The Talbot Horizon Lotus was set to be a mid-engined, turbocharged successor to the Sunbeam, but it lacked a vital ingredient -
was a mongrel. For starters, it was based upon a stopgap hatchback built on a cut-down Hillman Avenger chassis, hastily confected in just 19 months to give the ill-fated Linwood plant something to make. Even company bosses thought the Sunbeam was an unpromising platform for a rally car and motorsport director Des O’Dell had to use his own money to buy a Lotus engine and fit it to a mule in order to win them over.
Even once it was signed off, no one had great hopes for the little Sunbeam, despite Lotus tweaks to the suspension and shell, and a 2.2-litre version of their twin-cam 900-series engine up front.
Trouble was, by the time the fat-arched little hatch clinched the title at the RAC Rally in November ’81 the Sunbeam itself was an obsolete model, killed off with the closure of the Linwood plant in May of that year. And despite its victory, the car’s front-engined, rear-drive layout was looking out of date as the world now focused on the new-for-’82 Group B regulations.
had already started to show the potential of four-wheel drive that would lead to its domination of the 1982 season; the rear-drive Talbot looked technically old hat before it had taken part in its first rally.
The T16’s doomed forebear didn’t die in vain, however, because early development on the mighty 205 took place in Coventry using lessons learnt from the work undertaken on the mid-engined Horizon Lotus.
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