, what do we do?
• 34:35
  What do we do?
• 34:36
  We are now the also rams.
• 34:38
  They have great drivers.
• 34:39
  They got Marco and I lane Toyvan and all these folks driving for them.
• 34:41
  And it's like, we can't make this work.
• 34:44
  The Oh 37 wasn't a failure.
• 34:47
  It was just past its prime because the beta.
• 34:51
  Monte Carlo that it was based on was a car from the 70s.
• 34:54
  It was old technology.
• 34:56
  So what did they do?
• 34:57
  They said, you know what?
• 34:58
  Jujaro built us a really cool car, the Delta, which was also a 70s car.
• 35:03
  I want to point that out.
• 35:04
  By that point, by 1984, 1985, we had moved away from homologation
• 35:10
  into the Group B evolution period.
• 35:12
  And now, and I think it was In Lancia's favor that they changed the rules, they
• 35:17
  developed the Lancia Delta S4, which, to your point, the only thing that
• 35:22
  reminds you of a Delta is the backside of it, that it's still a hatchback.
• 35:27
  And it was a little con, right?
• 35:28
  I remember I spent Christmas, when I was first getting into reading car magazines,
• 35:33
  and I spent a Christmas in Germany, Christmas 1985, and my uncle, very kindly,
• 35:38
  had bought me all these car magazines.
• 35:40
  For me to read, because you knew I had an interest in cars and in a couple
• 35:44
  of these were pictures of the launch of the Delta S4 and the pictures
• 35:51
  of it, it looks like a normal Delta with like big wheels at the back.
• 35:55
  It looks nothing like what the actual Delta S4 looked like when it rocked up
• 36:00
  on the street, because what the actual Delta S4 looks like is nothing like.
• 36:05
  What the five door hatchback, the Giugiaro ped, you know, no element,
• 36:09
  the windshield might've been the same.
• 36:11
  That was about it.
• 36:12
  You know, Lancia comes to the table with the S4, but that wasn't until 1985.
• 36:18
  And what's interesting about that is that's when the horsepower wars really
• 36:22
  started to ramp up because the S4 came to the table and Lancia said, we
• 36:27
  just broke the 500 horsepower mark.
• 36:29
  And they're like, well, how did you do that?
• 36:30
  And to your point from earlier, they used the supercharging technology and
• 36:34
  then partnered with the turbocharger.
• 36:36
  So they twin charged the engine to reduce turbo lag.
• 36:40
  And now they have linear power, almost unlimited power compared to everybody
• 36:44
  else, a huge rev range in a four cylinder package in an extremely light
• 36:49
  car, mid engine, all wheel drive.
• 36:52
  And they're just kicking everybody's butt.
• 36:53
  But that's at the tail end of Group B.
• 36:56
  So now you have to remember, it's a quid pro quo situation.
• 37:00
  So Audi says, well, we got the sport quattro.
• 37:03
  It only makes 350 and we're limited at 135 miles an hour.
• 37:07
  And the Delta is just 200 more horsepower.
• 37:09
  So what are we going to do?
• 37:10
  Here comes the Evo S1.
• 37:12
  And there's another iteration beyond that when we go beyond Group B.
• 37:15
  So Audi reacts.
• 37:17
  It takes the sport quattro and puts it on steroids.
• 37:19
  And then Peugeot, though they had already introduced the 205 T16 at
• 37:24
  that point, and everybody went, whoa.
• 37:27
  Lancia I think copied the 205 T16 because who in their right mind puts a motor in
• 37:32
  the middle of a three door hatchback?
• 37:34
  Absolutely.
• 37:35
  I felt like when the Delta S4 came along, the permission for the Delta
• 37:40
  S4 had come from the Peugeot 205 T16, and I felt like the T16 had been
• 37:46
  allowed to have a longer wheelbase and have this engine in the backseat,
• 37:50
  which no real Peugeot 205 ever had.
• 37:53
  It was allowed to have that partly because Peugeot Sport and Ballest were based
• 37:57
  about 50 miles apart in Paris there.
• 38:00
  Well, not only that, Jean Todd, who went to lead Peugeot Motorsport, which brought
• 38:05
  Peugeot back from the brink of extinction.
• 38:07
  Everybody's French, we all get along, so Countrymen alike, we need
• 38:12
  to support each other, patriotism, all these kinds of things.
• 38:14
  So you don't think Ballester is going to turn a blind eye to Peugeot developing
• 38:18
  a car that makes absolutely no sense.
• 38:20
  And if it had the original wheelbase, it would have been too twitchy.
• 38:23
  Yes.
• 38:24
  I mean, again, listening to these rally reports, the Metro 6R4, Tony
• 38:28
  Pond on that first RAC rally on the straights, he couldn't keep it straight.
• 38:31
  It was so twitchy because the wheelbase is so short.
• 38:34
  Same thing.
• 38:34
  What Austin Rover, MG Metro on the planet.
• 38:37
  came with a six cylinder that made 400 horsepower.
• 38:39
  Zero.
• 38:40
  Before we talk about the Metro 6R4, I want to talk about this Astra 4S.
• 38:46
  Had you heard of that?
• 38:49
  I had not heard of that before doing research for this presentation
• 38:53
  and I wonder if Voxel were feeling like, you know, as if they had
• 38:56
  to do something because Austin Rover and everybody else was.
• 38:59
  But my understanding is that this was a four wheel drive Astra, but it used
• 39:03
  a Zaxpeed Turbo Formula One engine.
• 39:08
  Like the Capri had.
• 39:10
  Oh, like the Capri 1700 Zaxpeed.
• 39:13
  Oh, one of my all time favorite cars, that car.
• 39:16
  I love a Ford Capri like nothing else.
• 39:19
  Those Zaxpeed ones are just so awesome.
• 39:22
  Yeah.
• 39:22
  Wow.
• 39:23
  So let's talk about the 6R4 then for a little bit.
• 39:26
  What an awe inspiring car, but a disappointment at the same time.
• 39:30
  Like, I could never get on board with the 6R4.
• 39:34
  I have more appreciation for it today with the eyes of a veteran
• 39:38
  WRC fan than I did in period.
• 39:40
  In period, I was like, what a joke.
• 39:42
  What a weird car.
• 39:44
  This is never going to work, especially when you compared it to
• 39:47
  the Peugeot, or to the Lancia, and even the Audi, which at that time
• 39:52
  was sort of falling behind the curve.
• 39:54
  But the sound of the 6R4 is one of those things that, at first,
• 39:58
  you're like, is that the 939?
• 40:00
  Which most folks don't know is the rally edition of the 911, which
• 40:04
  then later they developed into the 959 and all those kinds of things.
• 40:08
  And so, no, it's not a 911.
• 40:10
  That's Austin Rover.
• 40:12
  Like, wait, what?
• 40:13
  Yeah, 400 naturally aspirated horsepower in a car.
• 40:17
  That's the size of a Fiat 500 or Fiat Panda.
• 40:20
  Really?
• 40:21
  I mean, it's absolutely microscopic compared to the other cars.
• 40:24
  And to your point, the early six R four was short.
• 40:26
  If you listen to Pond and Wilson, they talk about how they had to make the car
• 40:32
  longer and slightly wider to make it less twitchy and make it more maneuverable.
• 40:36
  But again, all of this comes as part of this space race.
• 40:40
  Everybody's trying to catch up with Pujo until Lancia came on the
• 40:43
  scene and suddenly now the bar was, well you only have 400 horsepower?
• 40:48
  We've got 520.
• 40:49
  I had the same sense as you, Eric, that I was disappointed in Pyrrhage,
• 40:53
  and for me it was like yet another, like, Austin Rover, wah wah.
• 40:58
  Right?
• 40:58
  It was like yet another Red Robbo on strike.
• 41:02
  It was just like wet cardboard, just like England, like, get out of my face.
• 41:07
  Right.
• 41:08
  Like, that's how I felt about it.
• 41:09
  And I, so I remember reading the article about the launch and being
• 41:13
  like, it's not fucking turbocharged.
• 41:15
  Why are we even turning up?
• 41:16
  Yeah, whereas my thought now is if it could put the power down better watching
• 41:22
  these RAC rallies, it's clear that Pond is expecting Arlen and Teuvenin to crash.
• 41:29
  Yes.
• 41:30
  And they do.
• 41:30
  It just so happens they get back on the road.
• 41:32
  You know, by freakness, they get back on the road, you know, literally it.
• 41:37
  So at the time I was all about Lancia, but looking back now, I'm like Austin
• 41:41
  Rover had a super pragmatic approach and certainly the events that, you know, the
• 41:45
  RAC rally that I watched, they, they were.
• 41:48
  Competitive ish and didn't seem to feel the need to put it off the road or roll
• 41:53
  it or all of this other tomfoolery that those awesome fins that I so loved in
• 41:57
  period did and I think when we look back on it now with more education about the
• 42:03
  mechanics of these cars and things like that what you can come to respect about
• 42:07
  a non turbo six cylinder metro 6r4 making 400 horsepower compared to everybody
• 42:13
  else is that the torque was immediate.
• 42:16
  They didn't have to wait and so when you look at some of those time trials and
• 42:20
  special stages from, let's say, Lombard and other parts of the and other parts
• 42:24
  of the, you realize the Metro was quicker out of the corners, even though it didn't
• 42:30
  have the top end that everybody else had.
• 42:32
  So, yes, the could go into a situation.
• 42:34
  Speed trap at 100 miles an hour and the Audi was right behind it at 90 and the
• 42:38
  metro would come trundling along at 88.
• 42:40
  But the difference was as Hanu Mikola would say, you know, the
• 42:44
  corners came up a lot faster.
• 42:45
  So you had to break harder.
• 42:47
  You had to drop so much more speed.
• 42:49
  And when you drop that kind of speed in a corner, now you're outside of the optimal
• 42:53
  torque band and rev range and boost parameters that the motor is looking for.
