It’s 30 years since rallying’s legendary Group B cars were outlawed at World Championship level and this autumn’s Dayinsure Wales Rally GB 27-30 October will mark this milestone with heroic stars and fearsome cars from that revered era.
Surviving drivers from the sport’s most audacious epoch are being invited to attend the event as official ‘Rally Legends’ on Saturday 29 October at the RallyFest event.
Often termed ‘Formula 1 in the forests’, Group B regulations were introduced for the 1982 season with only a few restrictions and allowing almost unlimited power. Cars could be mid-engined two-seaters and manufacturers only had to produce 200 examples that bore no more than a passing resemblance to showroom models to meet minimal homologation requirements.
As a result, in the four years between 1983 and 1986, rallying developed further and faster than it had done in the previous four decades.
Group B took the sport to the absolute edge of performance, but put it beyond common sense and reasonable safety levels. When FISA, the then world governing body, culled the category following a series of terrifying accidents, Group B was immortalised.