Rocket Science

Built In The Twilight Of The Infamous Group B Era, The Unique, Naturally Aspirated Metro 6r4 Was A Unicorn Of The Genre. We Drive It

- John-Joevollans

NEW MOTORSPORT regulations are rarely cause to get excited. They’re mostly about tedious attention to detail such as wing and tyre widths. Group B, however, was very different.

It fired the collective imaginations of a generation of engineers and resulted in some of the most fearsome fourwheeled machines ever to see competition. They were loud, visually wild and ferociously fast.

Making a 300kW-plus MG Metro that could accelerate from a standstill to 100km/h in 3.2 seconds, regardless of the surface, was far from straightforward. It would involve an inordinate number of people from the UK’s car-making and motorsport industries coming together and finding innovative solutions to problems that most hadn’t even conceived a few short months before.

Like Aussies, the Brits love underdog stories. I think it’s written into our cultural DNA. Both countries seem to gravitate to those plucky few who go against the grain. So it was no accident when Austin Rover chose the little Metro to join the Group B ranks. We know you’re all familiar with Group B and its significant position in the pantheon of stage rallying. For those of you who’ve lost their memories, or who know nothing about it, consider this the very briefest of (re-)introductions.

By the end of the 1970s rallying was not only a hugely popular spectator sport, it was translating into sales for manufacturers. However, limitations in the rules meant that development was slow and makers such as Lancia and Renault were frustrated by the limitations placed upon them when designing gravel attack vehicles. There was a desire to reduce and simplify the rules to allow for faster, less restricted and more focused rally models to be created, without the need to manufacture so many road cars for homologation (200, down from 400).