Audi Sport quattro vs Lancia Hyena: rally cars reinvented

By Alastair Clements

| 18 Jun 2025

Classic & Sports Car – Audi Sport quattro vs Lancia Hyena: rally cars reinvented

You could be forgiven for thinking that the traditional art of the coachbuilder had all but died out by the middle of the 1980s.

In the search for ʻefficienciesʼ and better build quality, even the smaller, more exotic manufacturers, such as Ferrari, had largely taken production in-house.

The old carrozzerie were forced to go back to the drawing board – or more likely the CAD screen – and stay there, apart from the odd venture into the workshop to knock up a show-stopping concept car.

The Lancia Hyena devours corners

Think again. The craftspeople were still there; they simply didnʼt shout about it so much – and they were branching out into new arenas.

I donʼt mean Zagatoʼs armour-plated Alfa Romeos for the super-rich, either.

Take the Audi you see here. It doesnʼt take a huge amount of car knowledge to spot that this is no ordinary quattro, but one of 224 short-wheelbase Sport versions of the stage-munching monster.

What you perhaps wonʼt have realised, however, is that the carbon-Kevlar skin that wrapped the steel monocoques of those few homologation examples produced from 1984-ʼ86 were crafted not in Ingolstadt but over in Stuttgart in the workshops of Karosserie Baur.

The Lancia Hyena’s ‘double-bubble’ dashboard is a nod to Zagato’s signature roof design

Four years later, as the new decade dawned, Dutch restorer Paul Koot was chatting to Andrea Zagato, lamenting the loss of the handcrafted specials of old, and inadvertently instigated the Lancia Hyena.

Just three years later, in March 1993, the production car was unveiled at the Geneva show, six months after the prototypeʼs appearance in Paris.

Although it seemed an unusual creation at the time, this union of Zagato and Lancia was just a little bit of history repeating.

In ʼ67, just as the Fulvia was establishing itself as a rally star, Zagato rebodied it to create the Sport, so its double-bubbling-up of the late-ʼ80s/early-ʼ90s WRC dominatrix Delta Integrale to devise the Hyena was more logical than it might at first seem.

Like the Audi, the Lancia Delta HF Integrale Evo 3 floorpan was clothed in Kevlar panels, albeit only the doors and bumpers, with the rest – in Zagato tradition – being aluminium over a steel frame.

Zagato built just 24 Lancia Hyenas

Unlike the Audi, though, the Zagato Lancia coupé had no intention of getting its tyres dirty: this was very much a road car.

While they may have had different purposes, together this duo represented a new breed of four-wheel-drive super-exotics, born of the rally stage rather than the race track.

In the composite, however, their polar target markets are immediately obvious.

The Audi is, well, er... quite ugly. Donʼt get me wrong, I adore it when a carʼs style is born of purpose and without pandering to aesthetics, but it would be a lie to suggest that lopping 12½in from the standard quattroʼs wheelbase and stretching its nose to accommodate an intercooler created a thing of beauty.

The quattro origins are obvious, as if the 1980 original is struggling to fit into its lightweight new suit.

The Lancia Hyena has OZ Racing wheels with Pirelli P700Z tyres

It takes more skill to spot bits of the original in a Hyena.

Thatʼs hardly surprising because, while Lancia sanctioned the use of its grille, its generosity didnʼt extend to offering knocked-down Integrales.

Instead, complete Deltas had to be bought and cut up, before being wrapped in an all-new body by Marco Pedracini.

And what a body. It isnʼt pretty-pretty – itʼs a bit too cartoon-like for that, like a Charles Schulz sketch of the perfect supercar – but itʼs a well-resolved shape, with its doors moved back from the front bulkhead to centre them in the design.

Beside the tall, upright quattro it looks low, squat and tautly sculpted, creating drama through ready-to-pounce tension rather than the in-your-face, blistered-arched aggression of the Audi.

The Lancia Hyena’s transverse turbo ‘four’ makes 250bhp

There are hints of design greats everywhere – Audi TT in the windscreen pillars, Alfa Romeo Giulietta SZ in the tight tail – but also some oddities, such as using the windscreen from an Il Mostro Alfa Romeo SZ, which wraps into the roof so the Hyena looks as if it has a receding hairline.

Pull open the typically Italian, finger-thin doorhandle, slide over the wide sill and itʼs like climbing into an unfinished Formula One monocoque.

Youʼll recognise the supportive Recaro seats, the uncomfortable driving position and the three-spoke wheel from a Delta, but everything else – from dashboard to doors, even the heater controls – is carbonfibre.

The dash echoes the double-bubble of the roof, while the doors are moulded with a subtle ʻZʼ motif, and the whole interior reputedly weighed just 14kg.

Itʼs beautifully finished, too, without a creak or squeak once under way; in fact, the whole car feels stiffer, more rigid and better put together than the steel-bodied Delta on which it was based.

‘This was a new breed of super-exotic, born of the special stage rather than the race track’

Start up and the turbocharged 2-litre, 16-valve, twin-cam ʻfourʼ – stretched from 210 to 250bhp for the Hyena – settles to an urgent, offbeat grumble.

