A Visit to Lancia Rally
Headquarters
In December 2 1985 I had the
privilege to be taken to see the Lancia Rally headquarters in Torino.
My sincere friends at Lancia, including Enrico Ferrero and Emanuale
Garibaldi arranged a visit to these premises at the old Abarth factory
at Corso Marche 38 in Torino.
After testing both the 037 Rally
(one of the actual Martini cars that had recently finished fourth in
the San Remo Rallye) and an early production Delta S4 we all retired
to a fabulous ristorante "Papedelli" in the outer suburbs of
Torino. Here we spent a wonderful two hours enjoying, not only the
company of some of the people from Lancia that make the cars win world
rally championships and endurance races, but also partaking of a fine
repast of excellent Italian food and wine. Some of the items I noted
on the menu included raw marinated peppers, liquorice spinach, baby
quail eggs in a delicious pink sauce, gnocchi unlike any you have
tasted, beans in sweet sauce, cheese with peppers and, I think,
cinnamon, thin lamb with delicate potato slices, etc. For sweets we
had peaches in a honey sauce with nuts, and really scrumptious
chocolate cake. Coffee was followed by Amaro Petrus.
Then they suggested that we
return to the Rally preparation centre and join with the service crews
and others who stayed behind to help them celebrate the Delta S4 debut
victory in the RAC Rally of Great Britain that had finished the
previous Saturday.
Dott Claudio Lombardi conducted
us through the spotlessly clean workshops. The fully tiled floor,
benches, tool chests, vehicle hoists, in fact everything was like it
was brand new and had never been used. Buth this building had been
Lancia's rally workshops since the development of the Stratos in the
early seventies.
Over 200j people are employed,
including technical, design, drawing, machinists, body panel and
paint, mechanics, research staff, planners, publicity, cleaners and
the rally coordinating programmers. There is a fully serviced canteen,
change rooms, lounge, board room etc. The workshops have fully
enclosed air conditioned rooms for engine, gearbox and drive train
assembly. Most of the mechanics are in clean blue overalls, while the
others have sparkling white coats and nothing ever seems to have a
trace of grease of dust. The entire building is heated to around 20
degrees celsius.
The rally programme has a big
budget from FIAT with considerable assistance financially from Martini
to add to their winning ability. Currently the main competition comes
from Peugeot, but Audi are still around and the Japanese are starting
to learn how to win. The programme is continuous and at that time
there was a crew doing ice testing in Finland, another using a section
of closed roads in the Swiss Alps as a build up to the Monte Carlo
Rally and Vic Preston was completing a long term test in Kenya in
preparation for the Safari Rally the following Easter.
As well as preparing the factory
cars, they assisted in the preparation and building of 11 client cars
for prominent teams. Additional to the building of rally cars, there
was a separate section that looked after the preparation of the 20
service and support vans. These were all white FIAT diesels with
discrete Lancia, Magnetti Marelli, Pirelli and Martini decaling.
Cesare Fiorio's personal chase car was a Beta HPE Volumex, painted
nondescript mid grey but with martini stripes on the C pillars.
Whilst the celebration of
victory in the RAC Rally got under way for the employees we were shown
the two 037 being built for the Safari. This would be the last time
that this version would be used for a World Championship Rally by the
factory. This decision had been made as it was felt that this car had
proven strength and all the testing that had taken place over the last
2 years in Africa should not be wasted. The ZF gearboxes would have
longer throws and wider ratio spacing, and the cars would be
strengthened even further. One car, chassis number ZLA151ARO-00000418,
number plate TO W67787, was already nearing completion, and had its
own build bay and hoist.
The second car would be started
in three weeks, just before Christmas. These cars also had engines
enlarged to 2111cc. Sitting over in one corner was 037 number plate TO
09010D, which had taken Henri Toivonen to third place in the San Remo
Rally, and I was informed that this car would be retired now and would
never be used again in competition. It was undecided as to whether it
would reside in retirement at the Lancia museum or the Carl Biscaretti
Museum across the other side of Torino.
Over the years that the 037 had
been the factory entry in rallies some 20 cars had been built plus 2
early prototypes, but many of these had been destroyed whilst a few
had been sold off to Italian national teams. It was explained that the
037 engine had been derived from the production engine and in fact
used the same crankcase casting, whereas the new S4 engine was
completely new with a special light alloy crankcase and cylinder
liners in aluminium. This had been developed in conjunction with a
small specialist factory in Italy. It also used a special forged
crankshaft. Terms like nickel magnesium alloy and tecnol where
mentioned. The cylinder head was also a special casting with four
valves per cylinder.
The S4 project had been
initiated in April 1983, and the first car had begun testing at the
FIAT test circuit at La Mandria in August 1984. Thereafter testing
continued in Sardinia in March and April 1985. Prototype cars run in
events such as the Costa Smeralda, Mille Pistes in France and selected
Italian national rallys. Then followed lengthy testing in Toscana, in
July and September using roads that are pan of the San Remo rally
course. The final test took the car to the Algave Rally in Spain.
A lot of development work had
taken place on the visco system with the Ferguson System split torque
central differential. the same as used by both Ford and Peugeot. They
had developed a system whereby they could change the torque split
front to rear in 20 minutes. The front and rear differentials were
built by ZF (the road version of the S4) has no anti-lock system on
the front differential.)
The development of the combined
Super and Turbo charging. had been taking from aircraft engines, but
this was the first time it had been tried in a car. A special bypass
valve cut out the supercharger after 5000 rpm. On gravel the two
forced induction systems worked together up to those revs when the
turbo took over. The benefit was the low rev torque by the
supercharger assisted in removing the turbo lag which had made some
developing turbo cars difficult to drive. Horsepower figures were not
revealed but it had been decided to limit the road version to 250 bhp!
In preparation for the Monte
Carlo Rallye, one car was now carrying out snow testing on the Gran
San Bernardo Pass which was now closed for winter, due to snow.
However, Lancia had received special permission to carry out testing
there. They were sorting out front to rear ratios. Whilst Pirelli had
been testing special tyres for the S4. In late December special tests
will be carried out in north Finland in preparation for the Swedish
Rally in February. From mid December, all the drivers for the Monte
Carlo Rallye, Alen Biasion and Toivenon, would be charging over the
Rallye route in practice cars under the
supervision of Cesare Fiorio who
had chosen these three for that event.
In a set of tests carried out in
early November, Lombardi stated that the S4 had been timed at 2.8 sec
from zero to 100 kmph and other figures showed that the car
accelerated as quickly as a Cosworth engined Formula One car up to 400
metres, despite the rally car weighing 990 kgs.
After this most interesting of
tours we were able to join the mechanics and others celebrating the
RAC quinella and whilst most could not speak anything other than their
native Italian, some of the older service crew members had picked up
sufficient English to regail us with some interesting and remarkable
stories of happenings within the rally fraternity. Some could never be
printed. However, it proved that these people, though fiercely
patriotic to Lancia and their jobs, also have the ability to work in
lots of enjoyment into their involvement with the Martini team. I
wondered if they needed someone to wash the rally cars at the next
event. It was about the best service I could offer.
Grahame Ward
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