1986
The stage was set for 1986 to be a very exciting season. Defending champion Timo Salonen had the new Evolution 2 version of Peugeot's T16 with ex Toyota driver, Juha Kankkunen. Audi's new Sport Quattro S1 boasted over 600 hp (450 kW) and a huge snowplow-like front end. Lancia's Delta S4 would be in the hands of the Finnish prodigy Henri Toivonen and Markku Alen, and Ford was ready with its high tech RS200 with Stig Blomqvist and Kalle Grundel.
On the "Lagoa Azul" stage of Portuguese Rally near Sintra everything was to go tragically wrong. Portuguese national champion Joaquim Santos crested a rise, turning to his right to avoid a small group of spectators. This caused him to lose control of his RS200. The car veered to the right and slid off the road into the spectators. Thirty-one people were injured and three were killed. All the top teams immediately pulled out of the rally and Group B was placed in jeopardy.
Disaster struck again in early May at the Tour de Corse. Lancia's Toivonen was a championship favorite, and once the rally got underway he was the pace setter. Seven kilometres into the 18th stage, Toivonen's S4 flew off the unguarded edge of a tightening left hand bend and plunged down a steep wooded hillside. The car landed inverted with the fuel tanks ruptured by the impact. The combination of red hot turbocharger, Kevlar bodywork, and ruptured fuel tank ignited the car and set fire to the dry undergrowth. Only a cloud of smoke and the lack of Toivonen's car at the finish indicated that something was very wrong. By the time rescue workers made it to the remote spot (some 30 minutes, by some accounts) all that remained of the car was a blackened frame with the bones of Toivonen and co-driver Sergio Cresto inside. With no witnesses to the accident it was impossible to determine what caused the crash other than Toivonen had left the road at high speed. Some cite Toivonen's ill health at the time (he reportedly was suffering from flu); other suggest mechanical failure, or simply the difficulty of driving the machine although Toivonen had a career full of crashing out while leading rallies. Up until that stage he was taking stage win after stage win and leading the rally by a large margin with no other driver challenging him. Simply using a racing fuel cell in place of the fuel tank may have saved them.
The crash came a year after Lancia driver Attilio Bettega had crashed and died in his 037. While that fatality was largely blamed on the unforgiving Corsican scenery (and bad luck, as his co-driver, Maurizio Perissinot was uninjured), Toivonen and Cresto's death, combined with the Portugal tragedy and televised accident of F1 driver Marc Surer in another RS200 which killed his co-driver, compelled the FIA to act: Group B cars were immediately banned for 1987. Audi decided to quit Group B entirely after Corsica.
The final days of Group B would also be controversial. The Peugeots were disqualified from the Rally San Remo by the Italian scrutineers as the 'skirts' around the bottom of the car were deemed to be illegal. Peugeot immediately accused the Italians of favouring the Lancias. Their case was strengthened at the next event, the RAC Rally, when the British scrutineers passed the Peugeots as legal in identical trim. FISA annulled the result of the San Remo Rally eleven days after the final round in America. As a result the championship title was passed from Lancia's Markku Alen to Peugeot's Juha Kankkunen.
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