Fiat 131 Abarth

Introduction & acknowledgements

In spite of several in-built drawbacks to its basic design – the engine was never powerful enough, and parts of the transmission were often likely to break on arduous rallies – between 1976 and 1981 the Fiat 131 Abarth was a hugely successful car. As with its big rival the Ford Escort RS1800, works 131 Abarths were ultra-competitive until the Audi Quattro arrived – after which they swiftly became obsolete.

I have always admired the Fiat 131 Abarth – and respected the Italian team which developed and campaigned the car. How many other organisations, after all, would have relished being dragged away from the world-class Lancia Stratos, being told to abandon that mid-engined supercar to its fate, and being directed to produce another world-beating rally car, this time around a family saloon?

Stated simply, and quite baldly, in 1975 Fiat’s publicists decided that they wanted to see a recognisable Fiat-based saloon car winning rallies, rather than a space-age two-seater which might have carried almost any badge on its nose. Having nominated Abarth (the tuning business which it owned) to do the engineering job, Fiat also obliged that company to abandon work that had been started on a 2-litre-engined Fiat X1/9 rally car project.

Because Fiat wanted a new-generation works rally car to have strong links with the Fiat family cars that sold in hundreds of thousands every year, the only ‘donor’ car which then made sense was the newly-launched 131. Although tightly constrained as to what it could change and what had to be left alone, Abarth (not Fiat) went ahead and transformed this into a truly formidable rally car.

When I was formulating my original list of Rally Giants, I included the 131 Abarth for two very important reasons – it laid the foundation for Fiat to win the World Rally Championship for Makes three times (in 1977, 1978 and 1980), and it took the concept of ‘building a better Escort’ to a new level of technical excellence.

In the case of the Fiat, however, I should emphasise that it was only the Abarth-prepared works cars (and there were fifty of them over the years) which could regularly win at top level. Very few of the balance of the ‘homologation build’ (which means another 350 cars, as will be explained in the text) were ever prepared to full works/Abarth levels. Cars which won European or prestigious National Championship events (those held in France, Germany and Italy being perfect examples) had invariably been prepared, or re-prepared from older works cars by Abarth, before being sold on. (Competitive privately-owned Escorts, however, were built in their hundreds, and were still winning at international level in 1983 and 1984.)

The 131 Abarth programme was successful in almost every way. Although company politics got in the way of the development of a truly Escort-competitive engine (the Fiat unit had far too long a stroke, which top management would never agree to alter), every other aspect of the car was designed for one job and one job alone – to make the works rally car competitive, and capable of refinement for all sorts of events.

Compared with the Escort RS1800 – and, make no mistake, Fiat incessantly measured the 131’s performance against that of the British car – the 131 Abarth had a more advanced chassis, complete with independent rear suspension which was adjustable in so many ways. This meant that it could, and often did, make up for a lack of straight-line performance with handling and traction which was measurably superior to those of its rivals. Additionally, the works team was always run with remarkable flair, consistency, guile, competence and – how the rivals moaned about this – a very generous budget. Fiat wanted to see World Championships won, and Abarth duly delivered. All this, matched by the hiring of superlative drivers – not least Markku Alan and Walter Röhrl – made the 131 Abarth team an object lesson of how to go rallying.

When the time came for the 131 Abarth to be replaced, a superlative new machine would be needed – which is where, and why, the Lancia Rally 037 was born. But that, as they say, is an entirely different story ….

Acknowledgements

As ever, I want to thank the many people who helped me assemble all the facts and figures which complete this book. Although I was always close to the rally scene when the 131 Abarth was in its prime, considerable research was necessary before these words could be written, and the pages illustrated.

I want to start by admitting that much of the book would have needed further editing if Sergio Limone, that wonderfully helpful ex-Abarth engineer, had not helped me so much. Sergio, who worked on the 131 Abarth as a young man, and would later lead the design team which produced the Lancia Rally 037 and Delta Integrale rally cars, was a mine of information, and a visit to see him in Turin was a real privilege.

British historic rallying enthusiast, Mick Wood, who probably knows as much about these cars as any other owner, has kept an ex-works car and loves everything to do with them. Not only did Mick put me in touch with Sergio Limone, but he was kind enough to let me study the homologation papers and much more of the written material which Abarth published about these cars.

Cesare Fiorio, the distinguished motorsport boss at Lancia and the Fiat-Abarth team has, over the years, always been ready to provide insight, facts and opinion about the career of this and other related models.

Naturally, when it came to the search for images, and for facts and figures about World Rallies, I needed to rely on the expertise and knowledge of Martin Holmes. As I have stated on several previous occasions, Martin’s World Rallying annuals are a constant source of inspiration, and his personal pictorial archive is a gold mine too. I have come to rely on Martin as an absolute authority, to be cherished at all times.

To all of them, and other unsung heroes whom I also consulted, I hope I have been able to assemble the authentic story of Fiat’s greatest-ever rally car.

The car and the team

Inspiration

The car which became Fiat’s most successful rally vehicle was Abarth’s pragmatic and successful response to a request from Fiat’s marketing department. It wanted to see something that looked like a mass-market family car winning on the special stages of the world. Success with the exotic 124 Abarth Rallye was one thing, and with the Lancia Stratos (nearly a ‘blood relation,’ since Fiat owned Lancia) another, but these were sports cars after all. And at the time, a proposed competition car replacement from Abarth – a 2-litre 124 Abarth-engined development of the mid-engined Fiat X1/9 – was already evolving on the same lines.

The X1/9 was chosen instead of the new Lancia Beta Monte Carlo (also known internally as the X1/20), not only because it was smaller and lighter than the Stratos, and therefore also the Beta Monte Carlo, but because it was a Fiat-badged, as opposed to a Lancia-badged, car. Work progressed so fast that Abarth had already built four competition car prototypes, and a proposed road car/homologation version, before it was told to stop work immediately.

The first specially-engineered Fiat for rally use was the 124 Abarth Rallye which was announced in 1972. In general layout but not in detail the 131 Abarth would evolve from this.

By 1975, company sentiment was swinging decisively behind the ‘family car which wins’ concept, as Fiat realised just how much it had done for Ford’s Escort. In April of that year, therefore, the big decision was made to cancel the X1/9 project, just as its limited production run was about to begin, and to start afresh on the newly-launched 131 model. Progress, thereafter, was swift, for the very first (Group 5-specification) prototype competed in an event in November 1975, and homologation (on rather flimsy evidence concerning the production figures already achieved) followed in April 1976.

What came after, in so many ways, was a rewriting of the Ford Escort story. With similar influences, timetables and production claims to those that had been made in 1967 and 1968, and starting with a very mundane and unpromising family saloon, Abarth, on Fiat’s behalf, achieved the same sort of miracles.

Fiat – newcomers at World level

It’s worth remembering that when Fiat announced the 131 Abarth in 1976, it was still a relative newcomer to modern world-class rallying. Until 1970, the company had been more concerned with supporting Abarth in motor racing than in rallying, and the very first works cars had been built in-house within the Fiat workshops, supported by the Assistenza Tecnica department. The team, though, soon settled at the Abarth premises at Corso Marche in Turin. The buildings themselves were long established and by no means high-tech – as one wise old sage once commented: No, they were certainly not up to McLaren levels of cleanliness …. Originally, Fiat used big and uncompetitive 125 saloons, whose only merit was a fine Lampredi-designed 1.6-litre 8-valve twin-cam engine (Håkan Lindberg of Sweden was the first works driver), but these cars were soon supplanted by 124 Sport