For the first three days of San Remo Rally 1986 business was as usual, Lancia and Peugeot fought in tarmac and gravel roads of Northern Italy for the win and Lancia was losing. Peugeot ran three bar turbo pressure on their cars, pumping a whopping 540hp out of the engine. At the end of the third day, disaster struck. Scrutineers re-examined Peugeots and decreed that their underbody fins were in fact skirts. Skirts had been banned after the Corsica and despite the fact that cars had passed pre-rally scrutineering, stewards excluded all Peugeots with immediate effect.
Incidentally, Peugeot used the same underbody configuration in all rallies after Corsica without any scrutineering problems at all. It is useless to point fingers or try to figure out whether Lancia was behind this affair but certainly the fact that italian team was losing in italian rally had an effect in this decision. At any rate, Peugeot's counter-protest was not successful and team was out of the rally. This was the major error on the organisers side, they should have let Peugeot run under appeal.
But as they did not, competition was over and Lancia was able to shuffle the victory for Alen. Matter did not end there as Peugeot took the matter to FISA who after the season in December decided that exclusion had been illegal. All championship points of that rally were annulled and because of that, San Remo 1986 cannot be considered as an WRC event.
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