• 42:58
  And they're absolute.
• 42:59
  Dogs versus the metro was small.
• 43:02
  It was agile.
• 43:03
  They could toss it in the corner and just stand on it and wring its neck,
• 43:06
  but they had six cylinder torque.
• 43:08
  And that was what made that car extremely special.
• 43:11
  So I feel like the Peugeot had to do an extended wheelbase.
• 43:15
  And if you look at later iterations, Of the T 16, you know, the Pikes
• 43:19
  Peak car that Vartanen uses.
• 43:20
  That's a 405 that was a four door sedan, bigger class of car.
• 43:26
  And, and it allowed them to do that longer wheelbase to balance it a bit more.
• 43:29
  And this is exactly the right opportunity then to be like, well, what the F
• 43:33
  happened to Ford, given they were the dominant force all the way through.
• 43:37
  And it goes right back to the place that we started with this two stages
• 43:41
  of homologation, because they had a car, I guess they were caught wrong
• 43:45
  footed because of the whole like.
• 43:47
  Silhouette issue that in 1980, the old escort was replaced by a new escort.
• 43:53
  The escort mark three, that was a front wheel drive hatchback.
• 43:56
  Well, that was shit for rally.
• 43:57
  It was shit in general.
• 43:59
  I mean, come on.
• 43:59
  No, no, it wasn't.
• 44:00
  It was actually a really good car.
• 44:02
  It was the beginning of Ford.
• 44:04
  The ones we got in America were terrible.
• 44:07
  Oh, you did get that body style in America.
• 44:09
  Didn't you?
• 44:10
  I'm sorry.
• 44:10
  The European ones, they were light on their feet and faster than the The first
• 44:15
  generation Astra was better than that first generation Escort, but the rest of
• 44:19
  the time through the eighties, the Escorts were okay, but front wheel drive, right?
• 44:22
  No good for rallying.
• 44:23
  So Ford developed this thing called the RS 1700 T.
• 44:27
  There were about three of them built.
• 44:29
  And by the time Audi were there with the Quattro, I think Ford thought
• 44:32
  this thing's just not fast enough for us to be competitive with.
• 44:35
  So they were like, right back to the drawing board and created
• 44:39
  this thing, the RS 200, the.
• 44:42
  Right at the end of group B, so it launches and in those early
• 44:47
  warmup events is involved in one of the accidents that ends group B.
• 44:52
  I always looked at the RS 200 as a day late and a dollar
• 44:55
  short . To summarize that thought.
• 44:57
  No, no, not a dollar short.
• 44:59
  I think it would've been, I think it was a day late.
• 45:01
  I think it, it could have been developed into a, I mean, fundamentally, who do you
• 45:05
  trust to organize winning rallies more?
• 45:07
  Ford or Lancia, I mean.
• 45:09
  Ford, right?
• 45:10
  If I look at the stats, I'd lean on Lancia.
• 45:13
  Had the accidents not happened?
• 45:15
  Yes.
• 45:16
  The RS 200 would've been destroying, and I say this as a committed RL fan,
• 45:23
  he would not have been competitive.
• 45:25
  'cause I think the Fords would've been faster.
• 45:27
  I think the RS 200 was right at the bottom of its development care.
• 45:31
  True.
• 45:31
  But the RS 200 took us back 10 years, if you think about it, because.
• 45:36
  The reason I looked at it as a day late and a dollar short, not because
• 45:39
  Ford didn't spend an exorbitant amount of money developing the RS200.
• 45:44
  When you really stood back and looked at it, that's a really
• 45:47
  interesting 037 with all wheel drive.
• 45:49
  It's basically the same principle, the same idea.
• 45:52
  The drivers like Stig and Marco Alain and other people that got behind the
• 45:57
  wheel of an RS200 were the same guys that drove 037s and cars like that.
• 46:01
  So did they design that car for them or did they design it?
• 46:05
  To compete, there wasn't a clear motivation for the RS 200 other
• 46:09
  than Ford wanted to come in and win.
• 46:10
  And Ford didn't become dominant in WRC until now with M Sport and all
• 46:15
  those other things with the Puma and the Fiesta and all those cars that
• 46:18
  we can talk about it in a later date.
• 46:19
  To me, the RS 200 was the beginning of something good.
• 46:23
  But it's a day late and a dollar short because of how Group B ended prematurely.
• 46:28
  And we'll, we'll get into that.
• 46:29
  So Ford like miscoordinated, right?
• 46:31
  The timing was just unfortunate for them.
• 46:33
  They had one car that was uncompetitive, developed another one
• 46:36
  that would have been competitive.
• 46:37
  Classic Ford, I think, but you know, it just arrived a bit too late.
• 46:41
  I think with a couple more seasons, had they been going the way they'd
• 46:45
  been going, we'd be also not just talking about the RS200, we'd be
• 46:49
  talking about the battle between Ford.
• 46:51
  An MG.
• 46:52
  Yeah.
• 46:53
  Before this recent research, I'd have not felt like that was the case at all.
• 46:58
  But with this recent research, I have felt like that because I just
• 47:02
  feel fundamentally the Austin Rover package was going to be more reliable.
• 47:07
  Yeah.
• 47:07
  than this turbocharged, supercharged space frame driven by these crashy fins.
• 47:14
  That feels like Lotus.
• 47:16
  It feels like Lotus.
• 47:17
  That's what it feels like.
• 47:18
  Yeah.
• 47:21
  But to talk about Lancia, the story continues.
• 47:25
  The Delta lives on a car as it hit its zenith in the nineties in Group
• 47:31
  A with that Delta HF Integrale, which is Take the S4 motor and detune it and
• 47:39
  put it at the front of the car with a synchro style all wheel drive system
• 47:43
  similar to a rally golf and some of the other products that were out there.
• 47:47
  Then you had a car that won from 87 to 93 and Lancia cemented itself.
• 47:52
  Because a new class was born around that car.
• 47:55
  But it was tiddlywinks, Eric.
• 47:56
  It was.
• 47:57
  It was tiddlywinks.
• 47:57
  And I have respect for Mickey Biazion, who was the winning driver of that period.
• 48:02
  You've told a nice story about how it was, but no, it wasn't right.
• 48:07
  This was the Giugiaro car from the early seventies.
• 48:10
  Exactly.
• 48:11
  Hatchback with the slab side body with the transverse inline four
• 48:15
  cylinder engine, making a feeble hundred horsepower with a turbo on it.
• 48:19
  It was a bloody yawn in comparison to the way that it had to be.
• 48:22
  Bit.
• 48:22
  The music was gone.
• 48:24
  Oh yeah.
• 48:24
  A hundred percent.
• 48:25
  But I so loved it in period.
• 48:27
  Oh, absolutely.
• 48:27
  I love the Lanius Imper.
• 48:30
  And you can't understate that Martini livery looked good.
• 48:34
  Oh, that martini livery really looked good, but they all looked good.
• 48:38
  I mean, let's be real.
• 48:39
  I mean, they're iconic.
• 48:41
  Even to this day.
• 48:42
  I mean, if I could.
• 48:43
  paint my cars or my house or myself in, you know, an Audi sport
• 48:46
  livery or the Peugeot livery or the Martini of old Rothmans cars.
• 48:50
  They're all gorgeous.
• 48:51
  Never to be done again in some respects.
• 48:54
  I mean, we pay tribute to those cars.
• 48:56
  There's all sorts of things like that that exist today, but it's just not the same.
• 48:59
  Citroën.
• 49:00
  They too are gorgeous.
• 49:02
  We're caught with their pants down.
• 49:03
  The Visa GTI was meant to be what Group B was meant to be.
• 49:08
  It was meant to be budget rallying, but then Audi and everyone kind
• 49:12
  of got ahead of themselves.
• 49:14
  And so Citroen too were caught on the hot and then they did that BX.
• 49:19
  Before TC.
• 49:20
  Right at the end.
• 49:21
  And we were talking about this sort of before we came on air.
• 49:24
  I was talking with my producer before we came on air.
• 49:26
  Yeah.
• 49:27
  Yeah, the 4TC was their answer to Group B, but again, another
• 49:31
  car that showed up in 1985.
• 49:33
  It took them two years to figure out what they were going to build, and then
• 49:36
  by 85 into 86, Group B was disbanded.
• 49:40
  Again, a day late and a dollar short, right?
• 49:42
  I'll tell you, it wasn't a day late or a dollar short, and I was watching
• 49:46
  my rally and thinking, Oh, cool cars.
• 49:49
  The Toyota Celicas.
• 49:51
  Celica Sika with the two JayZ.
• 49:55
  These would've been early examples of Turbocharging two
• 49:59
  Jay-Z's, and they're big and long.
• 50:01
  This is full on Dukes of Hazard stuff.
• 50:03
  Oh yeah.
• 50:04
  And awesome.
• 50:05
  And the Nissans were the same, but not Turbocharged.
• 50:07
  They were Nissan two forties that were similar and, and not Turbocharged.
• 50:11
  Maybe we look on it with a bit of nostalgia, rose colored glasses.
• 50:15
  But I tell you what, you made the comment earlier about.
• 50:19
  The virtual world and how it's paid homage to these cars.
• 50:23
  That's exactly what I was going to say, right?
• 50:24
  Because when I'd been knocking around the idea of revisiting Group B for
• 50:29
  ages, because I noticed how it had come along in the games, and I noticed the
• 50:33
  way that my gamer mates love the cars.
• 50:36
  I'm not a gamer myself, but I was sufficiently aware of the gaming community
• 50:41
  to see how the cars of Group B had continually made themselves relevant.
• 50:47
  Group B was the motorsport that I imprinted on as a kid.
• 50:52
  I'm less than 10 years your junior, let's say.
• 50:55
  So I had a different way of absorbing the data.
• 50:58
  You were there at some of those events.
• 51:01
  I was watching them here through very expensive cable feeds and whatnot.
• 51:04
  But I'm watching them happen.
