Lurking in
Essex was the most serious challenger to the four-wheel-drive
supercars that were dominating world
championship rallying in 1984.
It's
not a Ford — though it was under development just a few miles from the
former World Champion's lair.
It is, of
course, a four-wheel-drive, 350 horsepower version of the Mitsubishi
Starion, being developed for group B
international competition by a team including Alan Wilkinson — an engineer
whose rallying credentials are second to none. He came to Team RALLIART via
Ford's competition department, Toyota Team
Europe and Audi Sport UK, where he was
responsible for their very successful Quattro.
With permanent four-wheel-drive and a 2-litre
turbocharged engine, the Starion Rally is a very far cry from the sort of
car Mitsubishi first used with success in international rallies.
That was
the diminutive 1600cc rear-drive Lancer, driven
to victories in the 1974 and 1976 East African Safari rallies. The same
machine was also driven to five victories on the gruelling
Southern Cross rally in Australia by marathon
master Andrew Cowan {now team Ralliart Director},
who also won the African Bandama rally in it in
1977 and himself achieved a third and two fourth
places on the Safari rally, in Lancers again.
Despite
their successes on these events,
Mitsubishi had never made a serious assault on world rallying until unveiling
the Starion Rally.
Few Japanese
companies had done so, in fact, for it was a European orientated sport with
complex regulations which were open to a great deal of subtle interpretation
by knowledgeable team managers. And with the advent of the Group
B supercars, it became a massive commitment in
investment and high technology.
PARIS-DAKAR RALLY
1983
The 4WD
Starion started its competitive life with a class win on this event — taking
the ex-perimental class for non - homolagated cars..It
was the Starion's potential for the future
which was more exciting. The car first appeared
at the Tokyo show late 1992. It is a shortened, lightened version of the
rear-drive Starion turbo.
It
runs on the same, 96ins wheelbase as the standard car but, overall, it is
nearly 6ins shorter because the nose has been chopped
back to take a full set of standard headlights
in-stead of the normal car's flip-up type. The
normal rear-drive of the Starion has been converted into all wheel-drive by
the relativly straight forward method of introducing
a Pajero transfer box, with uprated
Internals,behind
the normal transmision. This takes the drive
sideways to a second
propshaft that goes forwards to the front wheels: torque is permanently 50
/ 50 front/rear.
click to view Full-size
In
the Starion's favour as well as its weight
distribution, the engine can be mounted well
back in the car to even up front/rear balance
— unlike the Quattro which is restricted by a configuration that has to keep
the engine right up in the car's nose, ahead of
the gearbox and driveshafts.
Getting
the weight down to a minimum has been an important objective in the Starion's
design and as a result the car uses carbon-fibre reinforced plastics for the
propshafts, sumpguard
and lower arms of the all-independent strut and wishbone suspension.
Virtually all the exterior body panels are in glass-fibre and plastic, too;
bonnet, tailgate, door skins, wings, bumpers and
spoilers. The objective- was for the eventual
homologated rally car to weigh in at around lOOOkgs
— which would make it lighter than an Audi Quattro.
The
mechanical specification of the Starion 4WD Rally was very much a large part
of Alan Wilkinson's job, to develop a
competition configuration for the car that can then be used for the 20
evolutionary models the company needed to build to gain Group B homologation.
During its
early development the Starion used a version of Mitsubishi's two-litre turbo
engine, with intercooler and computer controlled
fuel injection system. But the goal was 350bhp using the
Sirius Dash engine that Mitsubishi announced at
the 1983 Tokyo motor show. This engine features a special three valves per
cylinder head with two inlet valves for each cylinder—one operates all the
time and the other is electronically controlled to come into operation only
over 2500rpm.
It
is said to provide
good top end performance without having to sacrifice power at the lower end of
the rev range, and would be coupled with
inter-cooled fuel injection and electronic ignition cum engine management
to provide that Quattro-rivalling horsepower.
Official
Group B homologation of the Starion Rally would
have come in time for the team to make its debut in world championship
rallying with a two car entry on the 1984 Lombard
RAC Rally in November. Unfortunatly, this never happened due to the deaths
of several spectators & drivers, which resulted in the F.I.A. banning ALL
Group B cars from Rally competition.
Very rare footage of the 4wd car in
testing......Please wait while this short video clip loads.
Mr Andrew Cowan with
the 4wd 350bhp Group B Starion Turbo..
Click BELOW for a printable link to a rally
magazine feature on the "NEW" 4wd Starion
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