Top rally cars of 1975

Still fab at 50

As splendid as the sport of rallying is today, it’s far less diverse than it was half a century ago, when a much wider variety of cars had the opportunity to make an impact at the top level.

There are several ways to determine how successful they all were in 1975, and the one we’ve chosen is to list them in order of the number of points they scored in that year’s World Rally Championship.

This is complicated by the fact that only the highest-placed car of any marque was eligible for points on an event, so a car which finished fourth would score zero if another built by the same company was placed third.

Points were available on a 20-15-12-10-8-6-4-3-2-1 basis, though since there was always at least one manufacturer with at least two cars in the top 10 they were never all allocated.

(Note: with the exception of the one above, all photos are of the standard, roadgoing models on which the rally cars were based.)

=26th: BMW 2002 (1 point)

Still in the early years of what would become a long and successful competition career, Christian Dorche took his BMW 2002 Ti to 10th place in Rallye Monte-Carlo, traditionally the opening round of the world championship.

It was an impressive performance, since Dorche and his navigator Pierre Gertosio finished only 3 mins behind a Porsche 911 and ahead of an Alpine A110.

There were other ’02 series BMWs on that event, and in later rounds of the WRC, but only Dorche and Gertosio were able to give the marque a point in 1975.
 

=26th: Ford Escort RS 2000 (1 point)

The first of three Ford Escort derivatives to make an impact on the WRC in 1975 was a 2-litre, Pinto-engined RS 2000.

Crewed by Leif Andersson and Lars Nyberg, the car which finished 10th in Sweden must have been a Mk1, because the Mk2 version of the same name was not yet on sale and would not have been eligible to compete.

As might be expected of a relatively low-performance model, the Escort RS 2000 did not make much of an impact on the championship, but for the next five months Andersson and Nyberg could rightly claim that they were the only competitors to have scored any points at all for Ford so far in 1975.

=26th: Lada VAZ 2103 (1 point)

The Acropolis Rally is a famously tough event, and was especially so in 1975, when four-fifths of the competing cars retired.

These included all the BMWs and Lancias, but the sturdy, Fiat 124-based VAZ 2103, better known outside Russia as a Lada, survived everything the Greek countryside could throw at it.

Pavlos Moschoutis and Pavlos Valentis (both of them Greek, like most of the drivers and navigators who finished the event), came home in 10th place, giving Lada its only point of the season.

=26th: Lancia Beta (1 point)

Lancia Beta Coupés finished third on the Swedish Rally and fourth on the Rallye Sanremo.

These were admirable performances, but they did not win any championship points for Lancia, since in both cases the Beta was outpaced by the much more powerful Stratos.

However, no Stratos finished the final round, the UK-based RAC Rally, and this gave the Beta its chance to shine.

Simo Lampinen (famous for his earlier success in Lancia Fulvias) and Piero Sodano finished that event in 10th – not the Beta’s best result of the year, but the only one which brought Lancia a point.

=23rd: Ford Escort RS 1600 (2 points)

1975 was the year in which the Mk2 RS 1800 took over from the Mk1 RS 1600 as Ford’s most important rally contender, but the older car could still be competitive in the right hands.

In the Rally Portugal, which no RS 1800s entered, Fernando Lezama Leguizamón and Javier Arnáiz scored two points for Ford by finishing ninth – presumably after having some kind of trouble, since they would not normally be expected to finish behind a Citroën GS.

As with the Lancia Beta, among other cars, the true ability of the RS 1600 was masked by the WRC’s scoring system, which makes it seem less successful than it actually was.

Erik Aaby and Monty Karlan finished eighth on Finland’s Rally of the Thousand Lakes, while on the RAC Rally (famously fertile ground for rear-wheel-drive Escorts), Tony Fowkes and Bryan Harris were third and Aaby – this time navigated by Per Odvar Nyborg – was fifth, but none of them scored any points because they were all beaten by RS 1800s.

=23rd: Sunbeam Avenger (2 points)

Chrysler’s only points in the WRC were earned in a car known in the UK, where it was built, as a Hillman Avenger, but branded elsewhere as a Sunbeam.

It finished ninth on the Thousand Lakes, crewed by Kyösti Hämäläinen, outright winner of the same event two years later in an Escort RS 1800, and fellow Finn Urpo Vihervaara, whose extraordinary career included spells in the fields of transportation, journalism, driver training, politics and dancing.