• 51:06
  I'm watching the videos later.
• 51:08
  My dad would buy them from the UK and we'd watch the replays.
• 51:11
  And I still have them on the shelves to this day.
• 51:14
  I wanted to be a rally driver.
• 51:16
  Formula one was amazing.
• 51:17
  And I, and I love Senna and we did that whole tribute episode to him,
• 51:20
  but I wanted to be Hanu Mikola.
• 51:22
  I wanted to ride shotgun with Michel Mouton.
• 51:25
  I wanted to meet Walter Rural, Stig Blumfuss, all these guys,
• 51:28
  like they were incredible.
• 51:30
  Now, granted I'm, I'm listing all of the works teams, drivers for Audi,
• 51:34
  but Marco Alain, all the same, right?
• 51:36
  Today, and ever since then, I started playing The Sims, the original Dirt
• 51:42
  series by Codemasters, the Network Q Rally series that existed on the PC,
• 51:47
  and now it's all WRC, this and that, and Electronic Arts has bought them all.
• 51:51
  What's interesting is, the really hardcore Sims, the stuff that's on
• 51:55
  par with the Assetto Corsas and the iRacings of the world, They've done a
• 51:59
  very good job of studying those cars, analyzing those cars, testing those
• 52:04
  cars, doing the 3d renderings, all those.
• 52:06
  And when I get behind the wheel on a sophisticated SIM of a rally car, yes,
• 52:11
  I'm, I'm sort of living through the digital experience, having driven some
• 52:16
  of these homologation versions, the R5 turbo two owning a UR quattro lunch at
• 52:20
  Delta, you know, some of these other cars I get behind the digital wheel.
• 52:24
  And it translates to me.
• 52:25
  I have a feeling of what it was like and I watched the videos
• 52:29
  and I'm like the car reacts the way it does in the file footage.
• 52:34
  They've done a very good job of that.
• 52:35
  And so my only analysis of the actual group B cars and their performance.
• 52:41
  Is through the digital world.
• 52:43
  What is interesting is they're so vastly different handling
• 52:47
  characteristics, acceleration.
• 52:49
  The Audi is like a missile when it comes to off the line and at high
• 52:54
  speed, because it can turn 10, 000 RPM.
• 52:57
  It's just unbelievably good at the top end, but you get it into a corner
• 53:01
  and you're like, Oh God, it's just plowing a field and it doesn't matter
• 53:06
  if it's the evolution versions either.
• 53:09
  But the Peugeot is quick and it's nimble.
• 53:12
  But then suddenly, because it's not designed to be a mid engine car, its
• 53:16
  polar moment is completely wrong.
• 53:18
  And when you think it's going to lift throttle oversteer,
• 53:21
  it just completely snaps.
• 53:23
  And it's all over the place.
• 53:24
  And then you can't control it.
• 53:25
  And it's tank slapping.
• 53:27
  And it's a mess.
• 53:27
  And when you watch the videos, it does the exact same thing.
• 53:30
  You're like, why did he spin there?
• 53:32
  Because the cars are twitchy.
• 53:33
  The Metro 6R4 the same.
• 53:35
  The Delta S4.
• 53:37
  They did a lot of learning and studying the mistakes of everybody else.
• 53:41
  It's very smooth, but it has this, if you scruff it a little too
• 53:46
  hard, it's going to bite you back.
• 53:48
  You know, those kinds of things.
• 53:49
  I recommend people, if you want to get a first hand experience,
• 53:52
  go try the latest version of WRC, which is WRC 11 by Electronic Arts,
• 53:57
  where they bought Codemasters and they're one big happy family now.
• 54:00
  You get a sense of these cars.
• 54:02
  It's unlike anything else.
• 54:03
  I prefer the Group A cars, they're easier to drive, they're a lot more fun.
• 54:08
  Your stage times are actually quicker with half the horsepower.
• 54:13
  Well, that's why I wonder if that Metro mightn't have been, uh, a bit of a
• 54:18
  world beater, had the Binscope to do it.
• 54:20
  So, I'll put you on the spot now, Eric, which was the best car of the era?
• 54:23
  I don't mind going first whilst you're thinking.
• 54:26
  I think, probably, based upon what we've said here, Delta S4.
• 54:30
  A lot of people would agree with you that it is the halo car of the Group B, period.
• 54:36
  As legendary as the Audi S1 is, as legendary as the 205 T16 is, as quirky
• 54:41
  as the Renault 5 Turbo 2 is, and some of the other cars that are in the field,
• 54:47
  my heart Always sort of leans Audi.
• 54:50
  I bleed Audi.
• 54:52
  But if I have to pick one, the best?
• 54:55
  The Lancia is on paper the best, but I think the Peugeot, as proven with
• 55:00
  the right drivers, and this is where we get into the conversation of is it
• 55:04
  the car or is it the driver, I think the Peugeot is something to respect.
• 55:10
  But I also think it was probably the best car.
• 55:13
  It was the most well thought out.
• 55:15
  It was constantly refined, but in an iterative way, not in a gigantic
• 55:19
  way like the Audi was, or like the Delta S4, just outlandish coming on
• 55:23
  the scene and being ostentatious.
• 55:25
  The Peugeot was just there, and their changes, like I said, were subtle.
• 55:29
  Think about when they added the aerodynamics package to the 205 T16.
• 55:34
  Is that all you guys are doing?
• 55:35
  You're putting a spoiler and an airfoil on the front?
• 55:37
  Like, really?
• 55:38
  That's all you're going to do because if you listen to the drivers, all we
• 55:41
  needed was a little bit more control over the jumps to keep the rear end
• 55:45
  down so we could continue to maintrain traction, you know, things like that.
• 55:48
  So it doesn't seem very French because they do very big and
• 55:52
  outlandish things with their cars.
• 55:54
  But the Peugeot, I think, was the best.
• 55:56
  If it had gotten more time, it would have continued to evolve.
• 56:00
  They would Lanta and Vatanen.
• 56:04
  Would have come back, wouldn't he?
• 56:05
  Yes.
• 56:06
  People may or may not be aware, but sort of midway through 85 Argentina,
• 56:10
  Vartan had a horrible accident where the car did that jumping business.
• 56:13
  Yep.
• 56:14
  Didn't land properly and he end over ended and the seat fell off inside the car.
• 56:18
  So he got all knocked around in the car and really flattened
• 56:21
  his knees, broke his back.
• 56:23
  He was in.
• 56:23
  Traction basically for like a year and a half or something.
• 56:26
  I believe he said in an interview.
• 56:28
  So, so we've, uh, we've talked about the cars there.
• 56:30
  Let's pivot now.
• 56:31
  We'll talk about the drivers, see if we can do a little thumbnail on each.
• 56:37
  I've sort of stack rank, the ones that we mentioned in the
• 56:40
  title of our presentation here.
• 56:42
  And it begins at ends where if you look at any footage of Ari Vartanen
• 56:47
  driving a Ford Escort, You've got the car being driven completely
• 56:52
  out of control, completely wildly.
• 56:55
  And then when he's interviewed afterwards, his English is perfect,
• 56:59
  his demeanour is completely calm.
• 57:02
  The theatre of that made it an awesome TV spectacle.
• 57:07
  So the spectacle was almost there before the cars came along and made it a thing.
• 57:13
  But what I realized that I'm predisposed to feel very positively
• 57:18
  towards Hannu Mikkola, because he had an amazing run at the RAC rally.
• 57:23
  You talk about being imprinted as rallying and motorsport was imprinted on me.
• 57:28
  The superiority of Hannu Mikkola and first the Escort and then the Quattro,
• 57:35
  that was really impressed upon me.
• 57:37
  In our notes here I put the comeback king and when you watch the videos of events
• 57:42
  now that's what's really striking about him is that he can have issues but he
• 57:46
  will still be there at the finish and he seems to have incredible stamina.
• 57:51
  He seems to get better the longer the event goes on.
• 57:54
  Hanumikola is a legend.
• 57:57
  He's one of those people that big fish stories are written about.
• 58:01
  It's so unbelievable, the stuff that happened to him, but it's also true.
• 58:06
  And he also kind of epitomizes what I call the full send.
• 58:11
  Sort of mentality.
• 58:12
  I mean, there's one of the videos that you and I reviewed where they
• 58:15
  broke the front suspension and I won't talk about the stupidity of the
• 58:18
  steering box design on those cars.
• 58:21
  You know, it all makes sense when you put it in the context of rally, but he's like,
• 58:24
  you know what, to your point, I'm bringing the car home with my shielder on it.
• 58:27
  Very Greek in that sense.
• 58:29
  So he decides, well, we can't go forward.
• 58:31
  So I'll drive it backwards for the next eight miles to the service stop.
• 58:35
  And you're like, what?
• 58:36
  There's another one where he lost a front wheel and he tells his co
• 58:39
  pilot to get out on the back of the car to counterbalance the fact
• 58:43
  that he doesn't have a front wheel.
• 58:44
  And he continues to go just full out with only three wheels and just.
• 58:48
  The nuttiest stuff happened to him, but he would get out of the car and they're
• 58:53
  like, I don't know what's going on.
• 58:56
  And he's got this cat ate the canary grin on his face.
• 58:59
  He was always so happy.
• 59:01
  He's just one of these people that would light up an interview.
• 59:04
  And you're like, how could you find fault with Hanu Mikola?
• 59:06
  Not only that, he was sort of the elder statesman, when you compare him to Alain,
• 59:12
  who was in his 30s, Toivonen, who was in his late 20s, Walter Rural was sort
• 59:16
  of there, but Hanomikola was in his 40s.
• 59:19
  And I don't want to say he was an original flying fin, but he's of that
• 59:22
  generation of rally drivers growing up in Scandinavia, where to go to school every
• 59:27
  day, it was like driving a rally for him.
• 59:29
  So, he was The guy, you know, he was the man, if you will.
