Acrimonious start to the World Touring Car Championship
The FIA’s premier World Touring Car Championship had turned sour before a wheel was even turned, after F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone belatedly resumed promotion and imposed an entry fee of $60,000 (£273,000 today), prompting several top teams, including Rover Vitesse outfit Tom Walkinshaw Racing, to walk away. And the situation got even worse after the season opener at Monza 500.
The race had been won by the BMW M3 (run by Schnitzer Motorsport) of F1 veterans Riccardo Patrese and Johnny Cecotto, but this and the other six team cars were disqualified. The M3 had been homologated with a plastic trunk lid but raced with a carbon fiber lid, leaving it slightly under the minimum weight.
A similar fate befell Eggenberger Motorsport’s new Ford Sierra RS Cosworth pair, which used Bosch electronic management when it was supposed to use a Marelli-Weber system.
Clearly, the degree of “flexibility” in the rules that was allowed in the early years of Group A was no more. Victory therefore went by default to the Holden Commodore deprived of Allan Moffat and John Harvey.
But all’s well that ends well: BMW’s Roberto Ravaglia won the drivers’ title, Ford that of the teams.
Seat creates the crazy Ibiza
What do you do if developing four-wheel drive for rallying is too expensive? Make a car with an engine on each end, of course.
Well, at least that seemed obvious to Seat when it created the Ibiza Bimotor. Fitting the two 1.5-litre, 120bhp four-cylinders was easy enough; syncing them was not. He rallied domestically in Spain but unsurprisingly met with little success.
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Source: www.autocar.co.uk
This notice was published: 2022-04-01 04:01:23
