Audi S4 - Group B Rallying (New Video)

Today's World Rally Championship (WRC) is a superb competition, much more interesting than F1. You don't have a Schumacher winning nearly all (boring) races, because young drivers are given the chance to race with top gear and conditions change more than they do at Formula 1, where the same tracks, under similar weather conditions, are challenged by the same tires and the same rules, fueled by the same money, year-after-year...

However, the WRC is becoming similar to the F1WC in some ways: (1) the time differences are getting shorter and shorter and (2) technology is contributing more to shortening the gap between extreme talent and "just good" drivers, rather than contributing to easily highlight the best of the best.

There was a time when technology highlighted the finest and only the finest. On the early 1980s, the "Group B" category was for manufacturers to show off their nearly *unrestricted* #1 machines. That was rallying!

The Group B monsters were so powerful that, for example:
- the cars could do 0-100 kph in 2 seconds - nearly as fast as today's F1 cars;
- in 1986, during the Rally of Portugal, Henri Toivonen lapped the exact same Estoril circuit that would be used for that year's F1 race, and scored a best time that would have put him on the 6th place on the F1 starting grid!
- cars had none of today's "softening" technology (progressive traction control, perfect power steering...), meaning that any driver's lack of concentration or excess would probably cause a severe accident.

Here are some of the finest Group B cars ever built:
- Lancia 037 (2 wheel drive - 2WD)
- Lancia S4 (4WD)
- Peugeot 205 T16 (4WD)
- Audi Quattro (4WD)
- MG Metro 6R4 (4WD)
- The Renault 5 Turbo (2WD)
- Ford RS200 (4WD)
- Ferrari 288 GTO (2WD)

The Ford RS200, driven by Joaquim Santos on the 1986 Portuguese rally would start a sequence of high profile crashes than would kill Group B: Santos' Ford took the lives of over 20 spectators at Lagoa Azul; and Henri Toivonen's Lancia would kill him at Corsica, a few weeks later. That was it.

Just watch today's video featuring the Audi S4 and listen to nearly 600 hp of brute force! It is very, very impressive.

Enjoy these 43 secs:

arturmarques_dot_com_audi_s4_600k_43s.rm [3342 KB RM file]

To watch the video, just right click its link above, chose "save as" to somewhere on your PC, and then play it with Real Player (free). This is a high quality (600 kbps) file. Do not try to play it from the website, because you won't have enough bandwidth.

This video is also available from the videos page.

If you're into rallying and supercars, I am sure you'll just love

The World's Greatest Rally Cars (2001)

Best possible prices for the DVD edition are:

for european costumers: http://www.amazon.co.uk (£18.99 ~ 27.6€*) [direct link to item]

for american costumers: http://www.amazon.com (26.96 USD) [direct link to item]

*considering 1£ = 1.45313€