• 59:33
  And so I realized that as a kid, I'm like, this is somebody to aspire to be.
• 59:38
  Hannu Mikkola, unbelievable.
• 59:40
  He's from that part of Finland, right up in the north, fought
• 59:44
  the Russians in the war.
• 59:46
  And there's definitely a difference between these sort of blonde
• 59:49
  Finns in the north and the guys like Toivonen and Arlen.
• 59:54
  who have dark hair and dark eyes and are from around Helsinki and I need
• 59:59
  to do more research but wasn't Arlen's dad like an ice racing champion?
• 1:00:03
  So you feel like their skills are more the way that Kenny Roberts grew
• 1:00:07
  up racing dirt track and therefore he could slide a two stroke sports
• 1:00:12
  race bike in exactly the same way.
• 1:00:14
  You felt like there was that translation for Arlen and Teuvenin.
• 1:00:17
  There doesn't seem to be any of that for these guys like Vartanen and
• 1:00:21
  Mikkola, who live in the far north.
• 1:00:23
  What's also interesting about Hanno is he was the first to come over
• 1:00:27
  to the works team, and then they brought over other popular drivers.
• 1:00:31
  You look at Stig Blomqvist, you look at Walter Röhrl, Michel Mouton.
• 1:00:34
  They were already successful with other cars, rear wheel drive
• 1:00:38
  cars, and so was Hanno Mikkola.
• 1:00:40
  But the thing was, when you looked at the progression, Audi didn't
• 1:00:43
  favor him as their prized calf.
• 1:00:47
  If you look, while everybody else was running the Sport Quattro, he was
• 1:00:51
  still driving the long wheelbase car.
• 1:00:53
  And when the S1 came out, then he got the Sport Quattro.
• 1:00:56
  And it's like, he was always a generation behind, even though all of these things
• 1:00:59
  happened in very rapid succession.
• 1:01:01
  It was like, your most experienced guy, Doesn't have your best card.
• 1:01:06
  No, because I think they gave him the card of finning.
• 1:01:08
  Yeah.
• 1:01:09
  I think Mouton was a like, go out and win or crash.
• 1:01:12
  And I hadn't realized to be honest that she was just that much.
• 1:01:15
  Super aggressive.
• 1:01:16
  She was like that until I did some research for this.
• 1:01:19
  I think Rawl, the RAC rally that I watched where he was using that DSG gearbox.
• 1:01:24
  In the interview, he talks about how the team just wanted
• 1:01:26
  to get as far as possible.
• 1:01:28
  And there was no way he was going to, I mean, that whole no pace notes
• 1:01:30
  thing on the RAC rally, really that benefits the local runners, right?
• 1:01:34
  Anybody, any British rally guys, they're going to have used
• 1:01:37
  these stages for local rallies.
• 1:01:39
  So it was a way of tipping the tables a little bit in our favor.
• 1:01:43
  And somebody like Roel, who'd only came for the international
• 1:01:46
  event, you know, inevitably he's at a bit of a disadvantage.
• 1:01:49
  So I can understand, you know, why would you want to commit to an event like
• 1:01:52
  that where you're at a disadvantage?
• 1:01:53
  I rate.
• 1:01:56
  More and more as the years go by.
• 1:01:58
  Partly because of stuff I've seen him do with Porsche in
• 1:02:01
  the years since World Rally.
• 1:02:04
  He was World Rally Champion in 1980, he was Champion in 82, even when the
• 1:02:08
  Audi was borderline a developed car.
• 1:02:10
  And he did that by not trying to beat it on sheer speed, but just by doing the
• 1:02:15
  best that he could with his Ascona 400.
• 1:02:18
  and letting the reliability of the Audi be its own undoing.
• 1:02:22
  Apart from Mouton, he and Mouton are the only, I would describe those two as the
• 1:02:27
  only non Scandinavian front rank drivers.
• 1:02:30
  At that time, yes, there were a handful of Italians and a couple of other
• 1:02:34
  Frenchmen in there and things like that.
• 1:02:36
  Not front runners.
• 1:02:38
  Because what you don't realize about WRC at that time is, there was still,
• 1:02:42
  A clear delineation between the four wheel drive cars, the two wheel drive
• 1:02:48
  groupies, and then everybody else.
• 1:02:50
  And today, you know, we call that WRC1, WRC2, and WRCJr.
• 1:02:54
  And so back then they sort of didn't do that.
• 1:02:56
  It was like, you know, here's everybody.
• 1:02:57
  Yes, your front runners are going to be the works teams
• 1:03:00
  drivers that we're talking about.
• 1:03:02
  But when you specifically talk about Walter Wuerl, you have to remember
• 1:03:05
  that his legacy starts in rally.
• 1:03:09
  But continues with Audi for many years after that, because he came to
• 1:03:13
  the States and then partnered with Hans Stuck and Hurley Haywood and
• 1:03:17
  ran in Trans Am and then in IMSA.
• 1:03:19
  Audi used Walter to teach Hans, who was already a well established driver and
• 1:03:24
  Hurley, this is how you drive an Audi.
• 1:03:26
  This is how you drive a turbo all wheel drive car.
• 1:03:29
  We need to use rally techniques in road racing to get these
• 1:03:33
  cars to be competitive.
• 1:03:35
  We have quote unquote an unfair advantage here because of Quattro and
• 1:03:39
  we won't get into that, but Walter always compared himself to Ari Vatanen.
• 1:03:43
  They were rivals without being rivals because for whatever reason you would
• 1:03:46
  think rally would be one of these disciplines of motorsport where it's
• 1:03:50
  like coming after a football match and you know bloody noses and smelling of
• 1:03:53
  beer and sweat and things like that, but it was actually very civilized.
• 1:03:56
  polite in some ways.
• 1:03:58
  Well, because what you're doing is so dangerous.
• 1:04:00
  Exactly.
• 1:04:00
  You know, I read Kankanen, the next car through the stage, comes upon Arlen in
• 1:04:05
  trouble, stops, helps Arlen get back on the road, helps push the Lancia back
• 1:04:09
  on the road, doesn't just drive by.
• 1:04:11
  And that's a legacy of that business of when the events were less about
• 1:04:15
  speed and more about endurance.
• 1:04:18
  Yeah, there is a camaraderie, isn't there, about rallying that you get a sense that
• 1:04:21
  they're all friends with each other and certainly there's a theater about the
• 1:04:26
  interview which take place where it seems like the interviewer always says, you
• 1:04:30
  know, do you know what position you're in?
• 1:04:32
  And the driver who's competing in the rally says, No, I've no idea.
• 1:04:36
  what position I'm in.
• 1:04:37
  And you can see that there's a banter about that, which is all sort of summed
• 1:04:42
  up by that phrase that we all know so well, associated with rallying.
• 1:04:47
  How will you be driving Markku?
• 1:04:49
  Oh, maximum attack.
• 1:04:51
  My other favorite phrase of his was, My mechanic is fantastic.
• 1:04:55
  Like, come on.
• 1:04:56
  I wasn't gonna talk about him first, but now we've started talking about him.
• 1:04:59
  There's one interview where he's like, he's got those Frankenstein dour
• 1:05:04
  brows, and he's like, leaning over the interview, and it's a dark rally stage,
• 1:05:07
  and they're talking about the Delta S4.
• 1:05:09
  And then they mention to him about the Stratos, and How much he must
• 1:05:13
  have enjoyed and his face lights up.
• 1:05:15
  He's like a child, like a child.
• 1:05:18
  He's been given a gift.
• 1:05:19
  Like his face lights up and oh man, I was struck in that moment.
• 1:05:24
  I realized that again, you talk about the imprinted.
• 1:05:27
  That was the moment.
• 1:05:28
  It was those interviews that made me such a Marco Arlen fan.
• 1:05:33
  But what about Michel Mouton?
• 1:05:35
  Because I have to say you bigged her up before we did this.
• 1:05:40
  And I thought.
• 1:05:41
  You know what?
• 1:05:41
  She was a great piece of marketing fluff.
• 1:05:44
  And, you know, she could drive a bit, but she was great marketing fluff.
• 1:05:48
  Oh, on the contrary, she could drive a lot and the marketing fluff was good too.
• 1:05:53
  You know, 100%.
• 1:05:54
  So what was her background?
• 1:05:55
  Because I know very little about her.
• 1:05:57
  She's very private.
• 1:05:59
  It's really hard to get her backstory.
• 1:06:01
  What I've been able to collect over the years, she's still on my, you know,
• 1:06:05
  Mount Everest of People that I would love to interview on break fix is that
• 1:06:10
  she came from money, Southern France, everything that goes along with that.
• 1:06:14
  And so how she got into racing is still a little bit foggy, but she got in.
• 1:06:20
  Cause she's French and she got in with a French team and then they
• 1:06:23
  realized she was really fast and she could do all these things.
• 1:06:26
  And then moved around like all the rally drivers did.
• 1:06:29
  If you follow them, you're like, man, Stig Blumfuss drove a Talbot?
• 1:06:33
  Really?
• 1:06:33
  Like, I always thought he just drove for Audi.
• 1:06:35
  And, you know, Walter Ruhl drove an Opel.
• 1:06:36
  They all had to start somewhere.
• 1:06:38
  So her beginnings are a little foggy.
• 1:06:41
  How she came to Audi, I have never been able to figure out.
• 1:06:44
  Other than the fact that if you look at what Audi did, they sort of cherry
• 1:06:49
  picked the best drivers at the time.
• 1:06:51
  Stig Blumfuss, Walter Ruhl, Hannu Mikkola, Michel Mouton.
• 1:06:54
  And they said, Let's do this.
• 1:06:56
  They talk about it a little bit in that movie, Race to Glory.
• 1:06:59
  They introduce her as the new kid compared to Hanu, compared to Walter,
• 1:07:03
  but they don't go much more into that.
