RevRico said:I actually liked what they wound up with in the underway refueling bit, but BMW did it better a couple weeks ago and stole some of the thunder.
I had not seen the BMW refueling bit before watching the episode... very cool, but of course they were actually trying to be successful. And as Keith noted, the GT episode was probably filmed months prior.
In reply to Rodan :
Oh very true. I know the tent part was filmed in early November, there was a good picture of Hammond between Goldberg and the boxer they posted online. I imagine the actual scene was shot in summer or fall. Just a happy coincidence how it worked out timing wise.
The drive on one they did though, not only was it successful, but it demonstrated something I've thought about for a long time. In the not so far away future, I could see a system like that being used to swap fuel cells or battery packs on long haul trucks, serving from an automated hub. Even in it's current state they used in the show, that could be really nice on long road trips, swap drivers and refuel without ever getting off the road. Or even get a little use out of traffic jams and let people fill up as they sit and wait.
Sorry for dragging this off of the 037.
LanEvo said:Buddy of mine has one. Very impressive up close, though build quality is a small step above kit car standards.
Most race cars are, especially very limited numbers cars built around a production car.
In reply to markwemple :
Audi has two years of world rally championships to their name. 1982 and 1984. Lancia has 10. 1974, 1975. 1976, 1983. 1988, 1989,1990, 1991, and 1992. Fiat adds 1977, 1978, and 1980. Fiat/Lancia are THE most winning manufacturer on the World Rally Stage
markwemple said:Dis Audi all you want ... the sport was a real car, the Peugeot 205 and the others were race cars made to look like street cars.
That’s hardly relevant. The other cars you mentioned all met their respective homologation rules, otherwise they wouldn’t have been allowed to run
mad_machine said:Fiat/Lancia are THE most winning manufacturer on the World Rally Stage
By a country mile.
The only thing I needed to know was the rorhl quote "people asked why I signed with lancia. They said if I crashed I would die. I said I wasn't planning on having any crashes. "
So brutally efficient.
In reply to mad_machine :
WTF does tgat have to do eith anything I've said. FWIW, Fnut, I'v owned a 124 spider since 85. I'm quite familiar with their heritage. I was clarifying some of tge BS, and still BS comments made here. Nothing more. And Lancia is dead. While Audi owned the 24 Hours of LeMans for the 2000s. So what. I was adressing tge veginning of tge Killer B era and how important Audi was to it. Heck, is to it. And tgst 5 cylinder has the nickname tank in Germany for a reason. They'll do a million miles.
In reply to markwemple :
Soooooooo....which WRC event is a million miles long? Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were busy trying to dig your your nose-heavy pig out of a ditchbank...I'll carry on my lightweight RWD chariot of the gods. Sorry....
ae86andkp61 said:In reply to markwemple :
Soooooooo....which WRC event is a million miles long? Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were busy trying to dig your your nose-heavy pig out of a ditchbank...I'll carry on my lightweight RWD chariot of the gods. Sorry....
Quote for truth. That car sucks for transitioning, which is DIRE for rally.
ae86andkp61 said:In reply to markwemple :
Soooooooo....which WRC event is a million miles long? Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were busy trying to dig your your nose-heavy pig out of a ditchbank...I'll carry on my lightweight RWD chariot of the gods. Sorry....
At the time of Group B, stage rallies were way longer. Thousands of miles over 5 days or so, with MAYBE one overnight rest halt. I'd like to say one of the final Rally GBs was close to three thousand miles in length.
People focus on the killing-off of the ultra light CARS, but another major change after 1986 was limitations on how long a rally could be, as well as mandatory overnight rest halts, and limiting servicing. (Remember Lancia switching from slicks to studded ice tires mid-stage?)
I think this is a large part of why when you see International level Group B footage, it looks like they are just walking down the road rather than driving at 10/10ths. The crews are heavily fatigued and the handling was middling at best, so they were mostly just trying to keep it between the ditches.
markwemple said:In reply to mad_machine :
WTF does tgat have to do eith anything I've said.
