Last week, everyone was excitedly talking about the return of the Lancia Delta HF Integrale. But this week, the company scrubbed all mention of the Delta. Has the brand decided against bringing back the rally icon or did its marketing team simply act prematurely?
If you’re a hardcore rally fan, the Lancia Delta HF Integrale is basically the automotive equivalent of Micheal Jordan. Built as a successor to the Delta S4 that competed in the infamous Group B segment of WRC, the Delta Integrale HF won the Group A Manufacturers’ Championship for six consecutive years between 1987 and 1992. It was dethroned by the Toyota Celica GT-Four the following year.
Having announced the new Ypsilon HF (HF being Lancia’s high-performance designation) and simultaneously confirming that the brand would be returning to rallying earlier this year, everyone began to fantasize about the prospect of the Delta coming back into play.
Lancia has tragically spent the last couple of decades building re-badged models trading on little more than the brand’s heritage — diminishing its cultural value in the process. However, the company recently issued a press release stating that it would be bringing back both the Gamma and the Delta, with HF guaranteeing that there would be high-performance versions of both vehicles.
However, CarBuzz recently reported that all mentions of the Delta have since been scrubbed from Lancia’s press materials. The same was true of the Gamma.
The assumption here is that the company simply released the information prematurely. But it doesn’t sound as though the cars are being scraped, especially considering how much hinting Lancia has already done. For example, the Ypsilon Rally4 HF was previewed wearing the iconic Martini livery worn by Delta cars throughout their WRC careers.
The presumption was that, while the Ypsilon (above) was doing battle in Rally4, Lancia would be preparing the Delta for WRC Rally1. In both cases, the vehicles would yield homologation models that would be sold to the public.
Officially, Lancia has said that the Gamma will indeed see an HF Integrale variant. But it was unable to confirm anything about the Delta. It only specified that a third model was in development. Your author is willing to gamble that it’s still the Delta, as Lancia would be pretty stupid not to run with the model that probably has the most cultural cachet among today’s drivers. But the question is when are we going to see it and how long will we need to wait until there’s an HF Integrale variant that can compete in motorsport.
There have also been unsubstantiated rumors that the would-be Delta is facing some development issues due to Stellantis’ previous (and arguably ongoing) obsession with electrification. Those clearly stem from the STLA Medium platform that will underpin the Gamma, which is assumed to come as both a hybridized-gasoline model and pure electric. But we don’t really have enough solid information about the presumed Delta to go on, so it’s unfair to make any major assumptions regarding how it’ll be built.
As for the likelihood of our seeing any Lancia models coming to North America, the outlook isn’t particularly rosy. While the brand may have produced some of the most iconic rally cars of the twentieth century, most of their fame is isolated to Europe.
That said, imported Deltas are highly desirable in the United States and many Lancia models are well known among North American enthusiasts. World Rally has also gained in popularity inside the United States since the early 2000s thanks to the internet, a slew of video games, and the formation of the American Rally Association in 2016. If Stellantis was still considering bringing over European brands, Lancia could be a reasonable option. Sadly, the company started 2025 announcing that it had changed its mind on the matter.
Considering how it has handled the existing American brands, and the current state of Fiat and Alfa Romeo, that’s understandable. Stellantis has clearly (and wisely) opted to focus on fixing Dodge, Jeep, and Ram while Chrysler’s fate seems a little more up in the air. However, a sound solution may be to badge engineer European models and slot them into whatever U.S. brand they’d be best suited for — ideally doing a better job than they did with the Dodge Hornet/Alfa Romeo Tonale.
With there being a deficit of traditional sports cars on our market right now, something small and spicy (with enough practicality to be a daily driver) could be ideal. The assumption is that a model like the Delta HF would compete with the likes of the Toyota GR Corolla, a sprightly car that has been popular enough for the Japanese brand to want to increase production on. However, even if that was the plan for Stellantis, we probably wouldn’t see such a model land on our shores for quite some time.
[Images: Samuel Mederos Medina/Shutterstock; Stoqliq/Shutterstock; Stellantis; JoshBryan/Shutterstock]
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