Car magazing, May 1997

You are driving with Miki Biasion twice world rally champion in the Martini Lancia Delta Integrale. Shades pulled on tight, number one crop making his skull look as if it is lightly dusted with iron filing. Mulling through his hometown, an hour out of Venice. Easy does it: low revs, just cruising. In his giallo fly Integrale Evolution road car, pimpled with flares and implicit with grunt. The perfect time to ask one specific question.

Miki, you say, burbling through Bassano del Grappa, dodging myopic Vespas and kamikaze Puntos, thick, creamy engine noise shuffling within the car. Miki, you say.

How to put this? Are you familiar with Sega Rally? A faint twinkle. The arcade video game: you know, you can choose to drive a rally-sharpened Toyota Celica GT4 or a Delta Integrale. “Yes”, says Miki with a huge, chin-bending grin. “But, you know, I’m a disaster at driving this car.”

The digital Delta must be the only Lancia rally car which Biasion hasn’t mastered. A decade ago he began an all-wheel-drive odyssey, developing and driving and winning in the Lancia Delta HF 4WD and its subsequent Integrale siblings.

He brought on the car from faintly anaemic roots to become a terrifyingly efficient rally dominator, spitting flames on the downchange and clawing sharply into any kind of road surface. The Delta was World Rally Champion inn 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1992: Biasion took the driver’s title in ’88 and ’89. The Delta was the McLaren MP4 of the gravel road- and Miki Biasion might just have been its Ayrton Senna.

“I think that the Inegrale is the woman I have been living with for ten years,” he will say, simple as that. You turn up at his Lancia dealership- all aluminium cladding, smoky glass and need-a-sweater air-conditioning- to find four rally Deltas, brazen in Martini stripes, corralled outside. “Big surprise, no?” he says as he shakes your hand. “What do you think, then?”

He talks through each car, old friends one and all. “The Delta HF 4WD is the car I won the Monte Carlo Rally in, in ’87. The Delta S4 is from the Argentine Rally, where I won my first World Championship event. The Safari car I used during 1990 and I had an accident in that one. And we repaired it; now it’s perfect. And the red one is the Sanremo Rally car, the only red one in existence, from when I won the Sanremo Rally and the championship in ’89.”

Did Lancia present you with these cars as a thank you? Not so. “The only they gave me is the red one. They didn’t used to give us cars.” This, then, means that, even as a factory rally driver, you paid for three Integrales? Just because you enjoyed them so much? “I bought all except the red one, yes.”

The man is an encyclopedia of Integrale, road, rally, even R&D. “I have been testing cars for so many years because I was not only the factory driver, but also the tester,” he explains: there’s a hint of joy, an underscoring of pride. “I have been living with the car for such a long tim. I hknow everything about the car, the evolution of the car. I think I am the man who has been sitting in that car longer than any other driver.”

He will, back in the sepulchral cool of his office, give a spare, taut history of the Integrale, relive a period of his life that allowed him to redefine himself: from amateur rally driver, in an Opel prepared just down the road, to world champion, twice over.

Rallying was in crisis in 1986. The Group B cars- Ford RS200, Audi Quattro S1, Delta S4- were mad, bad, and dangerous: Henri Toivonen and Sergio Cresto had been killed on the Tour de Corse when their S4 crashed and burned. The rules were rewritten. Cars were to be production-based, steel-shelled, slower. Group B was replaced by Group A. Lancia turned the meek Delta, then eight years old and aging fast, into a four-wheel-drive, turbocharged rally weapon.

“The first Delta HF 4WD was not so brilliant, partly because I was coming from the Delta S4 with more than 500bhp,” admits Biasion. “In the first Group A car the power was 260bhp to 270bhp, so it was not so powerful. And, to drive, it was not so big- how to say?- an emotion. It wasn’t a big thrill to drive that car the first time.

“You cannot drive with the power of the car. You have to drive on the tyre, on the momentum. You must use all the road. You must cut everywhere you can to get shorter lines. Also I think there were not to many drivers able to drive the Group B car with 500bhp. But, with the Group A with 250bhp, I would say the group of drivers able to find the limit of performance was much more- so I had many more competitors.”

Biasion won the Monte Carlo Rally on the HF 4WD’s debut in January 1987. “ When we finished the first Monte Carlo Rally there was a team of engineers thinking for the future. I remember I have done the test of this new car, the first Integrale, and the first rally I used that car was in Portugal in ’88. And I won.”

