Group B - ‘you couldn’t give them away’

Unfortunately we won’t know until we get in to the future and look back….cars may not even have much value in the same timeline…it might be something completely different. People from 86 watched rallying and rally cross in huge numbers - they don’t do that anymore and homologation specials are few and far between.

Point is you didn't know in 86 and you don't know today (if you were old enough) But everyone looks back with regret as if they had a crystal ball.

I dabbled in finding group B and 4 cars for people in the late 90s. After inflation some of them would've been plenty cheaper than when they were attempting to offload them when new.

It was clear, to me at least, that they would go through the roof eventually. They were legendary at that point even if they didn't yet fetch telephone numbers and they certainly weren't making any more.

What has surprised me is the values of the Group A stuff. I still think of a M3 E30 as a ten grand car.

In terms of modern equivalents I don't think there'll be one, it was a unique set of circumstances in time never to be repeated, so they'll be even more ludicrously priced in future.

Theres a genuine RS200 for sale at £200k in europe, going to look at it..

Lancia Delta S4 Stradale for sale in Switzerland 700k euros. Four pretty basic pictures but it says it is being restored. Is that bad English and actually means it has been restored?

https://www.carandclassic.com/l/C1568297

Meanwhile, in Canada....
https://racemarket.net/rally/rally-cars-for-sale/h...

A lot of big price rises have come from the USA 25 year import rule.
Buy a 20yr old car that the yanks can't get then wait 5 years then profit.
Same for race cars, buy an oldish racer then wait for it to be eligible for historic racing.

I would say there were deffo 200 metro's made, of the others I doubt Todt would be that dumb, he would want to do things right, and there were a lot of road based 205's rallying in France in those days.

I would doubt Lancia made 200 S4's or Ford RS200's and I don't know about short Quattro's.

The Lancia story was about the 037 actually, again a car you rarely see in road form which adds to the story! But this was Clarkson who also said Lancia had no money in the same story, utter garbage and written by a man with a love in for Lancia anyway.

My question about E30 M3, you still see a ton of them abroad, they cannot All be based on original cars,m but they all look, sound and seem to be PROPER M3's!

Does anyone know how many were made over all the versions, bearing the only one you can rally is the 2.3 basic version I think.
I speculatively looked at buying one in the early 00's but was put off by an M specialist who told me why some were cheap and some dear!!

You can generally rally a 2.5 with no issue but not in events with strict homolgation rules (no evolutions of a current model were allowed in Group A rallying)

My mate has one with a 2.5 Millington that he takes to demo events at home and abroad

The RS200 owners forum had/has a list of chassis numbers/etc and a reasonable history on a lot of the cars. In total there were more than 200, albeit only when combining the ‘200 required for homologation’ (which appears to come up a few cars short) and the extra ‘Evolution’ models that could be made after the first 200.

This indicates Audi built 214 short Quattros, roughly in line with the total of Fords. https://www.historicclassics.com/20/recently-sold/...

Another version of the story I have read somewhere about Lancia was that they did build 200 sets of parts, somewhat loosely assembled into complete-ish cars for the inspectors to count. As soon as the homologation was granted, about 50 of them were disassembled and put on the shelf as spare parts, and 50 or so sent to the competition department for conversion to rally cars for the works and customer teams, leaving no more than 100 road cars for them to try to sell.