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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> Rallye stopped the insanity when Henri Toivonen burnt to death.

Alone it probably would not have done it, but the sanity of Group B (or lack thereof) had been in question for a while: earlier in the same season Joaquim Santos lost control of his car after avoiding a group of spectators (who'd routinely play chicken with cars) resulting in 3 deaths and 30 injuries.

And the previous season Bettega had died on the same course Toivonen and Cresto lost their lives on, and Vatanen was gravely injured in Argentina.

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> who'd routinely play chicken with cars

I've never seen this, but can only imagine the stupidity of these spectators. To solve that, I'd have been in favor of awarding bonus points to drivers not avoid these "chickens"

> I've never seen this, but can only imagine the stupidity of these spectators.

Unless you're 50+ you could never have seen it because it's long stopped. But watch old videos of group b and you'll see it, it was insane.

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I5sTuSoMho

The drivers went all out straight onto the people and could only hope they would get away on time.

Tbh Group B had a problem of crowd control, not with the cars themselves.

Those Lancias hnnng

While that was a problem, the larger one was that the cars were too fast for the tires and safety equipment of the time.

In a 13 month period there were three fatal accidents that were down to drivers losing control and crashing on their own. The last two coming in successive months. The repeated accidents killed off Group B and the nascent Group S that was supposed to replace it.

Modern WRC cars much higher cornering speeds than the Group B cars because of advances in tire technology. They aren’t as fast in a straight line, but they are massively safer in the event of a crash.

Group B absolutely had a cars problem, 3 of the 4 accidents mentioned were not crowd related, there was literally no close witness (only a video from far away) to Toivonen and Cresta's accident.

The Lancias were some of the worst offenders to the cars issue, but not the only one: many drivers complained that the cars had gotten way too powerful to be safe in Corsica.

And safety equipment was lacking and not consistently applied, for instance fuel tank skid plates were usually left off on asphalt tracks like corsica, which is likely how Toivonen's lancia instantly caught fire when it went off the road.

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