Fiat 131 Abarth Rally
Why 3.2: Fiat built exactly 400 homologation specials — plastic body panels, a 140-hp twin-cam four, independent rear suspension unique to this model — so Abarth's works team could campaign the 131 in Group 4. The works cars won three manufacturers' titles, 1977, 1978 and 1980; the road cars now trade for six figures and rarely see daily use.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €13k (1976) → €239k (2026), trending up · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
Built before ISOFIX existed, so there are no anchor points at all. A child seat here is a seatbelt installation, and the belt geometry of the period was not designed with one in mind.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
The ordinary Fiat 131 Mirafiori was a perfectly forgettable mid-size sedan, which made it a strange-looking base for a rally weapon — until you remember that homologation rules cared about superficial similarity to a road car, not whether the road car was interesting. Fiat built exactly 400 131 Abarth Rally examples for Group 4 homologation, fifty of them retained by Abarth as works cars, with flared plastic fenders, a Lampredi-designed twin-cam 16-valve four making 140 hp for the street, and an independent rear suspension no ordinary 131 ever got. The works version, running dry-sump lubrication and mechanical fuel injection, made up to 240 hp, and Sandro Munari, Markku Alén and Walter Röhrl drove it to manufacturers' titles in 1977, 1978 and 1980 — twenty WRC event wins across the whole campaign, one of the most dominant homologation-special runs of the era. That racing pedigree, combined with a production run smaller than many limited-edition Ferraris, has pushed road-car values from roughly $15,000 new-equivalent into the $150,000-$300,000 range over the past decade, with a handful of exceptional sales well past that. A genuine, numbers-matching Rally Stradale gets trailered to historic rally regularity events now rather than driven to the shops, the same trajectory as every other homologation legend on this shelf.