Lancia Rally Legend Will Fetch A Fortune At Auction

Short of the Toyota GR Corolla and Subaru WRX, America is pretty hard up on rally legends. They’re a particularly niche class of enthusiast car, combining truck-like off-road capability with the speed and dynamics of a sports car. Usually, that means they aren’t cheap. That will certainly be the case with this Lancia 037, currently up for auction on Bring A Trailer.

The 80s Group B legend is in short supply in America, largely because Lancia had to make so few roadgoing 037s to homologate the car for racing. If your goal is to go racing, why waste time making more than the required number of road cars? What’s more, this one is ready to race – if you’re brave enough.

This one is one of only 260 units produced during Lancia’s combined road and rally production run for these cars, making it all the more rare and valuable. It was eventually brought over to America around seven years ago, and was bought by the seller back in 2021. All of the body panels are made of composite, and the engine is now a replacement Evo II spec unit with a Volumex supercharger.

That gets routed through a ZF-sourced five-speed manual with a proper handbrake for big rally car skids. Unfortunately, power specs aren’t mentioned, but a little digging reveals that the Evo II motors made somewhere in the neighborhood of 325 horsepower, with the cars themselves weighing around 2,100 pounds in race trim. It’s nowhere near as fast as the modern Kimera 037 equivalent, but it’ll still haul ass.

Speaking of race trim, that’s exactly how the interior could be described. There’s not much in it other than the essentials, including two run-down Sparco seats and a fire suppression system. Let’s hope no one needs that. There aren’t many of these left.

As of June 23, the high bid on the auction is already at $201,000. That number will likely go up as there are currently 12 days left on the auction; we imagine this car will shoot up past the $300k mark. One of these has never sold on BAT before, so we don’t really have a frame of reference for how much cash this car will sell for. Given its rally heritage and the amount of money rich people have lying around, we’re betting it’ll be more than any of us can stomach by the time the hammer falls on July 5.