Everything. Audi won two years worth of championships and everyone thinks they are rally gods. Fiat/Lancia did it 13 times and people consider them "also rans". Yes, Audi changed the face of Rallying forever with Quattro, there is no disputing that, but the company itself was a flash in the pan as far as the rallying world is concerned. I say that because it did not take long for Lancia to learn what Audi did, build something better and faster, and send the germans scampering back to where they came from. If Audi had truely been in it to win, they would have continued to challenge the Italians. By 1986, they were done.
World Championships won:
Lancia -10
Citroen -8
Peugeot -5
VW -4
Fiat, Subaru, Toyota, Ford -3
Audi -2
Renault, Talbot, Mitsubishi -1
Loved the piece, it's the best Clarkson has done this season. Lancia beat the mighty engineering machine of Audi with nothing more than duct tape and bailing wire. Give me a few hardcore racers over a room full of engineers in a rally anytime..
Knurled. said:ae86andkp61 said:In reply to markwemple :
Soooooooo....which WRC event is a million miles long? Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were busy trying to dig your your nose-heavy pig out of a ditchbank...I'll carry on my lightweight RWD chariot of the gods. Sorry....
At the time of Group B, stage rallies were way longer. Thousands of miles over 5 days or so, with MAYBE one overnight rest halt. I'd like to say one of the final Rally GBs was close to three thousand miles in length.
People focus on the killing-off of the ultra light CARS, but another major change after 1986 was limitations on how long a rally could be, as well as mandatory overnight rest halts, and limiting servicing. (Remember Lancia switching from slicks to studded ice tires mid-stage?)
I think this is a large part of why when you see International level Group B footage, it looks like they are just walking down the road rather than driving at 10/10ths. The crews are heavily fatigued and the handling was middling at best, so they were mostly just trying to keep it between the ditches.
Made me look, because I hadn’t heard about that.
I think you crossed up your units. Looks like the longest was 3465 km over 5 days, with 25% of that being special stages and the rest being transits. It was that sort of length for a long time. It’s now right about half that over 4 days. Still a pretty significant distance in both cases. Looks as if the maximum stage lengths are the same (roughly), there are just far fewer of them.
http://www.juwra.com/rac_rally_1985.html
Anyhow - Audi revolutionized rally, you can't deny that. Maybe they didn't win as many championships as other makes, but they triggered a step change in what rally cars were and they got their name firmly attached to the sport for good reason. The Quattro had the most visible evolution of a single platform as Group B got crazier and crazier and it's still firmly associated with the class - in large part because it was more clearly derived from the street car than most of the other Group B cars were. There's a lot to be said for that and you're allowed to respect it while still loving cars like the Stratos.
I found the part of the story about moving cars around to be double counted to be pretty amazing. Looking for more details though, I can't find anything about that. The closest I've seen is that rather than needing to move 200 cars to be double counted for the 400 minimum, the fia only required a total of 200. Is my Google Fu not good?
In reply to wae :
Group 4 required 400. (And IIRC, it was the Stratos that had cars double counted, they never actually built enough to meet homologation)
Group B required 200, with 20 "evolution" models allowed. There was some confusion as to whether the evolution models had to be a separate run from the original 200. Ford pulled some of the 200 RS200s and remade them as Evolutions, for example, and assigned them new chassis numbers.
And I did find a copy of B255 - the GSL-SE was indeed the homologation for the Group B RX-7. All the actual rally stuff was in the evolution of type, so they only needed to make twenty of them.
Let us not forget that Lancia built the coolest rallye, nay, coolest car of all time, the Stratos.
Appleseed said:Let us not forget that Lancia built the coolest rallye, nay, coolest car of all time, the Stratos.
Lancia changed Rallying with the Stratos just as much as Audi with with Quattro. It's also a little known fact that as Fiat was looking to replace the 124 Rally Spider, they built a couple of X1/9 prototypes. They went with the 131 because the X was faster than the almighty Stratos.
