Group B Questions [Archive] - Motorsport Forums

playmo

28th May 2008, 16:45

Hi all, i'm a "newbie" to WRC, been following since 2002 season but ever since i found out about group B i got fascinated by those "beasts" and the tamers, and so far got few questions:
Did ford and audi retired from the championship since the accident from Portugal or Corsica? did they retired because of the ban?
Whatever happened to the citroens? did they only contested 2 events on 86?
Those are the quetions that i can think of right now, but i'm sure that may this thread will bring to surface planty more....

Cheers.

jonkka

28th May 2008, 17:04

Did ford and audi retired from the championship since the accident from Portugal or Corsica? did they retired because of the ban?
Whatever happened to the citroens? did they only contested 2 events on 86?

Audi were running out of steam. Even with quattro S1 they knew that any development on front-engined car was doomed to fail and were preparing a mid-engined car. Due to this, 1986 was to be somewhat low-key affair for Audi in any case. After the accident in Portugal Audi put their programme on hold and after Corsica cancelled it altogether.

Ford's case is a bit more complicated. They were very late with the RS200 project and were waiting for the much more competitive evolution version of the car to appear. However, FISA banned further evolution versions following the Toivonen's accident in Corsica, taking wind from Ford. They did enter both Acropolis and RAC so they did not withdrew from the season per se - though they had very selected bare-bone programme.
http://www.juwra.com/ford_season_1986.html

Citroen is peculiar case. They made more variants of Group B rally cars any other manufacturer thanks to no fewer than three versions of small Visa plus the full-fledged BX4TC. It appeared like they didn't know what route to take. Anyway, BX4TC had all faults that quattro had had (and largely had been cured of) like heavy front-engined design resulting severe understeer, it was underpowered and overweight. To choose that design at the time when nimble mid-engined cars were beating Audi was sheer folly. They entered three events, finished only once and were gone as quickly as they had appeared. Their recent success is everything that BX4TC project was not.