Lancia Rally 037

Pininfarina drew it, with Enrico Fumia on the pen and Sergio Limone directing from Abarth, and the shape is unusual among 1980s exotics for being almost entirely about function. The front and rear sections are single composite clamshells that lift clear of the car, exposing the whole engine and both suspensions, because a rally mechanic's time on a service halt is measured in minutes. The proportions follow from that. A short cabin sits well forward, the rear deck runs long and flat under a full-width wing, and the wheelbase is stretched beyond the Beta Montecarlo section buried underneath. The roof carries a double bubble, an Abarth signature borrowed from the firm's small competition coupes of the 1950s and 1960s, and one of the few details on the car that is there purely for pleasure. The Stradale keeps nearly all of it, including a roll cage integrated into the structure rather than bolted in afterwards, which is why the road car looks so convincing standing still. In Martini Racing white with its red and blue stripes, the works version became one of the most reproduced liveries in motorsport, and it is what most people picture when the 037 comes up.

The 037's first season was a write-off. It debuted at the 1982 Rally Costa Smeralda and both works cars retired with gearbox failures, and the year went on being a development exercise rather than a campaign. 1983 was the payoff. Cesare Fiorio ran a selective programme, skipping Sweden entirely because snow belonged to Audi, and concentrated on events where a light rear-drive car could beat a heavier four-wheel-drive one. It opened at Monte Carlo, where Fiorio talked French police into clearing an icy stage, bought salt for a snowy one, and had his drivers stop mid-stage to swap between slicks and studs in roughly 45 seconds. Walter Röhrl and Markku Alén finished first and second, won 20 of the 31 stages, and put the best Audi 11m18s behind. Röhrl added the Acropolis and New Zealand, Alén took the Tour de Corse and Sanremo, and Lancia won the manufacturers' championship 118 points to Audi's 116. Hannu Mikkola took the drivers' title for Audi, with Röhrl second and Alén third. Alén won the 1984 Tour de Corse in an Evoluzione 2, the last WRC victory for a rear-wheel-drive car. Attilio Bettega was killed in an 037 on that same event a year later.

The 037 is the underdog in rallying's most retold story, and that has kept it visible in a way six world championship event wins alone would not. The Audi against Lancia season finally got a feature film in 2024, Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia, with Riccardo Scamarcio playing Cesare Fiorio and Daniel Brühl as Audi's Roland Gumpert, built around exactly the tactics that won Monte Carlo. Group B's short life did the rest. The era is treated as a lost golden age by people far too young to have watched it, and the 037 in Martini white sits alongside the quattro and the 205 T16 in that iconography: on posters, in scale-model cabinets, and in the paddock at historic events where genuine cars still run in anger. Games carry it to a younger audience, the Evoluzione 2 in DiRT Rally and the Stradale in Forza Horizon 5 and 6. And in 2021 Kimera Automobili built the EVO37, a restomod engineered by Claudio Lombardi and Sergio Limone with Miki Biasion involved, making around 500bhp. Very few forty-year-old rally cars generate a modern industry around themselves.

Most 037s live gently, and that shapes what goes wrong with them. Cars that sit develop storage problems first: perished fuel lines and hoses, seized brake and clutch hydraulics, tired dampers, and a supercharger that has not been turned in years. Recommissioning is the normal job on one of these, not restoration. The Volumex is the component owners think about. It is an Abarth-built Roots blower, factory spares for the rotors and casings dried up decades ago, and a rebuild means sending it to one of the handful of people who genuinely know them. Done properly it lasts. Done optimistically it does not. The bodywork is composite, so it does not rot, but it cracks around mounting points and takes real skill to repair invisibly. The steel structure underneath is the thing to watch, especially on a car with competition use in its past. Inside, it is a rally car with trim fitted. The cabin gets hot, the noise never stops, and interior parts, glass and switchgear are hard to replace because they were made in tiny numbers. None of that puts owners off. The 037 is one of the more approachable Group B cars to actually use.