Hämäläinen and Vihervaara were by no means alone in their choice of car for this event.

The Thousand Lakes entry list was festooned with Avengers, five of which finished in the top 20.

=23rd: Vauxhall Magnum (2 points)

Vauxhall made its only impression on the WRC right at the end of the season with a coupé version of the Magnum fitted with the 2.3-litre, slant-four engine.

Familiar with the British forests, and in a car well-suited to them, Will Sparrow and Ronald Crellin couldn’t keep up with the more specialised Ford Escorts on the RAC Rally, but they did manage a very impressive ninth overall.

An Opel Ascona and a Fiat 124 Abarth Rallye were only 11 and 5 secs ahead respectively after more than six hours on the stages, and the Magnum finished one place ahead of Finnish star Simo Lampinen’s Lancia Beta.

=21st: Alfa Romeo 2000 GTV (3 points)

Most of Alfa Romeo’s points were scored by another model, but the 2000 GTV was the first to get the marque’s name on the board.

Launched four years previously, and powered by a 2-litre version of the celebrated Alfa Twin Cam engine, the car was nearing the end of its production life in 1975.

However, Guy Fréquelin and Christian Delferier showed it could still be competitive by finishing eighth on the Rallye Monte-Carlo, between two Porsche 911s.

Federico Ormezzano and Enrico Cartotto finished ninth on the Rally Sanremo, but their 2000 GTV was not the highest-placed Alfa, so it didn’t score any points.

=21st: Citroën GS (3 points)

Although the ingenious Citroën GS was voted Car of the Year in 1971, it might not immediately seem particularly suitable for rallying, being powered by a modest little air-cooled, flat-four engine.

Nevertheless, it scored three points in 1975, when Francisco Romãozinho and José Bernard finished eighth overall in Portugal and, by a margin of more than 40 mins, first in class.

No more points were scored in a GS that year, but Claude Laurent and Jacques Marché got into the top 20 three times, finishing 14th in Portugal, and 13th in Morocco and on the Rallye Monte-Carlo.

20th: Škoda 120 S (4 points)

The little Czech car with its rear-mounted, 1.2-litre engine finished the Swedish WRC round in an astonishing seventh place, beaten only by far more obviously suitable Fiats, Saabs and Lancias.

Škoda enthusiasts will not be surprised to learn – indeed might already have suspected – that it was driven by the brilliant John Haugland, who was still a member of the works team as late as 1990.

Haugland was navigated by fellow Norwegian Arild Antonsen on that event, and nine months later by Fred Gallagher on the RAC, where they finished 15th overall and won their class by 18 mins.

The 120 S was a special, high-performance model in Škoda’s 100/110 series, which also included the 110 L pictured here.

=17th: Audi 80 (8 points)

Still more than half a decade away from transforming the sport by adopting four-wheel drive as soon as the regulations allowed it, Audi nevertheless made an admittedly small impression on the WRC in 1975.

Alexandros Maniatopoulos (competing under the pseudonym ‘Leonidas’) and Ioánnis Lekkas took an 80 GT to fifth place on their home event, the Acropolis, and won their class by just short of an hour.

This result was largely down to the ability of the car and its crew to complete a memorably challenging event.

The entry list for that year included an Alpine-Renault, a handful of Lancias, several Porsches and a platoon of BMWs, but none of them finished, and the Audi did.

=17th: Datsun 260Z (8 points)

All eight of the Datsun 260Z’s WRC points were scored on the Rally Portugal, where Pedro Cortêz and João Teixeira Gomes – the highest-placed local crew – finished fifth.

In a rally with more than 50 retirements, eight of the surviving cars were Datsuns, and four of those finished in the top 10, including another 260Z.

=17th: Renault 17 (8 points)

Like several other cars on this list, the coupé version of the Renault 12 might not immediately seem like an obvious choice for rallying.

Somehow, though, Jean-François Piot and Jean de Alexandris brought their 17 Gordini home fifth in the Rallye Monte-Carlo, beaten only by a Lancia Stratos and three Fiat 124 Rallyes, and finishing ahead of all the surviving Alpines and Porsches.

Piot was an excellent driver, with a fine record in both rallying and circuit racing, but the car had form, too.

