Where did all the great road/race cars go?

Homologation is a big word, but it's impact on car culture is all-time. The process of making a road-going variant of a race car to qualify that race car for a particular class of motorsport has given us some of our most-vaunted automotive heroes. 

Stretching back to the early 1960s, the explosion of racing production cars in touring cars, NASCAR, rallying, sports cars, drag racing, and more, occured across the globe. From European circuits to New Zealand rally trails, American speedways and drag strips to Aussie road courses, car manufacturers realised the publicity of winning sporting contests helped raise their profile, which helped sell more cars.

Racing, they realised, was good business. 

Let's take a walk through SOME of homologation's greatest hits: Mini Cooper S, Datsun 1600 SSS, Ford Mustang Boss 302, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, Nissan R32 Skyline GT-R, Subaru WRX STi Type RA, Ford Lotus Cortina, Chevrolet Camaro Z2/8, Lancia Delta Integrale, Nissan Pulsar GTi-R, Plymouth Superbird/Dodge Charger Daytona, Mazda Savannah (RX-3), Ford Sierra Cosworth, Holden Torana A9X, Audi UR Quattro, Ford Falcon GT-HO, Nissan Skyline KPGC10 GT-R, Mazda RX-7 SP, BMW E30 M3, Porsche 911 GT1, Holden HDT VK SS Group A, Mercedes 190E Cosworth, Ford Galaxie R-code, Lancia Stratos, Mitsubishi Starion turbo, BMW E9 CSL, Nissan DR30 RS-X, Ford Escort RS (and later Cosworth), Mazda Familiar GT-R... the list goes on and on and on.

Pardon moi, I need a lie down after all of that.

You'll notice a lot of those cars listed above often feature heavily on lists of "the greatest driver's cars of all time" and the like. This is because manufacturers stripped them back to focus on the job at hand: being good to drive so they could win races. This is what makes them perfect for we car enthusiasts.

There is always a mythos around them, too, as these were special edition cars not seen often in regular life. There truly was an aura around them that these rare, high-performance beasts were more special than a garden variety supercar which had been purchased off the dealer's lot. Regular people who didn't typically care for cars knew these were special things. 

I distinctly remember being 5 years old and my father packing me a lunch and stuffing me into our yellow 504 Peugeot to visit a BMW dealer more than two hour's drive (each way) away from my house, despite my family not having the money to buy a BMW bonnet emblem. This was all because one of my dad's workmate who wouldn't have known a Quattro from a calculator had seen an E30 M3 race car in the window of this dealership when he drove past the day before.

Seeing Jim Richards' John Player Special race car in the flesh was the moment i really fell in love with E30 BMWs, which has continued 38 years (and many non-M E30s of my own) later. 

Arguably the greatest time period for homologation cars, on a global scale, was the late 80s through the mid-90s, which roughly aligns with Group A racing rules. This was when the governing body of motorsport, the FIA, decided to set up a global set of regulations to standardise racing classes. Group A was for "modified touring cars" and there was also Group N for "standard touring cars", replacing local classes like Group 2, Group C (Australian-only touring cars), Group B, Group C (world sports cars like the Porsche 956).

While the FIA talked about wanting to make it easier to race passenger cars anywhere in the world, and to increase the number of car manufacturers participating in racing there are many today who believe the real reason comes back to lobbying from the tobacco industry who were heavily invested in almost all types of sport at that time and wanted to improve their global reach.

Whatever the reason, these racing classes gave us some of the most iconic driver's cars and most-important tuner cars, upon whose shouldes our hobby and industry stands tall today. Homologation cars are literally engineered by manufacturers to become racing cars, so of course that means they make the perfect base for a tuner to build an awesome modified car.

But, if making race cars gave us all these absolute banger sleds to froth over for decades... what happened?

Money was the downfall.

Homologation cars cost huge sums to engineer into successful racing cars, and with the incredible pace of development in Group A touring cars and rallying - spurred on by a lot of tobacco sponsorship cash - costs to make your car faster than the other bloke stripped profit margins away from the very road cars the racing machinery was only there to help sell.

Most manufacturers were moving away from international touring car racing by the early 90s, and a push soon started to return to localised class rules featuring specially-constructed race cars that didn't need homologation. We got DTM in Germany, TOCA 2L in the BTCC, JGTC/Super GT in Japan, and Australia ended up with a 5L V8 formula after a short battle with a rival 2L super tourer class.

There was also a push, rightly so, for safer race cars. Attitudes towards deaths in motorsport had shifted greatly since the 60s, and the idea of enjoying a family day out at an event where multiple people could die in terrible crashes kinda killed the vibe. To make cars safer while containing costs, teams really needed to start with bare shells and remove the compromises the road car bases forced upon them. And that's a good thing.

With no requirement to have a racing variant in their road car line-up, manufacturers were free to pile on the luxury touches, improve NVH, strip out costly parts to bulletproof it for when it needed to do 1000km around the Nurburgring.... and these less focussed, less compromised cars still sold well. Racing variants were an expensive, niche product and the market signalled they didn't miss them.

So, the big question is: are we better off without homologation cars?

Cars are better-built and faster today than ever before so, on one hand, yes we are much better off. 

But - and this is a Nicky Minaj-sized but that would cause Sir Mix-A-Lot to pass out from fluid loss - the visceral, analogue, feedback-rich experience of driving a classic homologation car is truly a special, wondrous event to be savoured and celebrated.

It's important to note that, to get the most from the experience, you really need to keep things in perspective - there is no point comparing driving a Sierra RS500 or Mini Cooper S to your BRZ or late-model Civic Type-R.

Any classic car is a product of its time and to truly understand what makes these race-bred special editions so highly fawned-over you need to understand what other cars of that time period were like. Think of it like movies: in today's lifelike CGI and AI special effects world, The Terminator is almost laughable, but watch other movies from before 1984 to understand how Terminator influenced generations of movie-makers.  

We won't see a return to the days when scores of manufacturers would pump a decent slice of their annual engineering and marketing budgets into racing, and promoting their involvement, but this makes this era, from the early 1960s through to the mid-1990s as a special time we should celebrate. Long live homologation cars, and thanks for building us some heroes.