• 1:07:05
  What makes her more important in some ways than just the marketing fluff and
• 1:07:10
  her speed, because she's still fast to this day when she gets behind the wheel
• 1:07:14
  of a rally car, Is that there were a surprising number of women in rally.
• 1:07:19
  Even one of the commentators from Top Gear, Sue Baker,
• 1:07:22
  was a former rally co driver.
• 1:07:24
  We saw that in some of those interviews.
• 1:07:26
  You know, her and Fabrizia Pons, an all woman team on an underdog.
• 1:07:31
  Audi had never done rally before.
• 1:07:33
  They were the new kid on the block.
• 1:07:35
  Everything was new.
• 1:07:35
  All wheel drive was new.
• 1:07:36
  All of it was new.
• 1:07:37
  And here we have a woman and a female co driver and they're out running with the
• 1:07:41
  bulls, kicking butt and taking names.
• 1:07:44
  Now, Is she as winning as the others?
• 1:07:47
  Yes and no.
• 1:07:49
  On paper, maybe not.
• 1:07:51
  Hanu Mikala had 20 rally wins under his belt by the time he had gotten to Audi.
• 1:07:56
  Again, he was the elder statesman, right?
• 1:07:57
  He had already seen it, been there, done that, gotten the t shirt.
• 1:08:00
  But Michelle, she's someone to aspire to.
• 1:08:04
  In the face of everything, in the face of the early 80s, and all the tropes and
• 1:08:10
  the stereotypes and the discrimination and everything that goes along with
• 1:08:13
  motorsport at that time, she persevered.
• 1:08:16
  But what's interesting is, Rally supported her.
• 1:08:20
  It didn't hold her back.
• 1:08:21
  They didn't say, well, you're just a third rate, we need a fourth driver, and
• 1:08:25
  you're going to drive the slowest car.
• 1:08:26
  Those kinds of things.
• 1:08:27
  They let her shine.
• 1:08:29
  They let her excel.
• 1:08:30
  Isn't there something of the sort of Margaret Thatcher thing?
• 1:08:32
  They always said that, you know, in a cabinet meeting that Margaret
• 1:08:35
  Thatcher just outmanned all the men.
• 1:08:37
  In the room.
• 1:08:38
  In some ways you could say that.
• 1:08:39
  And in that sense, there's almost an argument that she sort of
• 1:08:42
  knocked back equality because she was just so fucking awesome.
• 1:08:46
  Yeah.
• 1:08:47
  You know, almost like a Barack Obama was another, you know, his sheer
• 1:08:50
  ability as an individual overcame.
• 1:08:52
  Whatever prejudices there might've been knocking around, her speed overcame.
• 1:08:56
  You know, I've had that revelation now that I really thought it was clever
• 1:09:01
  marketing for Audi because Audi always did have clever marketing and I'm sure as
• 1:09:04
  shit it was that, but she's really fast.
• 1:09:06
  And that decision in one of those RAC rallies to give her the short wheelbase
• 1:09:10
  car with more power, like absolutely give her the fast car and give Mikkola
• 1:09:15
  the car that's more likely to get home.
• 1:09:17
  Like that's exactly what I would have done if I was the team manager.
• 1:09:20
  What a awesome pairing.
• 1:09:22
  There is film I've seen, this was some years ago, of her and Mikkola
• 1:09:28
  communicating with each other basically where it's a safari rally and Mikkola
• 1:09:32
  has stopped to help and the teamwork there with Mikkola making the effort
• 1:09:37
  to help her with it being about Audi.
• 1:09:39
  Finishing that I remember feeling was, uh, was really cool.
• 1:09:43
  Audi viewed it more as an endurance than a race.
• 1:09:46
  They were proving their technology in a big way.
• 1:09:49
  They needed those cars to finish because think about it.
• 1:09:51
  If the Quattros failed consistently and they broke,
• 1:09:55
  they didn't fail, but they broke.
• 1:09:57
  But if they had failed miserably, where would we be with Audi today?
• 1:10:01
  Think about that for a second.
• 1:10:03
  Yeah.
• 1:10:03
  Well, my granddad had an Audi coupe in 1970.
• 1:10:07
  There were hundreds of Audis in Britain, only hundreds, you know, it was that.
• 1:10:12
  By 1980, and when the Quattro came along, the brand was established.
• 1:10:18
  They did that very famous Vaux Brun Duc technique advertising campaign,
• 1:10:23
  which was based around the Quattro.
• 1:10:24
  Not to wax poetic about Michelle Mouton, but one thing I want to point out about
• 1:10:28
  her, when you watch her drive, she's not as Ham fisted, like Hanumikola is,
• 1:10:34
  where he's willing to take the risk.
• 1:10:35
  He brings the car home, but he's going to bring it home again, come hell or
• 1:10:39
  high water, but she's not as precise.
• 1:10:42
  As Walter rural, Walter is very exact.
• 1:10:45
  He's very consistent.
• 1:10:46
  You know, it's just his very German way of being and of driving.
• 1:10:50
  So we got a flamboyant Flynn and we got a very stoic German.
• 1:10:53
  And then we have this French woman who sort of blends the two together.
• 1:10:57
  Watching her drive was like watching someone ballroom dance.
• 1:11:01
  She had this relationship with the quattro, especially
• 1:11:04
  with the sport quattro.
• 1:11:05
  Once they got her away from the long wheelbase car, that's
• 1:11:07
  where she began to blossom.
• 1:11:08
  She could get it to rotate.
• 1:11:10
  It's like watching a formula drift person today.
• 1:11:12
  Where it's just like, it's like no sweat to have the car completely out of control.
• 1:11:16
  And she is composed and as cool as a cucumber.
• 1:11:20
  So, that's the magic.
• 1:11:22
  Of Michel Mouton is when you understand that she's the middle ground.
• 1:11:27
  And then sadly you have Stig Blumfist, who's the quiet guy in
• 1:11:31
  the background, but is an absolute unbelievable driver behind the wheel.
• 1:11:36
  And he gets out and he's just.
• 1:11:37
  Very mild mannered Clark Kent type and you're just like, oh, okay, but again,
• 1:11:42
  behind the wheel, you're Superman.
• 1:11:43
  We should draw a distinction between the true Scandinavians,
• 1:11:46
  the Swedes and the Norwegians.
• 1:11:48
  We're not mentioning Norwegians.
• 1:11:49
  The Swedes like Blomqvist.
• 1:11:51
  And of course, Stig Blomqvist is the reason why Top Gear had the Stig.
• 1:11:55
  That's where the name came from.
• 1:11:57
  So the Audi Works team, superstars.
• 1:11:59
  In some respects.
• 1:12:00
  Here's the thing, I want to go back to rural for a second, just a second,
• 1:12:03
  because it brings us to Peugeot.
• 1:12:05
  As you and I have been studying this and talking about this, I began to
• 1:12:09
  reanalyze it with a whole new lens.
• 1:12:12
  Something started to emerge from this.
• 1:12:15
  Listening to interviews where Walter would say something about Ari Vatanen,
• 1:12:19
  and he's like, well, don't tell Ari I said that, and Ari would be like, well,
• 1:12:21
  don't tell Walter I said that, you know, and they would critique each other.
• 1:12:25
  You know, again, very stoic, very German, Walter World.
• 1:12:27
  This is how we do things.
• 1:12:29
  This is the moment that we turn.
• 1:12:30
  This is the time at which we break and all these kinds of things.
• 1:12:33
  And Ari Vatanen talks about playing music with his eyes closed and
• 1:12:37
  how driving a rally car was like playing the piano and this and that.
• 1:12:41
  And I began to realize There was two other drivers, very notable rivalry,
• 1:12:46
  that you and I have talked about quite a bit, that paralleled the two of them,
• 1:12:50
  and that is, the professor himself, Alan Prost, is like Walter Rural,
• 1:12:55
  and Ari Vatanen is like Ayrton Senna.
• 1:12:58
  I mean, Vatanen's appeal to me is similar to the appeal that Senna had.
• 1:13:04
  Exactly.
• 1:13:04
  I mean, the two of them both leapt off the screen for me.
• 1:13:07
  Vartanen, the level of commitment that Vartanen shows is just God
• 1:13:14
  is protecting him, let's be clear.
• 1:13:17
  There's also, especially with the escorts, And you talk about the
• 1:13:21
  artistry of the drift, the length of the slide, the elegance of the slide,
• 1:13:27
  that is just what Ari Vatanen did.
• 1:13:30
  Just feel like nobody else.
• 1:13:31
  I didn't come to respect Vatanen until he broke Audi's record at Pike's Peak.
• 1:13:36
  If you go back and watch the film, and you can search for this on
• 1:13:38
  YouTube, it's called Climb Dance.
• 1:13:40
  It's set to music with the sound of the 205 engine in that 405,
• 1:13:44
  the whole way up Pike's Peak.
• 1:13:46
  Then you see the magic.
• 1:13:48
  of Ari Vatanen, because he's by himself, as are the rules of the Pikes Peak Hill
• 1:13:53
  Climb, in the old days of Pikes Peak.
• 1:13:55
  Not today, where it's asphalt all the way to the summit.
• 1:13:57
  This is back when it was loose gravel and dirt and changing weather conditions.
• 1:14:02
  13 miles of hell.
• 1:14:03
  To get to the top of Pikes Peak.
• 1:14:05
  I'm not going to spoil it.
• 1:14:06
  If Ollie and I, my son, we'll talk about the Ari Vatanen sun visor, because there's
• 1:14:11
  one moment where he comes around the corner and the sun's right in his eyes.
• 1:14:15
  And he's holding the car in a slide right on the edge of the mountain.
• 1:14:19
  And he puts his arm up to block the sun.
• 1:14:21
  Yep.
• 1:14:22
  And I always think of that.
• 1:14:23
  You know, I have a class of students every year and they quite often come up
• 1:14:27
  with that as students are wont to do.
• 1:14:29
  They're quite into solving problems that don't really exist.
