Lancia Delta

The Lancia Delta was a compact five-door hatchback drawn by Giorgetto Giugiaro's Italdesign for the Turin marque, launched in 1979 and produced across three distinct generations. In its first and most celebrated form it started life as an understated family car, built at Lancia's Chivasso plant and offered at first with modest naturally aspirated engines, before the factory reworked it into one of the defining performance machines of its era.

That reinvention arrived with the HF Integrale, the four-wheel-drive, homologation-bred version that carried Lancia's works effort through the Group A period of the World Rally Championship. Powered by a turbocharged two-litre four-cylinder, it dominated the series as few cars ever have. Lancia took the manufacturers' title for six consecutive seasons, from 1987 to 1992, while drivers including Juha Kankkunen and Miki Biasion collected their own championships along the way.

Rally regulations that required thousands of road-going cars each year meant the Integrale reached private buyers as well as the special stages, evolving from the early eight-valve car through sixteen-valve and later Evoluzione versions with steadily increasing power. By the time first-generation production ended in 1994, Lancia had built 478,645 Deltas in total, roughly 44,296 of them Integrales, and across its competition career the model amassed 46 world-championship rally wins that make it one of the most successful cars the sport has known.