The car that stands out for me is the Peugeot T16. It was the first of its kind, and very well executed. It was a huge undertaking, and a big step at the time. Cars like Lancia’s 037 and Stratos had been designed to do the job with no real consideration about the road car, but the T16 still set a new standard for purpose-built rally machinery. Obviously, the way the homologation regs are formatted now it’s meant to be a derivation of a road car, but during that late 1970s/ early ’80s period, people began to do it the other way round, starting with a rally car and working back to a road car. Peugeot asked the question, ‘if you wanted the ultimate rally car what would it be?’

The 116 was the result. It used the centre-section of the 205, with a tubular steel rear framework and the turbocharged 1775cc four-cylinder engine mounted transversely. I probably wouldn’t have gone for that layout, with the engine on one side of the centre-line and the gear box on the other. In fact I was slightly involved at the schematic stage, because I was working on the UK side of Peugeot-Talbot Sport, and we were shown several options. We didn’t pick that as our first choice, we went for a more conventional mid-engined in-line solution. But though it was radical, it obviously worked.

What I liked about the car was that though it was an out-and-out rally car, almost a no-compromise design, it wasn’t overcomplicated. They kept it nice and simple — long-travel wishbones all round, no electronic torque distribution. A fairly radical piece of equipment, but not full of ludicrous technology.

I went to Juha Kankkunen’s private collection during the Finland Rally last summer, and he has an Evolution 2. You look round that car today, 15 years on, and it’s still a very impressive piece of equipment. It hasn’t got the sophisticated electronics, so it’s not as technically advanced in that respect, but when you look at the standard of the engineering, the simplicity of the design, you can’t help but be impressed. It’s a long way ahead of its time.

“The spectacle of GpB was the shock as much as anything”

Compare it to the Quattro, which was a triumph of development over design. It was all the wrong elements, overcome with ludicrous amounts of horsepower and complexity. When you look at the T16 it’s still simple and effective, nicely executed. They were special shells with a superficial resemblance to the 205 road car. The homologation required 200 road versions, and I would guess they were 25 per cent standard 205 and 75 per cent special fabrication. Then from that there was another step to the 20-odd Evolution cars which you would actually rally, and by the time you got to that, with its carbon-fibre body panels and so on, there was very little left of the original 205 at all.

As I said, in that era you designed the rally car and worked your way back to a road car of sorts. There was little compromise in the design to relate it to a family of road cars, whereas now we’ve moved on a long way.

A modern World Rally Car like our Subaru is a much more logical solution. It is a requirement that the rally car is based more closely on a mass-production car. Although a modem World Rally Car is a very sophisticated piece of equipment, there is a strong family resemblance, and it’s at least as good to watch, maybe better. But we’ve got used to it now.