The Beginnings
With the advent of automobiles in the early 1900’s, man was eager to take these new marvels of technology and raced them as quickly as possible around any kind of track, and such the era of motorsport began with competitions such as Formula 1, NASCAR in the USA, MotoGP, etc. One such competition was Rally racing, a sport where drivers will race on an asphalt, dirt or even a snow track in the pursuit of the fastest time possible. The sport will get worldwide recognition when in 1973 the sanctioning body of F1, the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile) will inaugurate the World Rally Championship, or the WRC, a championship consisting of 13 rally events driven on surfaces ranging from gravel and tarmac to snow and ice.
One of the appeals that drove many people to the WRC in its early years was the fact that all the cars in the championship were regular stock cars anybody could buy, but by the begging of the 1980’s the main problem for the WRC were the big number of groups and the tons of rules and regulations teams had to obey pushing many of them out from the championship. But all was about to change in 1982.
Group B
In 1982 the head of the FIA Jean-Marie Balestre would restructure the WRC reducing the number of groups from 6 to 3, with the first two keeping the same structure and rules but the third being entirely new and unusual. The third group was named Group B, where the FIA would take away the rules and say anything goes, welcoming some of the most spectacular rally cars the world had ever seen, featuring four-wheel-drive cars producing up to 500 brake horsepower that could go from 0 to 100 km/h on a gravel road in 2 seconds.
It’s safe to say that car manufacturers like Audi immediately jump in the fray, with their Quattro seeing immediate success, with Lancia, Peugeot and MG following suit.
Group B managed to produce incredible rally stages, with fans falling in love almost immediately with many legends of the sport like Toivonen, Alen and Pond trying to win the championship. The sport also had quite a novelty for time in Michele Mouton being the most successful female driver in history, almost winning the WRC title in 1982.
Despite the huge success that Group B had, racing 500 horsepower monsters on a gravel road is not the safest past time someone could have. It all came to head in 1986 when Joaquim Santos driving a Ford RS200 lost control and collided with a crowd of rally fans killing three and injuring over 30. This horrific tragedy was followed by Toivonen’s Lancia Delta S4 losing control and plunging down a mountainside, bursting into flames and killing him and his co-driver, Sergio Cresta instanly.
Following this tragedy the FIA decided to ban Group B cars, deeming them simply too fast to compete safely.
https://www.wrc.com/en/misc/wrc-history
https://classicmotorsports.com/articles/rise-and-fall-group-b