REVENGE: BEST SERVED COLD

Little has changed in many ways from the world of 1982. Then as now, a new World Rally Championship season began in Monte Carlo, with the FIA’s sporting arm, FISA, seeking to end spiralling costs and falling manufacturer numbers with a new category that was intended to revitalise the series.

That is the role which hybrid Rally1 seeks to play in 2022, while 40 years ago the new formula was the now-mythical Group B, FISA’s logic was simple: it was cheaper to build a competition car and make it look like a showroom model than to approach things in the opposite direction. Throughout the 1970s, Group 4 had cost manufacturers absurd sums in order to conjure supercar performance from their humdrum saloons. To the public at large, however, the money was wasted because a Ford Escort still looked like an Escort.

Jean-Marie Balestre, the FISA president, was a showman first and foremost. The French firebrand