Lombardi died on Thursday, 2 October. He was 83 years old at the time of his death.
Lombardi is best remembered as the architect of Lancia’s golden era. He eventually found himself designing engines for the Turin manufacturer’s iconic rally cars. Lombardi was involved in developing, among others, the Group B monsters – the Lancia Rally 037 and Lancia Delta S4.
During the Group A era, the Lancia Delta was utterly dominant. The team won no fewer than six manufacturers’ titles between 1987 and 1992, while Juha Kankkunen and Miki Biasion brought the team four drivers’ titles.
Kankkunen has an incredible memory of Lombardi from 1989, when the Lancia boss appeared unannounced on his doorstep. He had come to entice Kankkunen, who had in the meantime moved to Toyota, back to Lancia – and succeeded. Naturally, Kankkunen was saddened to hear of Lombardi’s death.
“It’s not a good year this one,” he sighed to DirtFish.
“Not long since we are losing [Claudio] Bortoletto and Stuart Turner and now Claudio [Lombardi]. Not a good year,” he continued.
Over the years, Kankkunen’s relationship with Lombardi deepened into a friendship. Kankkunen still remembers Lombardi’s arrival at his front door as if it were yesterday.
“Claudio [Lombardi] was a very good friend for me. Can you imagine, he was coming to my house, to Laukaa in Finland. Nine o’clock in the morning and I was having my coffee and there was a knock at the door. It was Claudio and [Lancia engineer Conny] Easenburg. I opened the door, I was surprised, but I told them to come in. I asked what I could offer them… maybe some coffee?”
“Claudio said very simply: “We would like you to come back to Lancia and drive for us again.” It’s not very often that a team principal is coming to your home to ask this kind of thing. But this was the man that he was. He was very, very, very good guy. He made me a good deal and I come back and stayed with Lancia for another three years. I won the championship in 1991 and was second in 1992,” Kankkunen recalls.
Lancia withdrew from the World Rally Championship as a works team after 1991, and by that time Lombardi had already moved on to Ferrari’s Formula 1 team.
“He was a really clever guy,” said Kankkunen. “He was a really, really good engineer and all of the time you could see the Lancias getting stronger and stronger. With the Group A cars, he was always coming and working closely with us drivers – we were always talking: “How can we make the car better? What else can we do?” And every time a new model was coming he was taking the best things and putting it inside the new car. I had a fantastic time with him when we were together in Lancia,” Kankkunen adds.