• 1:14:32
  And a couple of students have talked about how the sun in the eyes is really
• 1:14:36
  dangerous and what you need is one of these windshields that light shade, light.
• 1:14:41
  And I'm like, you know, I've got something that's really going to work well for you.
• 1:14:45
  It's the Vatanen.
• 1:14:46
  The Vatanen Sun Visor!
• 1:14:49
  And again, that whole trip to the summit is incredible.
• 1:14:53
  And if you've never seen it, you have to watch it.
• 1:14:55
  But what you do need to realize, though, is even though Ari Vatanen broke the
• 1:14:59
  record at Pike's Peak at that time, in period, it wasn't by that much.
• 1:15:04
  If you go back and look at the timesheet, it's enough.
• 1:15:07
  But it's not like, oh, we destroyed it by 10 seconds, like what the Peugeot
• 1:15:10
  205 T16 was doing when it first came on the scene way ahead of everybody.
• 1:15:15
  So it's a glorious run.
• 1:15:17
  It's sort of like the lap of the gods at Monaco.
• 1:15:19
  When you're watching Senna, he's just in the zone.
• 1:15:22
  He's doing his thing.
• 1:15:23
  Although I don't think Senna ever put his hands up to the sun, but
• 1:15:26
  the point is, I began to draw a parallel between Prost and Senna.
• 1:15:30
  and Volta Rural and Ari Vatnan.
• 1:15:32
  I think it works.
• 1:15:33
  I think it's valid.
• 1:15:34
  Yeah, I mean, I feel like rallying is so much more random than Formula One.
• 1:15:38
  I mean, I feel like Rural.
• 1:15:40
  Well, I don't know, Prost was too, weren't you?
• 1:15:42
  You produced a calculated approach.
• 1:15:44
  You didn't just throw caution to the wind in the way that
• 1:15:47
  people like Senna and Vatnan did.
• 1:15:49
  There was a definite sense that they threw caution to the wind and, and if
• 1:15:53
  you were an event competing with them, if you were going to win, you needed to be
• 1:15:57
  able to have that same kind of brain out.
• 1:15:59
  commitment because the British stuff they always talk about how only Roger
• 1:16:04
  Clark could like compete with the Scandinavians and it's yeah only Roger
• 1:16:08
  Clark had the courage to slide the car that much all the others British
• 1:16:12
  guys prior to that time they just didn't have the commitment level.
• 1:16:15
  So we talked about Vartan in there.
• 1:16:17
  Final thing I would say about him is like Mikkola, he's from the north from that.
• 1:16:21
  So there's that kind of sort of stoicism about him.
• 1:16:24
  The other thing I'd say about him is, and you and I've talked
• 1:16:27
  about this before, Eric, there's a wonderful biography that's about him.
• 1:16:30
  And it's, I mean, he had this terrible accident and then he convinced
• 1:16:33
  himself he had AIDS and couldn't rid himself of the idea that he had AIDS.
• 1:16:38
  It was a.
• 1:16:39
  full on like and as bonkers as he was behind the wheel this was as bonkers as
• 1:16:43
  a whole that he fell down and somehow managed to drag himself out of it's
• 1:16:48
  really an incredible kind of a story and then he goes on and does like pike
• 1:16:52
  peak and harry dakar and it's like no slower than he was before and then he
• 1:16:56
  goes on to be a member of the european parliament because obviously that's you
• 1:17:00
  know that's what you do i mean you know that's what you do yeah so we'll move
• 1:17:04
  to my favorite Now, you described Lancia as the sort of grandee team of rallying.
• 1:17:10
  You know, I think they were, right?
• 1:17:11
  Because they had this continual presence.
• 1:17:13
  And you would expect them, therefore, to pick the best driver.
• 1:17:17
  And this is why I feel like, although I love Vartanen, he's like Mouton.
• 1:17:22
  I mean, the guy just couldn't finish.
• 1:17:23
  No.
• 1:17:24
  He finished more than Mouton.
• 1:17:26
  He couldn't finish enough.
• 1:17:27
  And your comparison with Roar.
• 1:17:30
  I mean, Roar was a finisher.
• 1:17:31
  With him, it was done in a very, very study.
• 1:17:35
  I'd have no fear sitting next to him driving fast.
• 1:17:38
  Sitting next to Vartanen, fucking hell, you were taking
• 1:17:40
  your life in your hands, right?
• 1:17:42
  Because Extra insurance policy.
• 1:17:44
  I mean, the bloke, he drove it like it was like a computer game, right?
• 1:17:49
  Where it doesn't matter if you crash.
• 1:17:50
  Literally, that's how he was.
• 1:17:52
  Now, I feel like I'll end.
• 1:17:53
  Was like that as well.
• 1:17:55
  And Arlen was at Lance here for 20 years.
• 1:17:58
  When you see interviews of him, his Italian's like mine.
• 1:18:01
  The Finns would call him like the Italian Finn, because he like lost his temper and
• 1:18:06
  was all like gesturing and was passionate.
• 1:18:08
  You know, it was like the Finns were like, this is, he's not one of ours anymore.
• 1:18:12
  He's like, he's gone native.
• 1:18:14
  Sort of like Schumacher in that way, right?
• 1:18:16
  So many years of Ferrari.
• 1:18:18
  No, because Schumacher never humanized Arlen.
• 1:18:21
  He was Dauer, and then there was the moment of humanity.
• 1:18:26
  So comical.
• 1:18:27
  In the interviews, whenever they ask him what's happening, he always
• 1:18:31
  beats up his own performance.
• 1:18:32
  They're like, oh, you crashed off down a fire road, and he's not like, oh,
• 1:18:35
  I'm lucky to still be in the rally.
• 1:18:36
  He's like, oh, Two minute penalty that penalized us two minutes
• 1:18:40
  and 12 seconds kind of thing.
• 1:18:42
  It's, it's like all of this.
• 1:18:43
  I've an auto sport that I, I wish I'd found the quote before we did this, but
• 1:18:48
  that where the journalist interviews him and throughout the interview,
• 1:18:51
  it's San Remo or something like that.
• 1:18:53
  And it's like between throughout the interview, he just keeps muttering
• 1:18:56
  too fast, too fast, or he's just set fastest stage times, but he
• 1:19:01
  just keeps muttering too fast.
• 1:19:04
  On one of the RAC rallies, he spins the S4 flat in fifth,
• 1:19:09
  and then he's able to recover.
• 1:19:10
  And in the next two stages, sets fastest stage time.
• 1:19:13
  I mean, the bloke just had, I wouldn't say no fear, because
• 1:19:17
  I feel like that's Vartanen.
• 1:19:18
  I feel like he just erred the right side of the Vartanen.
• 1:19:23
  But he would be my number one.
• 1:19:26
  Like Lancia, I would have picked him.
• 1:19:28
  And I might have picked Mikkola.
• 1:19:30
  As a backup, if I was gonna pick a dream team.
• 1:19:33
  And then if you talk about like Toivonen, his teammate in the other
• 1:19:36
  car, who had also been rallying forever.
• 1:19:39
  And unfortunately, Toivonen died in a horrific accident.
• 1:19:42
  Well, and let's be clear, if people aren't aware, it's the
• 1:19:45
  accident that ends Group B.
• 1:19:46
  There were other accidents, and we don't want to dwell on that.
• 1:19:49
  But really, it's Toivonen's accident, which ends Group B.
• 1:19:52
  And something that I hadn't learned until I was reading about that, was
• 1:19:56
  that, without getting into details.
• 1:19:58
  It was the design of the car.
• 1:20:00
  Yes.
• 1:20:00
  The fact that the car was fundamentally a Formula One car, not like a
• 1:20:05
  Skoda 400, a converted road car.
• 1:20:08
  No, it was a Formula One kind of construction, which then meant that
• 1:20:12
  it was particularly delicate and vulnerable when the worst happened.
• 1:20:16
  To be explicit about it, it was a bomb.
• 1:20:19
  They were sitting on top of the gas tank, much like a series one Land Rover,
• 1:20:23
  where you sit on top of the gas tank.
• 1:20:25
  So those cars were made out of tube frame and carbon Kevlar.
• 1:20:29
  They were super light.
• 1:20:30
  They had none of the crash impact and safety things because again,
• 1:20:34
  this was the middle eighties and developed on top of 1970s ideas.
• 1:20:39
  So the protection wasn't there.
• 1:20:41
  And the rules of the FIA didn't dictate like they do now where the gas tank must
• 1:20:46
  be protected in this way and so many inches from the driver and blah blah
• 1:20:50
  blah blah blah and all these systems that exist there was no fire prevention
• 1:20:54
  there was maybe a fire extinguisher if they were lucky That crash was
• 1:20:59
  absolutely horrific and, and there's others that go right along with it.
• 1:21:02
  But the thing about Toivonen though is when you listen to his interviews, you
• 1:21:05
  know, with his big gradiated aviator glasses that he always wore, like
• 1:21:11
  a lot of other Scandinavians of the style of that time, you know, those
• 1:21:14
  big ski glasses that they would wear.
• 1:21:16
  But the thing is, he reminds me so much of, like, an Oittanic,
• 1:21:22
  if you follow today's WRC.
• 1:21:25
  He's one of those types.
• 1:21:27
  Like, there's a certain aura in the new drivers that remind me of Toivonen.
• 1:21:31
  If you ask me, paint me a picture of a rally driver, It's Toivonen.
• 1:21:36
  That's the guy that you go to as sort of the stereotypical rally
• 1:21:39
  driver, especially from Scandinavia.
• 1:21:41
  And he was entertaining, you know, his English wasn't so great.
• 1:21:45
  He always made for a good interview.
• 1:21:47
  Like, Hannu Mikkola, he was always kind of happy.
• 1:21:49
  And that's also part of the tragedy because he's another one of these
• 1:21:53
  cast of characters of Group B.
• 1:21:56
  That today we have, as you say, there's this bit of theater, it's almost
• 1:22:00
  artificial drama, if you think about it, like is painted even in formula one,
• 1:22:04
  they want to make racing more exciting.
