The dreadful disappointment of a Lancia Delta | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

It was certainly very close; at the time I was living on Hyde Park Place which forms part of the Bayswater Road between the aforementioned Gate and Marble Arch. And before you go getting the wrong impression, the accommodation was as stark a contrast to its plutocratic address as you could imagine: a shabby, damp basement with views out to nothing except piled up gravestones, as if the building had been built on a cemetery which I expect it had.

So, the car was certainly close, but my father? Not so much. By “bring it over” he meant drive it to Weymouth, put it on some rusting old hulk of a Sealink ferry, spend the night in a chair and wind up thoroughly exhausted on the island of Jersey where he lived. Being in my early 20s at the time, I obviously leapt at the opportunity. Crazy about cars but not yet driving them for a living, I’d have done it if he’d just bought a Fiat 126. In fact, it was a Lancia Delta HF 4WD.

I wonder if you remember this car. It was the first of a line of cars that became known as Integrales, after the car that replaced the HF 4WD. Like the Integrales, this one was based on the five-door Delta hatchback shell and powered by a 2.0-litre turbocharged engine, distributing its power in all four directions. You can tell the HF 4WD from all the actual Integrales in an instant as it's the only one that didn’t have flared wheel arch extensions.

It arrived just in time to take full advantage of the FIA’s new World Rally Championship regulations, replacing the Group B monsters of which just 200 needed to be built with Group A regulations for far more sensible machinery, so sensible indeed that homologation required a run of 5,000 vehicles.

In the end, just over 5,300 HF 4WDs were made, still making it the rarest of the Delta-based all-wheel drive Lancias, and on the special stage it won nine out of 13 rallies of the 1987 season, obliterating competition in the constructors’ championship and placing its drivers on all three steps of the podium in the driver’s championship. It was a total demolition job.

So, you can imagine the excitement as the 21-year-old me toddled off down the road to collect this thing. At the time I was ‘something in The City’, that something being a total but as yet undiscovered idiot, meaning I had some money and a Peugeot 205 GTI to go with my red braces and chalk stripe double breasted suit. Of course, I exaggerate for effect on the clothing front, but not by much.

And I thought my Peugeot, with its 106PS (78kW), 1.6-litre engine was an absolute missile. What would a 2.0-litre Lancia with a turbocharger, 167PS (123kW) and four-wheel-drive feel like? I’d have been quivering as I slipped through the right-hand door and tried to compose myself behind its wheel.

And the answer? It was a dreadful disappointment, and not only because the steering wheel had never been meant for that side of the car, it having been hastily and poorly converted from left to right hand drive (no all-wheel-drive Delta of any kind was ever built with RHD from new). It had the wrong steering rack and you didn’t have to spend much time staring into the dark recesses of the passenger footwell to see where they’d sewn up the carpet…

But even that aside, it was nothing like I’d expected. It turned out to be barely any quicker than the Peugeot because the mass of the five-door shell, the all-wheel-drive hardware and the big turbo motor all but wiped out its on-paper power advantage.

There was turbo lag, and if you wanted to make use of the limited-period overboost function you had to hit the accelerator so hard you feared putting a foot through the front bulkhead. Worst of all, while the Peugeot was beautifully balanced – a car that could be placed as easily by foot as by hand, the Lancia just wanted to understeer. Did I report my feelings to my father upon arrival in Jersey? What do you think?

They did get better. The 188PS (138kW) Integrale was a small step, the 16-valve version thereof a slightly bigger one and the final ‘Evoluzione’ cars the best of the lot by far. But I never did, and still don’t understand why they are so raved about today, and described by so many as the greatest fast hatchback of all time. As a thing just to drive, if not in which to win rallies, my little old Peugeot beat the lot of them hands down.