Renault 7 Gordinis had finished first, third and sixth, against similar opposition, in the 1974 Press-on-Regardless Rally, the US round of that year’s WRC.

16th: Volvo 142 (9 points)

The first car on our list to score points in more than one round of the World Rally Championship might have been expected to do particularly well on the forest roads of the Nordic countries.

In fact, seven of the eight Volvo 142s entered in the Thousand Lakes retired from the event, and the sole survivor was placed 21st.

Things went far better on the Swedish Rally, where Rune Åhlin and Åke Gustavsson finished ninth.

The Volvo 142’s best result, however, was Berndt-Inge Steffansson and Ola Tholén’s sixth on the Acropolis, a triumph of car over conditions backed up a month later by Jacques Osstyn and JH Weilenmann’s 10th and Alain Bergerot and H da Silva’s non-points-scoring 12th in Morocco.

=14th: Citroën DS 23 (10 points)

Even in its last year of production, the Citroën DS could compete in rallying at the highest level.

Major victories were by now out of reach, but Jean Deschaseaux and Jean Plassard were still able to finish fourth in Morocco.

Peugeot 504s performed spectacularly in that event, yet the DS was beaten by only two of them, and finished ahead of another four.

=14th: Mitsubishi Colt Lancer (10 points)

Andrew Cowan and the Colt Lancer made a fantastic combination on long-distance rallies, winning the Bandama in Ivory Coast once and the Southern Cross in Australia three times from 1974 to 1977.

Both car and driver could keep going long after others had failed, but this did not always lead to great results in WRC rounds, as 28th overall on the 1975 RAC demonstrated.

It was a different story on the Safari, where Cowan and the Colt (navigated by John Mitchell) finished fourth – not their finest achievement, but enough on its own to put Mitsubishi in the upper half of the championship-points table.

Two more Lancer crews also featured on the leaderboard, Davinder Singh/Roger Barnard finishing eighth, and the husband and wife team of Prem and Pauru Choda (who competed together on the Safari every year from 1973 to 1990) 10th.

13th: Opel Kadett GT/E (11 points)

The GT/E was a member of the last generation of rear-wheel-drive Kadetts, powered by a fuel-injected, 1.9-litre version of Opel’s cam-in-head engine.

It did not make an impact on the 1975 WRC until early November, when Henri Greder and ‘Céligny’ (actually Régine Greder-Clérivet) squeaked into the points by finishing 10th on the Tour of Corsica.

Given that almost every other crew in the top 15 was competing in a sports car of some kind, this was an excellent performance, though it was eclipsed later in the same month.

Cosworth-engined Ford Escorts dominated the RAC Rally, taking five of the top six positions, but Tony Pond and Dave Richards achieved a spectacular fourth place in their Opel Kadett.

=11th: Mitsubishi Colt Galant (12 points)

Like the Lancer, the Galant scored all its points for Mitsubishi on a single event.

This was the Acropolis, where the Cypriot crew of Michalis Koumas and Pétros Dimitriadis finished third.

They were more than two hours behind the event winner, but at the head of a three-car pack covered by just under 18 mins after nearly 12 hours of competitive driving.

=11th: Porsche 911 (12 points)

Given its long history of rallying success, the Porsche 911 had a surprisingly lean year in 1975, requiring two events to score as many World Rally Championship points as the Mitsubishi Colt Galant did in just one.

Jean-Pierre Rouget and Patrice Chonez set the ball rolling by finishing seventh in their Carrera RSR 2.8 (two places ahead of the Noël Labaune/Jean Maurin RS 2.7) on the Rallye Monte-Carlo, an event which had been won by 911s in 1968, 1969 and 1970, and would be again in 1978.

Carlo Bianchi and Marco Mannini improved on this by coming home fifth on the Rallye Sanremo, having spent more than an hour longer on the stages than the winning Lancia Stratos and second-placed Fiat 124 Abarth.

Two privately entered, UK-based Porsche 911s competed on the RAC in November, and did well to finish just outside the top 10 against a cluster of works or works-backed cars, including five Ford Escorts.

10th: Datsun Violet/160J/710 (18 points)

All of these names refer to the same car, which achieved the impressive feat of scoring points in the very different environments of Africa and Finland.

