The Absolute INSANITY of Group B Rally

Group B Rules, the car must have 4 wheels, rules end.

The most batshit insane racing series. The most batshit insane drivers The most batshit insane cars The most batshit insane spectators

Timo Salonen looking like a radio shack employee, wearing glasses, and smoking a pack between stages. Elite

Fun fact: Michele Mouton is now FIA Safety Delegate, and works WRC events! Her job includes telling people off for standing where cars could crash to. There's an FIA video about it.

My favorite thing about the human species' propensity towards innovation, is that at some point in almost every major institution, we collectively said 'fuck it, let's see how fast this thing can really go'

I remember seeing a comment somewhere about how the drivers just saw the spectators as trees. If they saw them as people, they couldn't drive.

*Group B sound like a prototype product that was shelved in the basement and forgotten for being too dangerous.*

Even Slapshoes respects the time honored tradition of slapping some Dark Synthwave music over clips of Group B rally.

Group B was the Rally equivalent of "Hold my beer."

Maybe to give you an idea about the absolute insanity that was Group B. The Lancis Delta S4 was Lancias purppose build Group B car and their answer to the likes of the Peugeot 205 or the Audi Sportsquatro. It was one of the first cars designed with computer technology, it used stuff like electrically timed direct injection and more. It had a mid mounted 1.8 L 4 cylinder engine which was both super and turbocharged. The official power output was about 450 hp, but many said that it was more like 500+ hp in actuallity. And they apparently were able to crank it up to 1000 hp at 5.5 bar on the testing block. The whole car barely weighted a ton. And they once did a track test at Estoril with a cranked up 800 hp version that laped only a few seconds of the F1 cars at the time, which were in their own turbo steroid age with power trains cranking out 1000+ hp in qualifying settings on a regular basis. So yeah, they drove cars with F1 level performance with barely any saefty meassures and on tiny wheels on gravel, dirt and ice, with humans as the track frontier. What could possibly go wrong.

> Stops car, removes dismembered finger from the frame. > "just another job day"

"Name a combination of YouTuber and subject you didn't know you needed." This is my answer.

The real insane people are the ones who stand in the middle of the road when a 10k RPM rally car is barreling towards them

Word has it that the only thing that kept Group B cars from literally flying was the weight of the drivers massive balls

Group B is the optimal out come of a conversation that goes like this "Think we can get that to work?" "I dunno probably, might as well try."

Look man, to each their own, I love and appreciate all motorsports (F1, WEC, Nascar, etc.) but i will never understand how someone can watch a rally and not immediately consider it the greatest motorsport in the world. It's literal art, the sound, the dust clouds, the locations of the stages.

The thing that still gets me the most about GroupB is the time period. This was the 80s. Not the 70s, 60s, or 50s. Everything else had been pretty well sanitized by then, but rally just got even more insane.

The reason Group B is so beloved is because it's one of the rare series in history that actually captured what racing is about... Creating the fastest most powerful car with crazy engineering and finding a driver that's crazy enough to push it to the limits... Too many rules about everything is what ultimately dulled all motorsports

As an F1 fan, Jean Marie Balestre and the FIA in general is something you NEED to look into. Balestre was a literal SS officer for Occupied France, his successor Max Mosely was the son of the fascist British politician Oswald Mosely, and the antics that both men got up to could fill TOMES.

*Group B, the Florida Man of Racing.*