Unfortunately for the Stratos, it has the opposite issue than the Quattro. With A arms up front and a strut based rear suspension, it's natural cornering attitude was to be sideways. The X on the other hand, cornered flat and with finesse, making it faster than the V6 powered Stratos. The X, btw, was powered by the spiders 16v 2 litre engine instead of the 1.3/1.5 SOHC engine
Wow, what an amazing pissing match this has tuned into. I thought we were talking about a cool TV show featuring cool cars?
As far as the Gran Tour is concerned I really feel it's hitting it's stride. They've has some outstanding episodes this year. High point include the tank. the stunning well thought out and scientifically proven old Jaguar reliability piece and the crowning jewel so far from both seasons the 037 rally bit. I also hear it's Amazon primes top watched/launched show along with season one of the Man in the High Castle. I was a bit worried last year, but this year I feel they've earned another three year contract down the line.
I'm really surprised we've got the Audi Vs Lancia pissing match going on. For those of us that lived through and loved the Group B era they were all hero's. I don't hold Lancia or Audi above each other. It was the most amazing arms race to watch. I grabbed the comics (Autosport and Motoring News) eagerly each week to see who had added a few Mega Tons to their arsenal. Literally every event one of the manufacturers would add more weather it was horse power, wings, new cars whatever, it was a mazing to see it just keep coming.
As for calling the Quattro Sport more of a real car than the 037 that's pushing it. Don't forget the 037 used a production Beta Monte Carlo central tub then added space frames front and rear plus kevlar bodywork, but the central tub was a production unit. The Sport Quattro used a UR Quattro shell that they cut over a foot out of the middle (320mm) and then grafted on the more upright windscreen and pillars from the Audi 5000 and a different rear roof. Seems pretty far from 'production' to me. I"m not dissing it, I love them both equally.
Don't forget we went from this in 1981
To this only four years later.
A(nother) magical time in motorsport we'll never see again.
I don't think that it's much of a pissing match. More of an educational opportunity, really. Fantastic story.
Even if the Quattros weren't coming off the production line, they LOOK like evolutions of the production car and they use the same basic drivetrain layout. While the 037 might have some Monte Carlo heritage in it, you can't really spot it - even if you've ever seen a Monte Carlo in person. That's what I was getting at. The Audis looked like mutated street cars, the Lancias looked like nothing else. The Delta S4 was so brutal in execution, the body panels were just there because the rules said you needed some.
I do love the Stratos, evil handling and all. I'd love to build one someday. Please send money.
In reply to Adrian_Thompson :
The Sport was a production car, though! Audi 80 ("4000") 2-door doors, roof, and windshield/pillars.
When people find a 2 door 4000 in the States, it usually gets cut up to make a SQ clone.
I will admit to preferring the looks of the uncluttered by livery street car version of the 037
I assume that all that front overhang on the Lancia was to get more weight up there? It also makes it more pretty, but otherwise seems unnecessary.
If you're a fan on the 037 you owe it to yourself to buy this book. It's $45 on Amazon but worth every penny.
I haven't been following Grand Tour (the first couple episodes didn't hook me) but i went back and watched this one due to this thread. I enjoyed learning some things i didn't know, and as usual the Walter Rohrl interview content was the funniest/most interesting part of whatever he's interviewed in.
I'm kind of shocked that people are saying this is a high point of the show, though. It seemed 'just good' to me. I found the refueling bit to be worse than the average bit from old UK Top Gear. Makes me wonder if i didn't get the right idea the first time that the show just wasn't that great? I'll probably go back and watch all of it eventually. There's not much car video content on the internet that i don't consume at some point.
Maybe my standards for rate of consumption are just getting dysfunctional. Being able to speed up YouTube videos is about the best thing that's happened on the internet lately. I used to play those variety of rythm/song games and sight-read notes (down to 16th) up to ~370 beats per minute and pound out 2 thousand notes in 3 minutes. I berkeleyed up one of my hands a little and now i don't do that but i DO speed up slow talkers on Youtube to 2x and wish every video player on the planet had the same option. Weirdo..
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