Not every Integrale built for motorsport was a Group A hero. In the shadows of those famous works cars were the customer builds, the privateer shells, the ones meant for national championships and regional gravel rounds. Cars that shared the bones and the spirit, but not the celebrity. Cars that ended up in the hands of people who wanted the real thing without needing a factory contract or a famous name on the door.
Group N sat just under Group A in the homologation world. It was the production based class, the one that kept more of its road car roots. Closer to stock. Limited modifications. Usually seam welded by serious privateer shops, though not required by the regulations. Still cage ready. Still pounding across the same stages with the same drivers, just without the factory budgets or the magazine covers. They were the privateer cars that filled entry lists across Europe. The ones most people never hear about, but the ones that made rallying an accessible religion.
Richard Groves' Delta is one of those. He first saw it at Walker’s Garage in Yorkshire, sitting right next to a real Juha Kankkunen car he could not afford. “There was a Kankkunen car. I couldn't quite afford that,” he says. “And they had another car, which was this, which was a Group N strike Group A car.” It had never seen the road. It was built for a fight that never came.
He had wanted one since 1987. “I was just in love with Lancia here at the time,” he says. The wait lasted until his fortieth birthday, when he finally bought “the car of my dreams, which was a rally car.” It did not need a famous chassis number. It did not need a trophy case. It only needed to be real.
And once he had it, he did the rarest thing anyone does with a real competition Delta. He used it. “For me, I was actually using the car a lot like, you know, probably a couple of times a week.” Not once a season. Not gently. Not preserved. The car goes out and lives.
Martini came later for him, not as a sponsor decal or a nostalgia prop, but as a feeling. He had grown up seeing the livery everywhere. “You can see today a lot of Martini clothing,” he says, “but I love the Martini livery. I think it’s one of the best.” The deep red slashed against the blue did something to him. “It just melts my heart seeing this car,” he says. It is not just color. It is a visual memory of the era that made him fall in love with rallying in the first place.
Long before it wrapped itself around the Delta, the Martini livery had already carved its place into motorsport. It began in the early seventies on Porsches tearing across Europe, the colors chosen not for fashion but for contrast on muddy rally stages and fast tarmac. As Martini Racing shifted into Group 4 and Group 5, the stripes became a signature of speed and danger. When the partnership moved to Lancia, it reached its highest form. The Delta wore the livery through five of its six championships, turning those red and blue streaks into a global shorthand for winning. Even people who cannot name a single driver know the colors. They feel them.
The moments that teach you come fast in a real rally car. One day he left the driveway and instantly knew something was wrong. “My nephew turned the brake bias totally to rear,” he says. “I went out and thought the brakes feel like they are not really working. And they were not.” A lockout plate went in after that.
Living with the car simply reinforced what he already understood about its nature. Group A was the big class, the one the world remembers most clearly. Group N lived underneath it, closer to stock but still homologated for the fight. Still cage ready. Still brutal. Many privateer cars blurred the line, borrowing parts upward into Group A spec. His car fits squarely into that world. N bones, A attitude.
And people know. The Delta has a gravitational pull. “During filming we were pulled over many times,” he says. Strangers stop mid road. Phones come out. Martini stripes, even decades later, hit people straight in the chest. “I love the suit with deep red against the blue and it just melts my heart,” he says.
This car is not a museum artifact. It is not the Kankkunen legend sitting on a pedestal. It is the kind of car built for real drivers in real towns who wanted a chance at something bigger. A competition shell with paperwork no one framed and dreams that perhaps never made it to parc fermé.
Richard is finally giving it the life it was denied. A road to run on. A reason to exist. Fear becomes familiarity. Familiarity turns into joy. And the car becomes what it always wanted to be. Driven.
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