Lancia still outselling Alfa Romeo – still!

The tale of Lancia is a cautionary one: Bought by Fiat 50 years ago, a dominant force in world rallying, neglected, forgotten, shoved to one side, ignored in Fiat Chrysler Automobiles’ strategic planning and expected to die.

But it hasn’t.

It’s fighting back, hard. While Alfa Romeo has had billions invested in it and its showrooms filled with 4Cs, Giulias, Giuliettas and Stelvios, Lancia has soldiered on with just the eight-year-old Fiat Panda-based Ypsilon hatchback.

And, while Alfa Romeo is marketed across Europe and the world as a rival for the likes of Mercedes-Benz and BMW, Lancia’s world has contracted to just Italy.

And Lancia is kicking Alfa Romeo’s butt.

As we reported in July, Lancia is outselling Alfa Romeo from a base of just one nation. But that was just an aberration, we were informed by an anonymous FCA source, and normal service would be resumed soon.

Here we are after nine full months of the year and, if anything, the once-great Lancia is stretching its sales lead over FCA’s golden child Alfa.

The last chance Lancia had at the big time was when it was a brief flicker on the strategy board of the late Sergio Marchionne, when it shared some already-dated Chrysler models.

But now under the control of Antonella Bruno, Lancia has walloped Alfa Romeo by 45,783 sales to Alfa’s 39,114 in the first nine months of the year in Europe.

That’s because Lancia’s sales boomed by 29 per cent and Alfa’s fell by 42 per cent to a paltry 0.4 per cent of Europe’s entire car market.

This begs two obvious questions: what’s Lancia doing right that Alfa Romeo isn’t, and will it lead to a worldwide Lancia comeback?

Lancia has boxed cleverly with special-editions and it’s also in the fortunate position of having the only proper mainstream hatchback (above the Panda) left in the entire Fiat Chrysler Automobiles catalogue.

Sales of the Polish-built Ypsilon have been rising since the death of the unloved Fiat Punto in 2018. FCA won’t reveal if it’s profitable or not and there’s no easy way to tell from its annual accounts, but it ought to be.

It’s cheaper to build than the far-cheaper Panda (which is made in Italy), so even if its end-of-month sales surges are heavily supported, they can afford to be.

It’s beloved of Italian women, and not remotely because it’s run by one of them.

A full 75 per cent of Ypsilon customers are Italian women, FCA’s data shows, and Bruno has been playing on it with a range of Ypsilon Collections to mirror the Italian fashion industry’s buzzwords.

Also, a third of Ypsilons are sold as liquefied petroleum gas cars, which cost far less to run and attract lower taxes. It’s the third most popular LPG car in Italy, behind only the Panda and the Dacia Duster.

Marchionne wrote Lancia off without killing it, hoping it would either fight back on its own without any of his money or energy or die a natural death.

“We realised the Lancia brand has no appeal outside of Italy," Marchionne said in 2014. “It has no heritage neither in Europe nor in the US.”

Its success has placed FCA in a quandary. It never planned to replace the Ypsilon, which has perhaps two more years left in production, so it’s now a bit stuck.

There will be a mild-hybrid update for it next year, according to FCA’s 2018 annual report, with the Jeep Renegade/Fiat 500X 1.0-litre, three-cylinder petrol engine replacing the heavier, thirstier four-cylinder current motor.

If you break it down, Lancia has been one of the cleverest, most innovative car-makers of all time, with that cleverness tempered by poor timing and even worse reliability. And scant profitability.

It was founded in Turin in 1906 (no, I didn’t spot the 100-year anniversary celebrations from FCA, either) and went into production in 1907.

It had the first production car with a unitary chassis construction and the first five-speed transmission, among its other innovations.

It made a brave attack on the Formula 1 world championship in the 1950s, with Ferrari taking over its pole-winning D50 when its own car was a bit ordinary, with Juan Manuel Fangio winning his 1956 championship in the rebadged car.

Its Fulvia Coupe was successful in rallying, but then the Lancia family was sold to the Pesenti family, which sold it to Fiat in 1969.

It stunned the world with the Ferrari Dino-engined Stratos in the 1970s, then the 037 Rallye, the Delta and the Delta Integrale in the 1980s and 1990s. It won 15 World Rally Championships, plus drivers’ titles with Miki Biasion and Juha Kankkunen.

Even though it hasn’t been involved in more than 25 years, it still has more constructors’ WRC titles than any other manufacturer, including the last for a rear-drive car with the 037 Rallye.

Everybody from Markku Alen to Didier Auriol, from Sandro Munari and Walter Rohrl and from Bjorn Waldergard to Henri Toivonen took WRC wins in Lancias.

Its 1980s efforts were dogged by tragedy, though, including the death of Attilio Bettega at the Corsican rally in 1985 in an 037 Rallye and the death of Toivonen and his navigator, Sergio Cresto, on the same rally a year later in the fearsome Delta S4.

It was even successful in sports cars, winning the Targa Florio and it even won the 1981 World Endurance Championship for sports cars. Its LC2 prototype was a match for the legendary Porsche 962 for speed (claiming 13 pole positions), but wasn’t as reliable and used more fuel.

Its road cars gradually lost its edge after the Delta Integrale became the thinking man’s WRX, though the Ferrari V8-powered Thema was a last hurrah.