Fabulous Lancia Delta S4 Stradale for sale

Nobody thought Group B rallying would ever make a comeback. Not only for the number of deadly accidents that occurred throughout the era, but also because of the astronomical costs involved in stuffing expensive Formula 1 tech into, mostly, humdrum family cars. But just look at the cars competing now. Sure, they look like Ford Puma STs, Hyundai i20 Ns and Toyota GR Yarises you can (or could) find in showrooms today, but underneath you’ll find a space frame chassis and hi-tech engines built solely for rallying. It’s Group B for the modern era, one that’s even faster and a heck of a lot safer than the one that came before.

The big difference is that, back in the ’80s, manufacturers were forced to make road-going versions of their challengers to homologate for rallying, which is something Ford, Hyundai and Toyota don’t have to worry about. As long as their cars vaguely resemble those sold in showrooms, they’re good to go rallying. But that’s what made the Group B era so special, right? The fact that you could ring up your dealer and buy a V6-engined Metro 6R4, a Peugeot 205 T16 or one of these: a Lancia Delta S4 Stradale.

The Group B era did churn out some proper oddballs, like the Citreon 4TC or twin-engined Seat Ibiza Bimotor, most of which were either too rickety or too slow to be any good as rally cars. The Delta S4, though, was a different kind of oddball. Lancia was, after all, very good at winning rally championships, taking the 1974, ’75 and ’76 titles with the gorgeous Stratos, and cunningly stealing the ’83 crown from the all-wheel drive Audi Sport Quattro with the rear-wheel drive 037. So when the Delta S4 arrived in 1985 as an oddly-proportioned box bearing little resemblance to the hatchback it shared its name with, you knew it’d come up with something spectacular.

This wasn’t just the first all-wheel drive Lancia rally car, but also the first in history to employ twin-charging technology. An ingenious idea when you think about it: use a big turbocharger for humungous amounts of power, paired up with a supercharger to minimise lag at lower revs. Official power figures were never released, though some claim it could deliver as much as 1,000hp with the wick turned up. It’s also fabled that Henri Toivonen, one of rallying’s great young talents whose death behind the wheel of an S4 ultimately put paid to the Group B era, put a time in around the Estoril Grand Prix circuit that would have put him in the top ten of an F1 test that took place a few weeks before. Wow. 

No surprise that Lancia dialled things back for the road car. The 1.8-litre four-pot still came bundled in with an Abarth supercharger and turbo, only power was scaled back to a tamer 250hp, while the all-wheel drive system with a trio of differentials was also retained. As was the positioning of the fuel tanks, which were directly under the seats for better weight distribution, presumably paying little mind to driver safety. However, the interior was suitably jazzed up, with lovely suede seats, some S4 badges dotted around the place and, er, that’s your lot.

Put it like this: if the Ferrari ever made a hatchback version of the F40, it would look a little something like this. Granted, it ain’t the prettiest thing to come out of Italy, but its close ties to one of the most fearsome rally cars there has ever been make it immensely desirable. Especially the example we have here, which was delivered to the UK when new, yet has spent the last 35 years and much of its 3,500 miles in France. It’s now back on our shores, having recently been serviced by legendary Lancia specialists Elio and Giovanni Baldi in Turin, where it received a handful of engine tweaks to unlock more grunt. You’ll need to give the seller a call for the price, which will be substantial. But as Group B homologation specials go, they don’t come more special than this.