The Good Ole Days

I have a good friend who likes to repeat something his brother often says about the good ole days: they weren't really that good. Sure it would be cool to be a sheriff in the old west, but never taking a bath and not having access to a decent cup of coffee doesn't sound like paradise. Elizabethan England holds great romance for many, but no indoor plumbing and a street that doubled as a sewer is no good either. So, in most cases I would agree...the good ole days really weren't that good.

There are, however a few exceptions, and one of them comes from the sport of Rally Car Racing. Since we in the US are mostly unfamiliar with rally racing, here's a quick primer: rally racing is the racing of cars in variously modified states on track surfaces of any combination of dry dirt, mud, gravel, pavement or snow. The track is in many places only about a car and a half wide, and can wind through narrow city streets, mountains, forests and a variety of other challenging environments. The track is so challenging that the driver has a navigator whose job it is to call out the upcoming turns so that the driver can be prepared.

In 1982, FIA sanctioned the Group B series of rally racing. Unlike Group A (production vehicles) and Group C (limits on weight and fuel), Group B had very few limitations on materials used, power levels and required very few production versions of the car to be built to qualify. This meant the series was as close to "anything goes" as possible- cars produced insane amounts of horsepower and were some of the most technologically advanced of the time. This also meant they were extremely difficult to drive, and that margins of error were even smaller than that of other classes of rally racing. The combination resulted in some of the most exciting racing in the history of motorsports.

Sadly, Group B was abruptly dissolved just 4 years after its inception after a series of high-profile accidents painted it in a bad public light. This included a collision with spectators (who routinely stand at the edges and even on the track at rally races) and a terrible accident that killed the 1986 championship leader and his navigator. Group B was both a thrilling an unforgiving racing series, and its abrupt cancellation only adds to its allure as a pinnacle of motorsport. Here is some must-watch raw footage from those four years of glory:



Nothing like Group B has been seen before or since- but if you ask those who would know, they''ll tell you about the good ole days when insanely powerful Pugeots, Lancias, Audis and many others fought it out in the mud, streets and snow of Europe. It really was better back then.