Zully Remtulla and Nizar Jivani finished an excellent sixth on the Safari, while Johnny Hellier/Kanti Shah and Frank Tundo/Anton Levitan bestowed further honour on Datsun by finishing seventh and ninth in a 160B and another Violet/160J/710 respectively.

Shekhar Mehta and Robert Bean also finished sixth in Morocco in June, and Timo Salonen and Jaakko Markkula did exactly the same thing on the Thousand Lakes two months later.

Between those events, Mehta, this time navigated by his wife Yvonne, drove his 160J to seventh in Portugal, but they didn’t score any points for Datsun this time because, as previously mentioned, Cortêz and Teixeira Gomes did that by finishing fifth in their 260Z.

9th: Alfa Romeo Alfetta (20 points)

The GT and GTV coupé versions of the Alfa Romeo Alfetta performed well in three rounds of the World Rally Championship.

Jean-Claude Andruet and Yves Jouanny finished a remarkable third in Corsica with their GTV, beaten only by a Lancia Stratos and the first of several thousand Alpines.

A few weeks earlier, Alberto Brambilla (competing under the pseudonym ‘Bip-Bip’) and Giorgio Bottini had done well on the Rallye Sanremo in a GT, finishing in seventh place between two Opel Asconas.

Clearly a capable rally car on Tarmac, the Alfa also went splendidly on the very different Acropolis: Giorgos Moschous and Aris Stathakis were seventh in their GT, one place ahead of Michalis Moschous and ‘Konstantinos’ (Nikos Kelesakos) in an Alfetta saloon.

8th: Saab 96 (30 points)

By 1975, the Saab 96 had been in production for 15 years, and for the past eight it had been powered by a Ford V4 engine which dated back to 1962.

Even with this old technology, it was still a strong contender in rallying, especially on Nordic forest events.

Its 30 points were earned by finishing second on the Swedish Rally (Stig Blomqvist/Hans Sylvan) and on the Thousand Lakes (Simo Lampinen/Juhani Markkanen), and other 96s were placed fourth on the former event, and fourth, seventh and 10th on the latter.

This still wasn’t the end of the story for the old warhorse, which took the top two positions on the Swedish WRC round the following year.

=6th: Ford Escort RS 1800 (32 points)

The Ford Escort RS 1800 had an incomplete season in 1975, making its debut on the Aberdeen-based Granite City Rally in April and not appearing in a WRC round until August.

Timo Mäkinen and Henry Liddon gave a sign of what was to come by finishing third on the Thousand Lakes, but retired from the Sanremo with tyre problems, as did teammates Roger Clark and Jim Porter.

The car made a glorious comeback on the RAC at the end of the season, with Mäkinen/Liddon finishing first, Clark (now partnered by Tony Mason, since Porter was on the event’s organising team) second, and the Irish crew of Billy Coleman and Dan O’Sullivan sixth.

=6th: Toyota Corolla (32 points)

The second-generation Toyota Corolla’s involvement in the 1975 World Rally Championship could be described as brief but startling.

Ove Andersson and Arne Hertz finished third in the Levin coupé version in Portugal, and were the only competitors to come home within 10 mins of the two works Fiats.

Five weeks later, several thousand miles away and many degrees colder, Hannu Mikkola (who, oddly enough, had driven the Fiat which finished second in Portugal) teamed up with Atso Aho for the Thousand Lakes.

In the closest finish of the season, with the top four cars covered by just 2 mins and 47 secs, their Corolla came out on top, beating a Ford Escort RS 1800 and two Saab 96s.

5th: Peugeot 504 (40 points)

Like several of the models already mentioned, the Peugeot 504 might not immediately strike you as a potential rally car, but in fact it was the only one to score maximum points in the 1975 WRC every time it scored any at all.

Highly favoured in African countries because of its strength and reliability, the 504 almost inevitably did particularly well on that continent, Ove Andersson and Arne Hertz beating every Lancia Stratos in the field to win the Safari by 38 mins.

The versatile Hannu Mikkola, this time navigated by Jean Todt, won the Rally Morocco by nearly an hour and three quarters, with other Peugeot 504s finishing second, fifth, seventh, eighth and ninth.

The car was less suitable for the Acropolis, the Rally Portugal and the Sanremo, but still placed in the top 20 on all of them, though the example which started the RAC didn’t make it to the finish.