• 1:22:06
  Back then there was a camaraderie and you could tell that they were partying the
• 1:22:09
  night before and things were happening.
• 1:22:11
  And it was just the spirit of rally and of motorsport at that time was
• 1:22:15
  very different than it is today.
• 1:22:17
  And I think he epitomized all of it in one person Toivonen was that example
• 1:22:23
  of what it was to be group B rally.
• 1:22:26
  He was another one, like Pond, who was the MG driver.
• 1:22:30
  These guys were relentless.
• 1:22:32
  They had this tenacity, and it was stupid, and it was foolish, to get
• 1:22:36
  behind the wheel of a car knowing that you're suffering from influenza.
• 1:22:41
  Today, your doctor would not clear you to get on track, or to get on
• 1:22:44
  a rally, knowing that you're sick.
• 1:22:46
  They'd be like, look, we're gonna call another driver, you're gonna lose
• 1:22:49
  your driver points, whatever it is.
• 1:22:50
  There's a lot more precaution.
• 1:22:53
  Taken today than there was back then launches putting pressure.
• 1:22:56
  They've got two cars, especially at Corsica and a lot of the other tracks.
• 1:23:00
  We need to get this done.
• 1:23:01
  I don't care if you're sick, get out there race.
• 1:23:04
  But they had that drive.
• 1:23:05
  They had that foolish determination.
• 1:23:07
  I feel like Toyford in his head was just farther above the
• 1:23:10
  parapet that anybody else is.
• 1:23:12
  The car was faster and more fragile than the others.
• 1:23:15
  And he.
• 1:23:16
  was a Vatanen of a driver.
• 1:23:19
  Yes.
• 1:23:19
  Rather than an Ahlen of a driver.
• 1:23:22
  He fell on the wrong side of the two fast.
• 1:23:26
  And I think Ahlen was lucky.
• 1:23:28
  That's the word I'd use to describe.
• 1:23:30
  It was always, he was on the edge.
• 1:23:31
  But to your point, I think he drove at 11 tenths.
• 1:23:34
  Whereas Vatanen and Teuvenen drove at 13 tenths.
• 1:23:37
  They were well over their skis.
• 1:23:39
  Yeah.
• 1:23:39
  When something went wrong.
• 1:23:40
  Yeah, I think so as, uh, as well.
• 1:23:43
  Of course, Arlen and Teufel and both from the Helsinki area, you know, as
• 1:23:47
  I say, I, I feel like there's further investigation around whether or not it
• 1:23:52
  was the ice racing stuff, how they got involved in longer stage rallying in
• 1:23:57
  the first place, because I feel like for Vatanen and for Mikkola growing up in the
• 1:24:01
  North, it would have been natural for them to be on those dirt roads all the time.
• 1:24:06
  Less so for people living in Helsinki.
• 1:24:08
  So I want to come back to your lead in question, to this whole discussion,
• 1:24:12
  to your presentation, to what you're doing at the symposium, you laid it out.
• 1:24:16
  Who was the best?
• 1:24:18
  Was it the Audi works team?
• 1:24:19
  Was it Lancia?
• 1:24:20
  Was it Peugeot?
• 1:24:21
  And when you say the best, not necessarily the manufacturer, but we're
• 1:24:24
  talking about the driver specifically.
• 1:24:26
  And we've been talking about them now for a little bit.
• 1:24:28
  My research, rather than making it easier for me to answer the questions about the
• 1:24:33
  driver, it's actually made it harder.
• 1:24:35
  Because the opportunity to show greatness was so based on the car,
• 1:24:39
  you know, like Vatanen was only great when he had the Peugeot, Arlen
• 1:24:44
  was only actually competing on the rallies when the Delta S4 was there.
• 1:24:48
  So it, cause let's be clear, right?
• 1:24:49
  Audi won in 18.
• 1:24:51
  to 83.
• 1:24:52
  Audi won some events, but Roar won in 82 with a Niscona 400, which then
• 1:24:57
  evolves into the Manta later on.
• 1:24:58
  In 83, Blancas is champion for Audi.
• 1:25:01
  84 is the year that the Peugeot comes and is dominant.
• 1:25:05
  And then 85, you have the Lancia come in and that being dominant, don't you?
• 1:25:10
  And yes, absolutely.
• 1:25:11
  Maybe we should have talked about the Audi, then the Peugeot, then the Lancia.
• 1:25:15
  That is the progression, that is the progression.
• 1:25:18
  My response to that, my only pushback to the question is, if you look at
• 1:25:23
  how Rally was organized before Group B, and even after Group B, where the
• 1:25:29
  drivers would switch teams, if Group B had lasted longer, On the global stage,
• 1:25:35
  and we had shuffled the deck, let's just say Vatnan got behind the wheel
• 1:25:39
  of the Audi and Marco Alain broke his relationship with Lancia and maybe went
• 1:25:43
  to Peugeot and Walter Rural went to, you know, lots of, we shuffled it around.
• 1:25:49
  It goes back to, is it the car or is it the driver?
• 1:25:52
  So can we really quantify who was the best?
• 1:25:55
  And if we're going to say who is the best, what criteria do we use?
• 1:25:59
  I think this actually goes a lot back to our conversation.
• 1:26:02
  We had.
• 1:26:03
  about the greatness of Senna.
• 1:26:05
  Where does he stack rank against a Lewis Hamilton or a
• 1:26:08
  Michael Schumacher or a Fangio?
• 1:26:10
  So if you look at it just between 1981 and 1986, how do we quantify who's the best?
• 1:26:17
  I picked a question that was going to provoke us talking.
• 1:26:20
  I didn't necessarily pick a question that I thought was something that
• 1:26:24
  we could answer in a meaningful way.
• 1:26:26
  I suppose I hedged my bets already, didn't I?
• 1:26:29
  I picked somebody who errs if there's a line.
• 1:26:32
  with crashing on this side and being too slow on the other side.
• 1:26:35
  I picked Arlene, who I feel sits on the crashing too much
• 1:26:39
  side, but just by a little bit.
• 1:26:42
  And I'd pick Mikala, who I feel sits on the slow side of the
• 1:26:46
  line, but just by a little bit.
• 1:26:48
  For me, the other people we've had, they fall too far on one side or the other.
• 1:26:53
  You don't think Michelle is most iconic of the bunch, based on
• 1:26:57
  all the other facts involved?
• 1:26:59
  No, maybe that's because, for me, it is that childhood imprint, right?
• 1:27:04
  And am I thinking specifically about that period, 81, 82 to 86?
• 1:27:08
  Maybe I'm not.
• 1:27:09
  Maybe I'm thinking about the earlier period as well.
• 1:27:12
  And maybe that's why Mickela and Vartanen, uh, sort of loom large for me.
• 1:27:16
  I do feel like, you know, you can measure it in different ways, can't you?
• 1:27:19
  You can look at the statistics and say who won the most events, and
• 1:27:22
  you can see who won the most points.
• 1:27:24
  And you can also use these satiric measures and say,
• 1:27:27
  you know, you could just see.
• 1:27:28
  By the way that Vartanen drives, there's an artistry there,
• 1:27:32
  which is a kind of greatness.
• 1:27:35
  That work that I did around Senna and the strange way that he's moved
• 1:27:40
  to being considered the greatest of all time in Formula One, whether or
• 1:27:43
  not he really is, that sort of weird beatification thing that I've done.
• 1:27:47
  Talked about with Senna, the hard thought coming out of that work is that maybe
• 1:27:52
  greatness is about the way in which you do things rather than what you do.
• 1:27:58
  So it's not about whether you win 50 million championships.
• 1:28:01
  It's about whether you do it with style and class and panache.
• 1:28:05
  And then it's about what appeals, right?
• 1:28:07
  So definitely Vatanen appeals to me for that.
• 1:28:10
  You know, in this presentation that we've done tonight, I feel like
• 1:28:14
  my passion for Arlen's method of communication and the fact that he is
• 1:28:18
  in just the right place for me, right?
• 1:28:21
  As I say, if I was, he's the first guy that I would want to sign.
• 1:28:25
  Absolutely no question.
• 1:28:27
  And I'd go for Vatanen afterwards as well, because my thought would be, I've got two
• 1:28:31
  cars, so one of them will probably finish.
• 1:28:33
  Yeah.
• 1:28:34
  I think if we played the pit stop question game, where it's like, well,
• 1:28:36
  who do you want to have a beer with?
• 1:28:38
  It's sort of like, Alain, Hannu Mikola, and Vatanen.
• 1:28:41
  Those are the guys you want to sit down at a pub and have a pint and drink.
• 1:28:45
  Talk war stories about rally because they're entertaining.
• 1:28:48
  They're personal.
• 1:28:49
  Oh, pond is yeah.
• 1:28:50
  To love to have a beer with Tony pond because he's so understated.
• 1:28:55
  It would have to be a pub in the Midlands, like a pub in
• 1:28:58
  the Midlands in England, right?
• 1:29:01
  It would have to be, I would just want to meet him, you know,
• 1:29:04
  because he died very young.
• 1:29:07
  56 in 2002 pancreatic cancer.
• 1:29:11
  My God.
• 1:29:12
  So the problem is in period.
• 1:29:14
  You can only go based on the time sheets and the results and the rally
• 1:29:19
  stage wins and the points and all that kind of stuff to say, who is the best?
• 1:29:22
  Was it Walter?
• 1:29:23
  Was it Hanu?
• 1:29:24
  Was it Marco, et cetera.
• 1:29:26
  But 40 years later, when you look at it under new eyes, this is the conclusion
• 1:29:31
  that I came to when you talk about who was the best, and it was very simple.
• 1:29:35
  If we just stay within the confines and the parameters
• 1:29:38
  of Lancia, Peugeot, and Audi.
• 1:29:42
  Launcher doesn't exist anymore.
