CarBrandLogos archive · Lancia · 1979

LanciaDelta

Car of the Year in 1980, then six consecutive world rally titles a decade later.

Photo: Tony Harrison from Farnborough, UK · CC BY-SA 2.0

The story

A defining chapter in Lancia history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Lancia Delta, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Giorgetto Giugiaro's design for the Delta, launched in 1979, was a neat, upright five-door hatchback with clean surfaces and excellent visibility, aimed straight at the Volkswagen Golf. It was well received, taking the European Car of the Year award for 1980 on the strength of its packaging, ride and interior quality. For most of the 1980s it was a competent family car and nothing more, sold with modest engines to buyers who wanted a well-made hatchback and had no interest in motorsport whatever.

2006FOS 1993Lancia Delta HFIntegrale · Brian Snelson from Hockley, Essex, England · CC BY 2.0

Design and engineering

What changed it was a rule change. When Group B was abolished after the 1986 season on safety grounds, the World Rally Championship reverted to Group A, which required cars based on genuine production models built in reasonable numbers. Lancia had been developing a four-wheel-drive turbocharged Delta since 1986, and it was ready when its rivals were not. Its Group B car, the mid-engined Delta S4, had shared only a name with the road model; this one genuinely descended from the hatchback in the showroom.

01 Lancia Delta 1979 · Pava · CC0

In production

The Delta HF 4WD and the Integrale that followed used a transverse turbocharged twin-cam four driving all four wheels through a centre differential with a Torsen rear diff, in a body widened and blistered over increasingly large wheels. Development ran continuously: eight valves became sixteen, the power climbed, the transmission split was revised, and the wheel arches grew until the Evoluzione of 1991 looked barely related to the shopping car underneath.

Lancia Delta · Tony Harrison from Farnborough, UK · CC BY-SA 2.0

Legacy

The record is the reason it is remembered. Lancia won the World Rally Championship for Manufacturers six years in succession from 1987 to 1992, a run no other manufacturer has matched, with Juha Kankkunen, Miki Biasion and Didier Auriol taking drivers' titles in the car along the way. Lancia withdrew as a works team after 1991 and the private Jolly Club effort still won in 1992, which says something about the car. The Integrale also mattered commercially, because homologation meant selling road cars, and the road-going Integrale became one of the most desirable hot hatchbacks ever built. Production of the original Delta ran to 1999 in various forms. A second-generation car appeared in 1993 and a third, unrelated in character, ran from 2008 to 2014, but neither had anything to do with what the name had come to mean.

At a glance

The facts that define it.

Produced

1979–1999

Body

Hatchback

Technical specification

The Delta, in detail.

Production: 1979–1999; 2008–2014
Class: Small family car (C)
Body style: Hatchback
Layout: Transverse front-engine, front-wheel-drive; Transverse four-wheel-drive
Manufacturer: Fiat Auto (1979–1986; 1991–1999); Alfa-Lancia Industriale (1987–1991); Fiat Group Automobiles (2008–2014)

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