4th: Opel Ascona (47 points)

Just before it was replaced by the second-generation model, the original Opel Ascona was one of only four cars to score points in five rounds of the World Rally Championship.

The highlight was the Acropolis, which marked the first WRC win not only for reigning European Champion Walter Röhrl and his navigator Jochen Berger, but also for Opel.

On that exceptionally tough event, four Asconas (and five Opels in total, including a Kadett) were among the 17 cars that made it to the finish, three of them in the top 10.

The 27 points not scored in Greece were all earned by other Ascona crews: Rauno Aaltonen and Claes Billstam finished fourth in Portugal, Anders Kulläng and Claes-Göran Andersson fifth in Finland, Salvatore Brai and ‘Rudy’ (Roberto Dalpozzo) sixth in Sanremo, and Håkan Svensson and Jan-Erik Andersson eighth in Sweden.

3rd: Alpine A110 (60 points)

Now officially known as an Alpine-Renault, the A110 was no longer the world’s most successful rally car in 1975, as it had unquestionably been two years earlier.

Uniquely among the top seven cars on this list, it did not win a single round, but it did achieve four podium positions, a performance beaten by only one other.

Its season got off to a slow start with sixth on the Rallye Monte-Carlo, but it somehow not only survived the Acropolis but finished second, crewed by ‘Siroco’ (Tasos Livieratos) and Miltos Andriopoulos, repeated that result in Corsica (Jean-Pierre Nicolas/Vincent Laverne), and came home third in Morocco (Bob Neyret/Jacques Terramorsi) and Sanremo (Jean-Luc Thérier/Michel Vial).

No doubt due to its fine reputation, it was immensely popular among non-works teams – of the 22 cars which made it to the finish in Corsica, 13 were Alpine A110s, while another was the later A310.

2nd: Fiat 124 Abarth Rally (66 points)

The Abarth Rally was a homologation special based on the Sport Spider version of the Fiat 124 saloon, and therefore a distant relative of the Lada VAZ 2103.

Second to the Alpine A110 in the 1973 WRC, and to the Lancia Stratos in 1974, it was still a leading contender in ’75, performing at its best in Portugal where Markku Alén/Ilkka Kivimäki finished first and Hannu Mikkola/Jean Todt were second.

Mikkola and Todt were also second, and this time at the head of a Fiat trio, in the Rallye Monte-Carlo, and were beaten only by a Stratos, as were Maurizio Verini and Francesco Rossetti on the Sanremo.

Despite appearing rather small and fragile for the purpose, the little Fiat also did well in the forests, finishing fifth in Sweden (Ingvar Carlsson/Claes Billstam, one place ahead of Alén and Kivimäki), and eighth on the RAC (Verini/Rossetti).

1st: Lancia Stratos (95 points)

In a sport mostly contested by modified family saloons, the aggressive-looking Lancia with the mid-mounted, 2.4-litre, V6 Ferrari engine was like a machine produced by a different civilisation.

It won the World Rally Championship for its maker every year from 1974 to 1976, and scored maximum points in 1975 not only on Tarmac roads in the Rallye Monte-Carlo (Sandro Munari/Mario Mannucci), Sanremo (Björn Waldegård/Hans Thorszelius) and Corsica (Bernard Darniche/Alain Mahé), but on the forest tracks of Sweden (Waldegård/Thorszelius).

It didn’t win the Safari, because not even the best rally car in the world could match the Peugeot 504 in Kenya, but Munari, now navigated by Lofty Drews, finished second, followed by Waldegård/Thorszelius.

50 years on

The scoring system for the 2025 World Rally Championship is slightly different from the one used in 1975, with more points available for the higher placings, and more still for the power stage and classification on the final day.

The last two of those do not translate to the previous era, but out of interest we’re including the first, along with the fact that points are now awarded to the two highest-placed finishers rather than just one, to see what difference that would have made half a century ago.

As it turns out, the top five – Lancia Stratos, Fiat 124 Abarth Rallye, Alpine A110, Opel Ascona and Peugeot 504 – would have remained the same.

The Saab 96, however, would have moved ahead of the Ford Escort RS 1800 and Toyota Corolla to finish eighth, since its fourth places in Sweden and Finland would have been counted.