Race for Glory: Audi vs Lancia review – 1980s rally face-off is David v Goliath showdown

Italian director Stefano Mordini manages an admirably tasteful dramatisation of a carmaker contest that defined a decade – but it never quite gets the pulse racing

Cast your minds back, if you will, to 1983. The year of Return of the Jedi and The A-Team. It was also the year of a showdown in the sometimes dangerous and always hotly contested world of rally racing. The 1983 World Rally Championship saw the German Audi Quattro A2 team, led by Hannu Mikkola, fighting it out against Walter Röhrl and the Italian Lancia 037; it’s a rivalry that this dramatisation depicts as a David v Goliath battle, pitting the technologically advanced Germans against the scrappier and more strategic Italian underdogs.

Liberties have been taken, but probably not too many that people outside rallying diehards will mind. Certain real-world factors here do not lend themselves particularly to the dynamics of thrilling fiction: the season playing out over a full calendar year, the split focus of the drivers’ and manufacturers’ championship, the gradual accumulation of points across the season … we’re not exactly in the realms of a be-all-and-end-all, down to the wire, penalty shootout.