Each evolution of the competition Delta had to be preceded by the creation of a raod car, on which the rally machine would be based. Every season, 5000 road cars had to be built if the Delta was to qualify for competition. Homologation is what the FIA calls this process. The ‘888 Delta, the first labeled Integrale, had “bigger, wheels, larger chassis, different suspension, different turbocharger, a new design of roll-bar, different air-intakes.” Biasion can reel off this litany of high-tech as offhandedly as dumping two sugars in his cappuccino. After all, he lived the Integrale life. He loved it, too. “And the car faster- not for the first rally- but after that the car was faster.”

So where was the Integrale stronger than the opposition? “The team!” Biasion laughs gently. The rally team was really fantastic. The car: I think the best part of the Lancia has been the engine. And I think the most important thing was we used to spend a lot of time in testing. While the other teams used to do a week before Monte Carlo and then start the event, with Lancia we used to spend a month and then all do the practice. And I know this because I was the tester and I remember I have done so many miles. So many miles.”

And Biasion’s finest Integrale memory? “I think that the best memory was in the red car, the last night of the Sssanremo Rallyin 1989. Didier Auriol, my team-mate, had a crash on the first stage on gravel, so the only car left was mine. The car was very fast on asphalt- we had a new fully-locked rear differential. But, on the gravel, the car was really nervous. And also there was no torque at all. We could only yse the car between 5500rpm to 7000rpm.

This, then, was just like a racing car to drive? “Yes, exactly. While on the fravel it was not so fast. At the end of the gravel part of the rally I was third, one minute and 40 seconds behind Carlos Sainz and Alex Fiorio. And, on the last night on the asphalt, I finished first and I won the world rally championship. It was a big fight and I was more than half-a-second per kilometer faster than everybody all night.”

Biasion stretches, begins to spill some secrets. “In 1990 we had been testing many things that we didn’t use in competition. I tested the four-wheel-steering car. And we were also testing active suspension, and a semi-automatic gearbox. The four-wheel-steering car was really good, especially in the hairpins. Because from zero to 70km/h, the wheels turned in the same way. But really, in a rally car with the continually changing surface- gravel, sand, mud- it was difficult to find the proper setting. On the asphalt the car was much faster. But the homologation and the production of the parts was so expensive that everybody decided to cancel. Also because probably they already thought that next year they would stop competing.” Lancia quit rallying at the end of 1991.

Today, at 39, Miki Biasion will drive you through Bassano, window down. “Listen,” he says as the wastegate blows off, tea-kettle sizzling against a hurricane. “That is a fantastic sound, no?” Laughing, he’ll imitate the chirrup perfectly, a sluicing the sibilance around, enjoying himself once more in an Integrale. He moves fluidly, slowly, evenly at the wheel. Yes as the way ahead begins to twist, to turn, to bob-and-weave, he crispens as the engine frows sharper, more reflexive. Out in the countryside, gravel on the apex, Miki Biasion finally puts the hammer down.

A tight 90deg right-hander looms. He downchanges four-three-two and, apparently in slowmo, hauls on the handbrake. The tail kicks out, scribes an eerily precise arc. Biasion buries his foot and the Integrale points, squirts, exits, all of a piece. As he slows, smiling, you ask the obvious question. Handbrake; all-wheel drive; why don’t the four wheels lock? “Not in the Integrale,” says Miki, launching into an explanation of center differential behaviour in moments of stress, fingers twisting imaginary cogs. Translation: Lancia thought through the details, as winners do.

Then, on the outskirts of town, he will plant his foot at 2000rpm in third fear and the engine responds with a deep-chested urge. “I think that, maybe, the Escort Cosworth has a little more power,” he will say, almost to himself. “But this car has torque. Torque is really important, no?”

There’s something more than man and machine at work here. Yes, Biasion all-too-obviously understands this car, defining it in tiny, almost reverential detail. Yet, two world rally championships on, he remains, above all, a fan, pure and simple, of the Integrale. This bond is about more than winning rallies, about more than test and development: this link is astonishingly emotional and runs deep. “Yes. Of course.” That’s how Miki Biasion answers your final question. He will always own, always relish, an Integrale. How could it be any other way?