Jonathan Gitlin

The heady days of Group B rallying (and racing) will always have a special place in the hearts of most motorsports fans. Introduced by the FIA in 1982, the Group B rules offered a vast amount of technical freedom for manufacturers. Although the OEMs had to produce road-legal versions, they were required to build just 200 to sell to the public in order to homologate their creations. Most of their vehicles (but not all) were based—however loosely—on road cars already in production.

What we got was a series of wild and wonderful machines, with massive wings, blistered wheel arches and body kits, all-wheel drive, and lashings and lashings of horsepower and torque. Perhaps too much of the latter, in fact: although Group B was a huge hit with the public, the cars were maybe too fast for the rally stages on which they competed. A string of fatal accidents eventually proved too much for the FIA, which banned Group B cars halfway through 1986.