Currently reading: Lancia Delta Integrale could return

Iconic Lancia Delta Integrale is being championed for a comeback by senior staff within Fiat Chrysler

A number of senior Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) executives are pushing for an all-new Lancia Delta Integrale to be commissioned before the brand is completely wound down.

Sources at FCA say representations are being made at the highest levels to reinvent one of the company’s most evocative and highly regarded models. However, there is no suggestion that another attempt should be made to rebuild Lancia as a full-line brand in its own right.

In an industry that increasingly successfully trades on prestige and history, many FCA executives believe it would be a big mistake to allow the Lancia badge to be wound up when the Delta Integrale brand still holds so much cachet.

However, FCA boss Sergio Marchionne takes a very unsentimental view of the near-defunct Lancia brand and is much more interested in a successful relaunch of Alfa Romeo. He is likely to see even a single new Lancia model as an unnecessary distraction.

The Delta won 46 individual World Rally Championship events and six consecutive manufacturers’ titles, competing up until 1993.

However, what was then Fiat Auto decided that Lancia should be reinvented as an upmarket luxury brand, despite its competition successes, leaving the way open for Alfa Romeo to be the group’s sporting brand.

More than 20 years of attempts to respin Lancia as a ‘luxury’ brand (including the Delta Mk2 and Mk3 and the big Thesis executive car) have failed miserably.

The key to the Delta’s long-lived high profile lies in virtual reality. Although the very last Delta Integrale models were produced in 1994 (in ultimate HF Integrale 16v Evoluzione II form), the car has lived on in generations of computer games.

A number of historic Lancia models feature in the current Gran Turismo 6 game, including the Delta Integrale, an Integrale rally car, the Delta S4 and the Stratos.Two years ago, it was estimated that 100,000 people a day log on to play Gran Turismo online. This suggests that in the past 15 years or so, millions of people would have engaged virtually with the Delta in its many high-performance forms.

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supermanuel 3 July 2015

Little chance

FCA is not capable of reviving brands, it is only capable of bleeding them out until they are dead. Nothing worthwhile will come out of FCA until Marchionne is removed from his post. The man has - literally- no idea how to run a large automobile manufacturer. If you want half-arsed, under-developed, unoriginal and derivative product then Marchionne's your man. Personally, I don't want that for Lancia anymore, or Alfa, or Maser.....
Daniel Joseph 3 July 2015

Marchionne is right...

...not to waste time on a vanity project like this. It reminds me a bit of the MG SV, with which MG Rover management amused and distracted themselves while everything else was falling apart. Unfortunately, I have to agree with supermanuel that Marchionne appears to be dead wrong about pretty much everything else. Lancia is dead, Fiat is in wholesale retreat and the new Alfa Romeo Giulia, whatever its dynamic abilities might prove to be, looks heavy-handed, dumpy and derivative, and is a huge disappointment. This is my third post today criticising Fiat. I'm beginning to sound like I have an agenda against the company. This is absolutely not the case. I'm pretty bored by the VW group hegemony in Europe and would love to see a resurgence in Fiat and its sister brands to provide something genuinely different and characteristically "Italianate".
Will86 3 July 2015

@typos1

Agreed, I though this was a Golf facelift.
typos1 3 July 2015

. . . . lets just hope that

. . . . lets just hope that any new Delta doesnt look like a Golf with a Skoda front like the picture above.
marj 7 July 2015

typos1 wrote: . . . . lets

typos1 wrote:

. . . . lets just hope that any new Delta doesnt look like a Golf with a Skoda front like the picture above.

absoltely!