1982 Lancia Rally 037

It’s midnight in late January and there’s a clear sky overhead with thousands of twinkling stars and a full moon. The white light is intensified by the deep snow lying all around. Despite the biting cold there is a buzz in the air as hundreds of speculatory conversations about who’s going to win and who’s already retired are carried on among the Monte Carlo spectators high up on the Col du Turini in the Alps Maritime. Ears prick up and the atmosphere changes as what sounds like someone rapidly filing the edge of a piece of tin several kilometers away grabs their attention. C’est une Lancia is the excited response as the noise grows ever closer and more insistent. It’s a noise seldom heard in latter-day motor sport, the scream of a supercharger—an 037 is coming!

As so often happens with charismatic and successful competition cars, they are born out of necessity rather than on the whim of a designer, and very often it is rule changes that drive these conceptions. In 1975, world rallying rules changed; the bases of the then-current Groups 2 and 4 were altered with the idea of reducing costs. The cost of winning a World Championship Rally had been increased when, in 1973, Lancia had introduced the iconic Stratos, a car that carried all before it. The 1975 changes caused Fiat to think, and plan, another marketing strategy with the net effect that, virtually at the height of its powers, the decision was taken to drop the Stratos as the Fiat Group’s frontline factory rally car.