The Lancia Beta gets so much bile and hatred
from the usual pub, TV and internet bores and yet hardly anybody really knows what they’re
like. So in the interests of bringing you truth and justice I selflessly spent a day
playing with this one, and went to hang out with people who do really know what they’re
like, and unlike all those clickbait journalists and lazy bloggers I did some actual research,
and this is the real story of the Lancia Beta. Spoiler alert: it’s a massively
underrated car, and 90% of the stories you hear or read about it are just rubbish.
The other week I borrowed this, which is a friend’s 1978 series 1 Lancia Beta Coupe. I
used it to gate-crash the Lancia Beta 50th birthday bash organised by the very nice people
at the Betaboyz forum. My friend came along too to make sure I didn’t elope with his Beta
but he was driving this, his Lancia 2000HF, but that’s a car for a whole other video.
The Beta came in a frankly slightly scattergun range of six different body styles, and there
was a marvellous representation of them at the Betaboyz do here in the Oxfordshire countryside.
There was the Berlina, a four door saloon that looked like a hatchback but wasn’t;
and eventually the Trevi, short for Tre Volumi or three boxes, a four door saloon that
didn’t look like a hatchback, and also wasn’t; the HPE, which was a hatchback but was
actually called the high performance estate; the Coupe;
the Spyder, which was a sporty not-quite convertible that had a removable roof panel and
was designed by Pininfarina but built by Zagato; and the Montecarlo (or Scorpion if you’re
in North America), a transverse mid-engined version that also had a removable roof panel
and was designed and built by Pininfarina, albeit originally for Fiat as the X1/20.
I do hope you’re keeping up with this – there’ll be a test at the end, you know.
There was also a seventh variant, the Lancia Rally 037, based on a very heavily
modified Montecarlo. This was famously the last 2 wheel drive car to win the World Rally
Championship, beating the Audi Quattro to the constructors’ trophy by the Kevlar skin of
its steel subframe teeth in 1983. They did make a roadgoing version of it for homologation too,
but they’re incredibly rare so you’ll never see one HOLY PATRICK AND MARY WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT.
I can’t tell you how excited I was to see this. In fact I was so excited I called it an
032, and the owner was very gentle indeed in putting me straight. Note how the engine
is mounted longitudinally in this, unlike all the other variants. The 037 used the centre
section of the Montecarlo but Dallara designed a spaceframe chassis fore and aft and Abarth
tweaked the 2-litre engine up to 205bhp even in this roadgoing trim. That doesn’t sound like
an enormous amount of power by today’s standards, but don’t forget that much of the body is
Kevlar and it weighs about as much as an espresso doppio and an Amaretti biscuit.
And just look at that brown corduroy interior. I am not normally much moved by supercars
but I am deeply in love with this one. Lancia was struggling by the late 60s. It had
a diminished range of cars that were cleverly designed but costly to make and, in the case of
the saloons, starting to look pretty dated. Enter Fiat, Lancia’s blue collar neighbour from a few
blocks away in Turin, which took over the business in October of 1969, put in new management, and
started the job of rebuilding the Lancia range. And they didn’t hang about. The team under the
Fiat-appointed engineering chief, Sergio Camuffo, took the Beta from clean sheet of paper to
production-ready show car in just over 2 years, an amazing achievement especially when you
consider the number of very different variants. While the car itself was a unique design, they
did use the Fiat parts bin as a starting point for the engines, adopting the excellent
Lampredi twin cam unit from the Fiat 124. This is a remarkable unit that saw active
service for over 30 years in everything from the FSO Polonez to the Lancia Delta
Integrale, by way of the Morgan Plus 4. This engine won the constructors World Rally
Championship ten times – a record – and the World Sportscar Championship in,
yes, a Lancia Beta Montecarlo. Twice. Lancia’s engineers did put their own spin on the
Fiat engine, designing their own alloy head to go on the Fiat iron block, with hemispherical
combustion chambers and new inlet and exhaust manifolds to improve efficiency and output
as well as different twin choke carburettors, from either Solex or Weber depending
on whose truck had delivered that week. I’m going to come right out and say it:
the Beta is a stonkingly good car to drive. The engines pretty much all punch a class
above their weight. The 1300 goes more like a 1.6 and this 1.6 feels like a 1.8 or 2-litre. I
haven’t driven the later fuel-injected 2000ie but I reckon that would make for a fascinating
back to back test against my BMW E30 320i. The steering has lots of feel on the move if
slightly heavy at parking speeds. The handling is great, with Macpherson strut independent
suspension all round. There’s a five speed gearbox on all versions, even this 1300 Berlina,
which is the least sporting model but still lively and a delight to drive. And you can tell
everyone that the wooden gear knob is straight out of the Lancia Stratos, and you’d be right.