Move off and thereʼs the familiar Lancia Delta Integrale clutch judder and slightly loose gearchange, with each ratio swap accompanied by a loud cough from the wastegate and brief respite from the engineʼs strident – if not particularly tuneful – blare.

If you’ve driven an Integrale you’ll know that itʼs no sluggard, but this thing is something else entirely.

Itʼs more aerodynamic, and its maker estimated 0-60mph at just over 5 secs and 145mph flat-out, but it feels quicker, with boost aplenty from 3000rpm to the 6500rpm redline.

The 330lb weight loss over the Integrale has an even bigger effect as the Hampshire back-roads get twisty.

Comfy Recaro seats in the Audi Sport quattro’s sober cabin

The steering is wonderful: quick, wrist-twitch accurate, heftily weighted and with such feel that itʼs easy to convince yourself thereʼs no power-assistance at all.

Adjustable Koni dampers all round give a firm ride, but itʼs compliant and thereʼs barely any roll as you revel in the Hyenaʼs light, chuckable nature.

Itʼs a touch nose-heavy if you turn in on a trailing throttle, but get on the power and it squats, then just grips and grips, as if the road were surfaced with touch-dry Copydex.

Step into the Audi and it feels entirely alien after the handmade, bespoke aura of the Lancia.

Aside from a bit of leather and suede – and the obligatory diff controls in the centre console – from inside you could be in any circa-1985 Volkswagen Group product.

The Audi Sport quattro’s windscreen is more upright than the standard car’s, but bonnet vents add aggression

In the Lancia you struggle for headroom, but here the problems come courtesy of the shortened cabin: the pedals and big, four-spoke steering wheel are close, while the rear seats are no more useful for accommodating humans than the Lanciaʼs diamond-stitched load bay.

Aside from that, and unlike its lairy roadgoing Group B rivals, the Sport quattro is a usable and luxurious road car – albeit one with a naughty streak as wide as the Audi is long.

That naughtiness is obvious from the moment you fire up, the lumpy thrum immediately making you feel like Walter Röhrl.

The longitudinally mounted 2133cc ʻfiveʼ sits so far forward that you expect the Sport to plough headlong past the apex of the first corner attacked with any vigour.

Yet, crucially, in addition to an extra cam, this car also received an alloy instead of iron block – on top of which it would appear that no one has told this Audi about the laws of physics.

The Audi quattro’s turbo ‘five’ got less capacity for the Sport, but gained an extra camshaft and an alloy engine block

The weight is there, yes, but the wheelbase chop makes this big car feel unnaturally agile, aided by the Torsen centre diff and massive 255/45 gumball tyres that wrap its 15in Ronal alloys (the flyweight Lanciaʼs 16in OZ Racing five-spokes make do with 205/45s).

The clutch, gearbox and brakes are heavier than the Hyenaʼs, and, in the case of the brakes, less convincing, but the steering is oddly light so it takes a few miles to adjust.

Once you do, however, it encourages you to push hard and enjoy it.

You must be prepared for a battle, but ultimately itʼs the faster car and, surprisingly, the more rewarding one.

The Sport, at 2807lb, was only 40lb lighter than an early 10-valve quattro, but it had 106bhp more prod – and this particular example may have a touch more, its previous owner having been a certain Richard Lloyd of Audi Sport UK.

Baur fabricated carbon-kevlar panels for the Audi Sport quattro

With 258lb ft available from 3700rpm, itʼs also much torquier than the Lancia, that groundswell building with the aid of the whopping KKK turbocharger into a faintly insane shove.

Think 60mph from rest in 4.8 secs and 154mph, all overlaid with that wonderful Kielder-forest warble that is so uniquely quattro.

Audi had to build 200 Sport quattros for homologation purposes.

In the final reckoning it managed 224, which makes it by far the more common of this pairing. Not that youʼre likely to see another of either on UK roads.

Thereʼs perhaps a generous handful of Sports over here – a few have arrived in addition to the six official imports – and itʼs the car to which passing petrolheads immediately give a thumbs-up.

The Audi Sport quattro’s 15in Ronal rims

As for the Hyena, there canʼt be more than two or three on British shores, with total production numbering just 24, which probably explains why it is greeted with a curious blend of puzzlement and pleasure by other road users.

And that is a shame. This carʼs £75,000 list price new must have scared away plenty of punters, many put off by the fact that it was only a Delta underneath.

Yet that basis had more competition pedigree than the contemporary Ferrari and Lamborghini ranges combined.

Pure folly it may have been, but the Lancia Hyena was a return to the classic carrozzeria formula, and it had the performance to live with the best that Modena had to offer.

‘The Audi Sport quattro [right] is by far the more common car – not that youʼre likely to see another of either on UK roads’

Yet one car it canʼt quite live with is the Audi Sport quattro.

The Lancia is a thrilling drive and by far the prettier car, but in moving from its mud-spattered roots towards the catwalk it lost a hint of its donorʼs appeal.

So it just canʼt beguile quite like the quattro, with the Audiʼs intoxicating blend of pace, blood-and-thunder noise, plus that bobble-hatted nostalgia for the rally stages.

Images: Tony Baker

Thanks to: David Flux (adrianflux.co.uk) and Lancia vendor Oakfields

This was first in our October 2010 magazine; all information was correct at the date of original publication

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