Lancia Delta Integrale

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Fancy owning a motorsport legend? Paul Davies looks at true classics that made their names on rally stages and race tracks, and still provide fine drives today

Nottingham, November 1985, before the start of the Lombard RAC Rally, and the first time I’d seen Henri Toivonen for twelve months. I wished the Finnish star good luck, he headed for the British forests and I got on a ‘plane to a sports car race in Malaysia. Henri went on to score his second RAC victory, this time in Lancia’s newly homologated Delta S4. He repeated the win on the following Monte Carlo, and died when he crashed in Corsica in May.

Henri’s accident wasn’t the cause, but it hastened the end of the wonderful Group B era of rally supercars.

The four-wheel-drive, 450bhp, mid-engine, turbocharged S4 existed for just over a year, but like the Peugeot 205 T16, the Audi Sport Quattro and the MG Metro 6R4, it was just too bloody fast. But it wasn’t the end of the Delta rally car; in first HF and then Integrale form the car was to win the next six consecutive world championships for the famous Lancia name.

However the Lancia that won from 1987 to 1992 was very different from the S4. To kill of excess speed, new Group A rules demanded it would be a mildly modified version of the production car. Lancia added fourwheel- drive to the top model Delta HF Turbo of 1984-85, and increased the front-mounted engine’s capacity from 1.6-litre to 2.0 litres, to give 165bhp in production trim and the maximum permitted 300bhp in rally tune. Like Mitsubishi and Porsche, Lancia used twin, counterrotating balance shafts to smooth out vibrations in the hard worked four-cylinder engine.

As Lancia steamrollered onwards to win 46 world rallies, hot hatch fans benefited from a series of evermore capable and more powerful production cars developed solely to keep the Italian team winning. Juha Kankkunen (‘87 and ‘91) and Miki Biasion (‘88 and ‘89) were Drivers’ champions in the Delta.

The HF 4WD of 1987 gave way to the Integrale 8v (eight valve) in ‘88, adding a useful 20bhp in the process, and the following year four valves per cylinder pushed the power output of the 1995cc Integrale 16v to a heady 200bhp.

‘Evolution 1’ and ‘Evo 2’ models of ‘91 and ‘92 upped power to 215bhp for the on-sale version, whilst rally car output far exceeded that of the banned S4! At the same time water injected intercooling, engine mapping electronics and the operation of the three 4WD differentials (mechanical front and rear, viscous centre) became ever more clever. Yet another rule change effectively outlawed the Integrale for 1993, and road car production ceased that year when a new generation Fiat-based Delta appeared.

The Integrale was not just a limited production special: some 44,000-plus cars were made in its sevenyear life - all of them left hand drive, although many RHD conversions were undertaken (it’s not as nice to drive though). Now Integrales are a sought after alternative to the Sierra Cosworths of the era, and considered by many to be a more engaging drive than the high-tech Subaru Impreza and Mitsubishi Evos that were to follow.