The Car That Changed Rally Racing Forever
gearpatrol.com
gearpatrol.com
Also the races were much longer taking place over about 5 days compared to the 3 day events nowadays. One event had about 40-50 special stages back then when now there are about 15-25 and most of those are just the same stages repeated. In addition they used to drive both day and night while while getting only a few hours of sleep per night. I'm sure current rally races are still pretty grueling events, but those drivers in the 80s must have been superhuman.
I'm still glad that things have changed. If they hadn't cancelled Group B the fatality count would have just increased. The cars were getting totally out of hand. Some rumors say that some prototype cars already built for the 87 season had close to 1000 horsepowers.
They had an unsynchronized H-shifter gearbox that requires double declutching on downshifts and careful power application given the huge turbo boost. The driver has to be able to use the left and right foot for braking and be able to press all three pedals at once momentarily when downshifting under braking (left foot on the clutch, right foot toe on the brake and blipping the throttle with the outside of the foot, misleadingly called "heel'n'toe").
Here's a really good clip of Walter Röhrl putting an Audi Quattro through its paces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyVHj3sHVHQ
Interestingly, the rally heritage of the 80's Audi engineering org was such that even their unmistakably family-friendly models had unusual, competition-inspired features. For example, my '89 200 quattro stationwagon's brake and gas pedals are very close together, precisely to ease heel-and-toe work during technical downshifts. She shares the same manually-lockable type 1 Torsen differential drivetrain with the ur- and sport Quattros, and is powered by a slightly detuned version of the turbocharged inline 5 racecar engine that dominated the rallies so unstoppably. And you can turn off the ABS :D
When you take her around some corners on a dirt road at speed, it's not hard to see why they called quattro "the unfair advantage."
That makes it sound like there are tractors that can do powerslides.
The only thing you really have to watch out for is popping a wheelie and crushing yourself under it. Imagine my surprise when I found out that real cars aren't like that.
One thing I really would love to see once is Bellof beating his 956 around Nordschleife with an average of 200 km/h... Sad that there is no real Video of it...
And I recall a few years ago listening to Marcus Gronholm - two-time WRC champ himself - asking his team for permission to drop out after his power steering failed.
The result was exploding costs, exploding popularity (hundreds thousands of people lining the stages without the protection of normal circuit racing) and a series of deadly accidents, eventually leading to the end of the Group B category and a long decline in the sport's popularity.
By the way, a colleague of mine owned an Audi Quattro Sport back in the late 90's. It was a very complex car, many components were unique to this model and hand-built. Maintenance was difficult, very expensive and very frequent. He bought a Subaru Impreza WRX "for those 8 months of the year that the Audi spends in the workshop".
The issue with rallying is that it used to take place in remote locations with little or no crowds. There are no safety barriers to protect the audience. Additionally, the rally audiences got crazed by deadly dangerous activities like standing in front of the cars until the last second or trying to touch the cars when they zoomed past (there's a story that a mechanic once found a severed finger in the side mirrors of a car).
It became impossible for the race organizers to control the crowds and make the race events somewhat safe. That's why "exploding popularity" was an issue.
Group B was terminated after an accident in 1986 Rally Portugal (?) when a Ford RS-20 car flew off the track and into the audience with dozens of fatalities and serious injuries. This was only a few weeks after the fatalities of driver Henri Toivonen and co-driver Sergio Cresto in the Rally of Corsica. Toivonen's last interview concluded with: "these cars are too fast for the human mind, if you lose concentration, you're dead" [paraphrased from Finnish], then he closed the car door, drove off and was never seen again.
This is how crazy it was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYIH7ApCxoM
I spent a couple minutes on the Wiki page and this little picture sort of sums up rally racing - they soberly resisted writing "flying" in the label that says "Toivonen driving the Manta 400".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Toivonen , http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/61/Henri_Toivonen...
I know next-to-nothing about rally racing, but that last photo in the article must highlight what you're talking about: a TV cameraman standing about six feet away from a speeding car on a dirt road. Yikes!
Portuguese rally fans especially were completely insane back then.
Actually: Comparing that run to this one here [1] from the 'recent' past I'm even more impressed. Seems like the original video was awfully fast - and on a dirt road at that time?
LMP? You mean the formula where the major constraint is the fuel characteristics of the engine?
If so that is a much more sane than regulating performance on the amount of oxygen the engine can consume. It's also much more relevant to production cars as well.
To me Balance of Performance is a dirty word, but I am ok with having each technology balanced so each car has roughly the same amount of energy available to it.
And when everything fails, I just watch VLN.
My brother bought a Delta Integrale 1993 EVO in 1997 and kept it for a few years. I had the pleasure to drive it several times. What a beast.