• 1:29:43
  Stellantis has no plans.
• 1:29:46
  They've teased, you know, the Epsilon might be coming.
• 1:29:49
  There's some tribute cars out there, like singer style, Delta HFs and O37s
• 1:29:54
  and Stratos's and things like that, that have been developed at the factory.
• 1:29:56
  Launcher doesn't really exist.
• 1:29:58
  So they're gone.
• 1:30:00
  Peugeot Sport.
• 1:30:01
  No, it's gone.
• 1:30:03
  I read that they closed it a couple of years ago, the original place on
• 1:30:07
  the road out of Paris, South of Paris.
• 1:30:09
  That they're sort of still around only in LMP one GTP now in WEC, the world
• 1:30:16
  endurance championship with the Peugeot nine X eight, you could say Peugeot
• 1:30:20
  sport is still around their branded as Peugeot sport, you know, but it's
• 1:30:23
  different, it's not the Peugeot sport of John Todd of the eighties and all that.
• 1:30:27
  One could say Lancia doesn't exist as a brand, Peugeot is still
• 1:30:31
  around making cars, they make some really interesting stuff.
• 1:30:34
  I'd love to drive some of the new 208s and some of those cars that I've seen
• 1:30:37
  even last year when I was in Europe.
• 1:30:39
  But on the racing scene, not so much.
• 1:30:41
  They did a couple of things in the past with Le Mans.
• 1:30:45
  They've done Formula 1, if you think about Jordan Peugeot based.
• 1:30:49
  So that's great.
• 1:30:50
  And then Audi.
• 1:30:52
  Audi has come well beyond anybody's expectations.
• 1:30:56
  If you think about Audi in 1980, when it approaches rally with a new car and a
• 1:31:02
  new technology and a team of all stars, but really an underdog and unknown Roland
• 1:31:08
  Gumpert, who's this guy, the head of Audi development, what, who Audi, what?
• 1:31:12
  You think about it.
• 1:31:13
  Audi went, proved what they needed to prove.
• 1:31:16
  And this is a very German thing, right?
• 1:31:18
  We've done what we needed to do.
• 1:31:20
  Now we move on.
• 1:31:20
  They go to Trans Am and they kick butt and they get banned.
• 1:31:23
  Then they go to DTM and they kick butt and they get banned.
• 1:31:25
  They go to IMSA and they kick butt and they get banned.
• 1:31:27
  Then they end up in ALMS forever.
• 1:31:30
  They end up winning at Le Mans.
• 1:31:31
  And now next year they're going to be in Formula One.
• 1:31:34
  So if you think about it from that perspective, who's the best?
• 1:31:38
  It's still Audi.
• 1:31:39
  And people like Walter Rural and Michelle Mouton who are still with us are still
• 1:31:43
  associated with the brand that to me and I'm trying to put my bias aside, but
• 1:31:49
  they've proven themselves to be the best.
• 1:31:52
  And I think they will continue in any discipline that they apply themselves.
• 1:31:56
  But they have to realize that their roots came from WRC.
• 1:32:00
  That's an interesting perspective, Eric.
• 1:32:02
  I'm not sure if I agree.
• 1:32:03
  I, I still feel like you have to look at it from the
• 1:32:05
  perspective of the period itself.
• 1:32:07
  And in that period, you have to pick the Lancia.
• 1:32:11
  It's the most technologically advanced.
• 1:32:12
  Just to bring this full circle for those that are maybe now Googling
• 1:32:17
  Group B, learning more about it.
• 1:32:18
  Maybe you knew something about it before.
• 1:32:20
  Maybe you've learned something from this.
• 1:32:22
  I want to let people know that group B did continue after it was disbanded.
• 1:32:28
  So there's a couple things that we have to myth bust here at the tail end of this.
• 1:32:31
  So Toivonen's death was the turning point.
• 1:32:34
  That's when Balestra said it's time to pump the brakes.
• 1:32:37
  The space race is over.
• 1:32:39
  We're not doing this unlimited horsepower thing anymore.
• 1:32:41
  We're not letting you do evolution cars, all this kind of stuff.
• 1:32:44
  He did a complete 180 on group B and he shut it down.
• 1:32:47
  What people don't realize is.
• 1:32:49
  Audi had already pulled out basically the tail end of the season before, because
• 1:32:54
  of a death that had occurred at Portugal.
• 1:32:58
  And they were like, this is getting crazy.
• 1:33:00
  Crowd control is an issue, which begs the question, if we had better
• 1:33:04
  crowd control, would the rally stage times have been faster?
• 1:33:07
  Because the drivers had to really compensate for people in the middle
• 1:33:10
  of the road and the journalists and all this kind of thing.
• 1:33:12
  There were other deaths before that point, you know, they call the Group B years
• 1:33:16
  also the killer years in motorsport.
• 1:33:18
  And so, Toivonen's death is that moment in which Group B died.
• 1:33:22
  But, it got two extra years everywhere else around the world because of special
• 1:33:28
  events like Perry Dakar, Pike's Peak Hill Climb, where Group B cars were
• 1:33:32
  still used in official events, but they weren't sanctioned WRC Group B
• 1:33:38
  class events, those kinds of things.
• 1:33:40
  Group B, like I said before, was disbanded and replaced by Group A.
• 1:33:44
  And that's where the Delta HF Integrale comes on the scene.
• 1:33:47
  This is where you start to see Mitsubishi coming to play.
• 1:33:50
  And of course, the Subies.
• 1:33:51
  That's the Exactly.
• 1:33:53
  Subaru is making a bigger splash.
• 1:33:55
  The Celica GT4.
• 1:33:57
  That's right.
• 1:33:58
  That's the other car that the young'uns like now.
• 1:34:01
  Real rally pedigree and that's a whole new generation of rally fans coming
• 1:34:06
  into the 90s into the early 2000s the lower horsepower cars to this day even
• 1:34:12
  the current WRC cars with their hybrid systems on their tricky bits and all
• 1:34:17
  the stuff that they have going on are not as powerful and Has been proven.
• 1:34:21
  They're not as fast As the group B cars, the group B cars
• 1:34:24
  are the monsters of rally.
• 1:34:28
  And they always will be never to be repeated again.
• 1:34:30
  I think it's like in the rule book at FIA that nothing like it will
• 1:34:33
  ever happen again, you know, because of everything that went down and
• 1:34:37
  Toyvan and his death and all that.
• 1:34:38
  So for those of you listening to this and listening to us pontificate about group B
• 1:34:44
  for so long now, it's one of those things that if you're not familiar with it,
• 1:34:48
  you will suddenly become addicted to it.
• 1:34:51
  And then follow rally.
• 1:34:52
  It's really interesting.
• 1:34:53
  And I try to remind people all the time, you don't have to buy WRC plus.
• 1:34:58
  Although it's awesome to go back just like Formula 1 subscription service.
• 1:35:01
  You can go back and watch all the old footage and all the old rallies, which
• 1:35:04
  is really cool because rally, there's a lot of it captured in the 80s.
• 1:35:08
  They had amazing footage considering how long a rally stage is and how
• 1:35:13
  complicated they are and things like that.
• 1:35:14
  But today you can watch Red Bull's coverage.
• 1:35:17
  Of WRC on the Red Bull app for free.
• 1:35:20
  And I highly recommend people do that.
• 1:35:21
  You can jump into the cars.
• 1:35:22
  You can watch Terry Neuville live, Oitanic, Esa Pekka Lappi, all the
• 1:35:26
  current drivers and the hilarity of rally hasn't changed the danger.
• 1:35:30
  It's the riskiest, if not the riskiest, one of the riskiest
• 1:35:34
  motor sports out there.
• 1:35:35
  But their car control is second to none.
• 1:35:38
  Now, granted, they're two pedal cars, they're ruddering, hybrids and hydraulic
• 1:35:42
  this and flappy paddle that and all that.
• 1:35:44
  And it's not, it doesn't have the same appeal, let's say, as Group B does.
• 1:35:48
  But go back and check out Group B footage.
• 1:35:50
  It's all over YouTube.
• 1:35:52
  Group A footage for that matter.
• 1:35:54
  It'll get you excited.
• 1:35:55
  And I wish there was a drive to survive sort of thing for Rally because I think
• 1:36:00
  more people would be interested in it.
• 1:36:02
  And you get to see some of the most unique.
• 1:36:04
  Biomes and the planet by watching rally.
• 1:36:07
  You don't get that.
• 1:36:08
  Yeah.
• 1:36:08
  Formula one, you're like, Oh yeah, they go to Singapore and they go to
• 1:36:11
  Austin and they go to Australia, but it's on a paved circuit in rally.
• 1:36:15
  You never know what's going to happen.
• 1:36:17
  The weather is constantly changing.
• 1:36:18
  Sometimes it's at night.
• 1:36:19
  Sometimes it's a day, something torrential downpour.
• 1:36:22
  You never know what you're going to get.
• 1:36:24
  Ah, well, thank you for that insight into, uh, into Modern Rally there, Eric.
• 1:36:28
  That's, uh, that's really useful for me.
• 1:36:30
  We've come to the end of the agenda here now.
• 1:36:33
  So I feel like I have more than enough material, not just create a pod here, but
• 1:36:37
  also to create something for the IMRRC.
• 1:36:40
  I always jump at the opportunity to do a crossover episode with you, John.
• 1:36:45
  Thank you very much, Eric.
• 1:36:46
  Good stuff.
• 1:36:46
  Well, anyway, I look forward to seeing.
• 1:36:48
  What you come up with for the, uh, symposium.
• 1:36:51
  So I want to know how you're going to boil all this down.
• 1:36:54
  Yeah.
• 1:36:55
  Well, I want to know I'm going to do it as well.
• 1:36:57
  And yeah, I'm going to really get on the case and do this sooner rather than later,
• 1:37:01
  because I'm just not going to have time.
• 1:37:02
  Otherwise.
• 1:38:10
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