I’ll do a full driving review of the coupe in a separate video, so keep watching and
I’ll post up a link to it towards the end. I did almost buy my own Beta once, a 1983 2000ie
HPE in metallic blue – I got as far as putting a deposit down, but it was advertised as coming with
an MOT and when the seller came to actually put it through the test it failed catastrophically on –
well, you can probably guess what it failed on. Yes that’s right, rust, which is
what the Lancia Beta is famous for. They were built out of scrap Russian steel and
rotten from the factory and the engines all fell out and that’s why there are none left, right?
Wrong. Firstly, the Russian steel story is just made up.
Yes, Fiat was part of an Italian trade deal with Russia that led to the setting up of the Togliatti
factory on the banks of the Volga to make cast-off Fiat 124s as Ladas, but there’s zero evidence
of Lancia, or Fiat, or Alfa Romeo, using low grade Russian steel.
But there were rust issues, more likely caused by condensation when production stopped
in the regular micro-strikes that hit the Italian factories, so the giant oak tree of the famous
scandal did grow from a little acorn of truth. The story started on the 9th of April 1980, when
the Daily Mirror posted this on its front page, revealing a secret Lancia plan to buy back
defective cars at a cost of one MILLION pounds. The problem was not wholesale rot, but
specifically the brackets that held the back of the engine subframe on the early Berlina saloons.
Not the Coupes or HPEs or anything mark you, just the saloons. This was a simple piece of box
section that had been made out of insufficiently thick steel and insufficiently coated in
protective paint. In the most extreme cases this could eventually fail, and the subframe would
drop a couple of inches and rest on the bulkhead. It did NOT mean the engines would fall out
on the road while you were driving along, even though I’m sure someone will put in
the comments that their cousin’s wife’s sister’s dog’s vet had a nephew who heard of
someone’s friend whose brand new Beta’s engine fell out on the M6 on the way home from
the dealership and everyone nearly died. It didn’t. They didn’t.
Even so, obviously this isn’t good, and Lancia rightly issued a recall. For context, all
car makers issue recalls, and it’s hardly a badge of shame. In 2019, the most recalls were from
Mercedes-Benz, and the second most were from BMW, neither of which I can remember getting laughed
at on Top Gear. So my point is that yes there were rust issues but it wasn't the rust that did for
Lancia’s reputation in the UK, it was terrible PR. The Italian car makers Lancia are buying back
hundreds of their Beta models and scrapping them because of serious rust in the engine mountings.
Lancia dealers are trading old models for new, obligingly telling disgruntled customers that
they'll buy back their rusted Beta saloons - worth only scrap to the company - and offering
generous part exchange terms for the new models. It's all part of a frantic public relations
exercise to help cover up the rust problem they've identified as destroying their cars.
Whoa whoa hold on, either it’s a massive publicity campaign or it’s a
cover-up, it can’t be both. Sue Lloyd-Roberts went on to become a famous
special correspondent, winning an Emmy Award and the CBE for fearless reporting on political
corruption and the world’s dodgiest regimes, but back in 1980 she was a junior ITN
reporter fighting hard to make her name by turning the pretty thin gruel of a
car maker recall into a monstrous scandal. Oh Andrew.
The correct answer would have been that Lancia redesigned the car years
ago to fix the problem, we’re looking after all the affected customers, and we’ve introduced a
six year rust warranty with annual inspections which is a way better deal than any other car
maker, but this poor man has been sent into this gunfight armed only with a structurally corroded
spoon, and has given an honest engineer’s answer to massively loaded marketing question.
All cars in the 1970s were prone to rust. Fords, Vauxhalls, Volkswagens, even BMWs;
Minis were famous for the rear suspension subframes letting go, and on 2CVs and Renault
4s the floorpan was practically a service item. These cars are revered today, not dumped on some
clickbait list of the world’s worst cars because they had a recall 7 years into the model cycle.
The good news is that, while most of them did eventually succumb to rot and vanish from the
roads, along with Lancia’s whole UK operation in the 1990s, there are still quite a few left.
And the even better news is that they’re excellent cars, with a very friendly and supportive
community of owners and a decent network of parts and expertise thanks mainly
to Betaboyz and the Lancia Motor Club. And because of all the nonsense, they’re a bit of
an insider tip, so not just better but a whole lot cheaper than the equivalent Capri or Cortina,
say. So go and buy one, or just hit the like button to say to hell with the pub bores.
Meanwhile if that’s whetted your appetite for how good Lancias are then watch this next.
Cor, I feel better for getting that off my chest.
