The Group B era, 1982-1986: the rules, the escalation, the ban

A note on tone. Four spectators and two crew members died in the events described on this page. They are stated because they are the reason the category ended and because the game models that consequence. They are not entertainment.

What the era was

A homologation rule so permissive that manufacturers stopped adapting road cars and started building race cars with a road-car run attached.

Group B arrived for 1982 as part of a full category overhaul. To homologate, a manufacturer needed 200 production cars, against Group 4's 400, plus 20-car evolution batches permitted every twelve months. There was no power ceiling. Forced induction carried a 1.4× displacement equivalence. Groups 1 to 4 stayed eligible through the 1982 transition, and Walter Röhrl took that year's drivers' title in a Group 4-derived Opel Ascona 400.

Power went from roughly 250 hp in 1981 to over 500 hp by 1986, and four-wheel drive went from novelty to prerequisite. The 20-car evolution clause is the mechanism: it made a twelve-month development cycle not just possible but compulsory, because your rival's next evolution was already homologated.

The era in dates

Date	What happened
1982	Group B introduced alongside Groups A, C and N. 200 cars plus 20-car evolutions; no power limit. Groups 1-4 still eligible for the transition season.
1983	Lancia's supercharged, rear-drive 037 beats Audi to the makes title by two points, the last rear-wheel-drive manufacturers' title in the championship's history, while Mikkola takes the drivers' crown for Audi.
1985	Peugeot's mid-engined 205 T16 sweeps both titles; Salonen scores 127 points from five wins. Attilio Bettega is killed in a Lancia 037 on the Tour de Corse.
late 1985	The escalation cars arrive together: Lancia Delta S4 (twincharged, around 480-500 hp, 890 kg), Ford RS200, MG Metro 6R4, Audi Sport quattro S1 E2.
5 Mar 1986	Rally Portugal, SS1 at Lagoa Azul. Joaquim Santos's RS200 leaves the road into a packed crowd: three spectators killed outright, a fourth dies in hospital, more than thirty injured. Every works crew withdraws that evening; the rally continues and a local privateer wins it in a Renault 5 Turbo.
2 May 1986	Tour de Corse, SS18 Corte-Taverna, seven kilometres in, one year to the day after Bettega died on the same event. Henri Toivonen and Sergio Cresto are killed when their Delta S4 leaves the road and burns.
3 May 1986	FISA's executive moves to ban Group B from the championship for 1987, and cancels the planned Group S successor. Group A becomes the top class.
mid-1986	Emergency measures inside the running season: evolutions curbed, ground-effect aerodynamic devices banned, moves toward shorter stages, fire systems made mandatory.
18 Dec 1986	The 1986 drivers' title is finally settled when FISA annuls the Sanremo result. Kankkunen is champion on 118 points; Alén had held the championship for eleven days.

Group S, and what a cancelled rulebook costs

Group S was announced in 1985 for a 1987 start: only 10 cars to homologate and a power cap around 300 hp, with far freer engineering. Prototypes were built: the Lancia ECV, the Toyota 222D with as many as eleven cars, an Opel Kadett Rallye 4x4, a Lada Samara S-prototype. An Audi 002 and a Group S RS200 were planned. All of it was cancelled in May 1986.

That is the era's real lesson for anyone running a team: a rulebook can make your research worthless overnight, and no amount of development budget argues with it.

What a weekend looked like

Cars away at one-minute intervals. Often fewer than half the field finishing. Gravel and ice-note crews running the route minutes ahead and radioing back what the road was doing. Helicopters moving parts. Chase cars and small armies of mechanics working at the roadside, because the central service park did not exist yet. Night stages. Fuel brewed to the edge of the rulebook. No pace notes at all on the RAC, which stayed deliberately blind until 1990.

How the game models it

A ruleset named Group B, running 1982 to 1986, with the era's own dials:

Homologation is Group B: 200 cars plus 20-car evolutions, which sets what appears in the catalogue and what it costs.
Notes are numeric and note crews run ahead: the systematised craft the previous era was still inventing.
Service is chase cars. Roadside repair is legal, so the era's crews recover from damage that would end a modern rally.
Tyres are an open war, changeable away from a service point, with ice crews feeding you information minutes old. Locking tyres for a whole leg is a modern rule and is not applied here.
Danger climbs across the era rather than sitting at one figure, because it did. Death and injury are modelled, described in words, and never expressed as a percentage.
The ban is a dated data row, not a difficulty spike: from 1987 a Group B car may not start a world round, and the field is re-formed with era-legal machinery rather than thinned out. The long version.

Your Group B cars are not deleted in 1987. They keep their value, they run where they are still legal, and over decades they become the most valuable objects your team owns.

Playing it

This is the era where the game is most likely to hurt you. The machinery is the fastest it has ever been relative to the roads it runs on, the money is the biggest it has been, the evolution cycle punishes standing still, and the category has five years to live whether or not you have finished paying for the car. If you arrive in 1982 with a twelve-year-old team and a driver who is 38, the sensible plan and the exciting one are not the same plan.