Group B defined a brief and influential period of rallying in the 1980s. The FIA identifies the historic Group B period as 1982–1986, rather than four full seasons. Its historic regulations record that date range. The ranking below is an editorial judgment of the cars and their influence.

The rule that lit the fuse

Group A asked manufacturers to build 5,000 road cars before a rally car could run. Group B asked for 200, and only 20 more for an evolution version. Materials, layout and forced induction were barely policed. Turbo engines were scaled by an equivalency factor for class purposes, and minimum weights were low enough to be insulting.

So the smart move became obvious. Build a spaceframe mid-engined prototype, drape a silhouette of your hatchback over it, make 200 copies for rich customers, and go rallying with something that had nothing to do with the showroom.

The result was a grid of cars making more power than the tyres, the brakes or the roads could deal with. Ranked by what they actually contributed, not by how loud the onboard footage is.

The bottom three

7. MG Metro 6R4. The contrarian. A naturally aspirated 3.0-litre V6 in a car everyone else was turbocharging, chosen because throttle response on a loose surface beats peak power. The idea was correct and the execution was fragile, so it spent more time on flatbed trucks than on stages. The engine had a second life: a turbocharged derivative ended up in the Jaguar XJ220.

6. Ford RS200. The best-engineered car of the lot and the last to show up. Mid-mounted turbo Cosworth BDT, gearbox at the front for weight distribution, composite body, and a chassis that behaved like it had been designed by adults. It arrived with roughly one season to prove itself and never got the development time. Leftover road cars sold cheap for years afterwards, which now looks like the buying opportunity of the century.

5. Renault 5 Maxi Turbo. A mid-engined, rear-drive hatchback that had no business being competitive once four-wheel drive arrived, and stayed competitive on tarmac anyway. Every wide-arch hot hatch since owes it the silhouette.

The middle two

4. Lancia Delta S4. Supercharged and turbocharged at the same time, which sounds like a forum argument and was actually a serious answer to lag. The blower filled in the bottom, the turbo took over at the top, and the throttle response was reportedly closer to a normally aspirated engine than anything else in the class. Underneath a Delta shell was a tubular spaceframe with the engine behind the driver.

3. Lancia 037. The last rear-wheel-drive car to win the World Rally Championship manufacturers' title, in 1983, against a four-wheel-drive Audi. Lancia did it by picking tarmac fights, keeping the car light, and being better organised than everyone else. Supercharged rather than turbocharged, again for throttle response.

The top two

2. Audi Sport Quattro S1. Audi's five-cylinder turbo four-wheel-drive programme is the reason the rest of this list exists. The Quattro proved traction beat power in 1981, took manufacturers' titles in 1982 and 1984, and forced every rival to redesign from scratch. The short-wheelbase S1 with the full aero package was the last, maddest version, and the layout was already wrong by then — engine ahead of the front axle, understeer built in.

1. Peugeot 205 T16. The one that got the recipe right. Transverse turbo four mounted behind the driver, four-wheel drive, sensible packaging, and a team that treated reliability as a performance feature. Titles in 1985 and 1986. When the class died, the hardware went to Dakar and eventually up Pikes Peak, which is the most Group B afterlife imaginable.

Why it ended

1986 killed it. A crash in Portugal put a car into spectators, and later that season an accident in Corsica killed a crew. The FIA cancelled Group B for 1987 and binned the even wilder Group S replacement before it turned a wheel.

Group A took over. Homologation numbers went back up, power came down, and the decade belonged to the Delta Integrale — a car built from a real production platform that still won six straight manufacturers' titles. Rallying survived because the rules stopped asking whether a car was fast and started asking whether the sport could live with it.

The reason Group B still gets worshipped is that it was the last time anyone designed a rally car without that second question. Everything about it that people love is downstream of the thing that ended it. Admiring the cars does not require accepting the conditions in which they competed. Their engineering and their human consequences both belong in the history.

Updated September 5, 2026: corrected the date range and clarified the editorial nature of the ranking.