Lancia 037: How Lancia Beat Audi With a Slower Car

Group B Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlRHygh59386nA5Cost2pUW4p3OkNMlK7In January 1983, high in the mountains above Monte Carlo, men working for Lancia went out onto frozen rally stages in the middle of the night.They were spreading agricultural salt across the ice.Not because they were cheating.Because nobody had thought to write a rule saying they couldn't.Lancia was preparing to fight Audi's revolutionary four-wheel-drive Quattro with a car that should already have been obsolete: the rear-wheel-drive 037.Audi had more traction.Lancia had less weight, instant supercharged power, a gearbox mechanics could replace in around twelve minutes—and Cesare Fiorio, a team boss willing to exploit every gap he could find in the rulebook.Against almost every expectation, it worked.In 1983, the Lancia 037 defeated Audi and won the World Rally Championship for manufacturers.It remains the last rear-wheel-drive car ever to do it.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━📚 ORDER MY NEW BOOK "History Written by Losers" — out now!The true story of global power has been whitewashed by the victors and the fixers. This book tells the side of history they tried to bury.👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🏁 IN THIS EPISODEIn this video, we uncover the extraordinary story of the Lancia Rally 037: how Lancia deliberately rejected the four-wheel-drive revolution, engineered an incredibly light and serviceable rear-wheel-drive rally car—and then used strategy, loopholes and some of the greatest drivers of the era to defeat Audi at its own game.Why Lancia Rejected Four-Wheel Drive:How Cesare Fiorio and engineer Sergio Limone looked at the dominant Audi Quattro and focused not on its traction, but on its weight, understeer, complexity and difficulty to repair.Turning the Beta Montecarlo Into a Group B Weapon:How Abarth and Dallara stripped the Lancia Beta Montecarlo down to its central steel safety cell, added chromoly tubular subframes and transformed a road-going coupé into the SE037 rally car.Why the 037 Had Two Bubbles in Its Roof:How Pininfarina created the distinctive raised sections above the driver and co-driver simply to make space for their helmets without increasing the entire roof height or hurting the car's aerodynamics.The Ferrari Engineer Behind the Engine:How the 037's two-litre four-cylinder descended from Aurelio Lampredi's famous Fiat twin-cam architecture—the same basic engine family that had already powered Fiat to multiple World Rally Championships.Why Lancia Used a Supercharger Instead of a Turbo:How the mechanically driven Abarth Volumex blower eliminated the turbo lag that plagued early-1980s rally cars, giving the rear-wheel-drive 037 immediate throttle response and allowing drivers to control its slides with extraordinary precision.Turning Waste Boost Into Gearbox Cooling:How Abarth routed excess supercharger pressure toward the gearbox oil cooler, converting air that would otherwise have been dumped into useful cooling.Why the 037 Had Two Rear Shock Absorbers Per Wheel:How Lancia deliberately doubled the rear Bilstein dampers to control heat generated by a powerful rear-wheel-drive car constantly sliding and spinning its tyres across long rally stages.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🔗 LINKS & SUPPORT📚 The book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH📺 Documentary channel: https://youtube.com/@thatjasonhassett🔔 Subscribe for weekly post-mortems on the cars, companies and engineering decisions that shaped modern motoring.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━#Lancia037 #Lancia #GroupB #WRC #Rally #AudiQuattro #WalterRohrl #MarkkuAlen #CesareFiorio #CarHistory #AutomotiveHistory #Motorsport #CarNerd #TheCarNerd