Behold, The New 276 bhp Lancia Ypsilon HF

 The famous racing elephant is back and it’s going rallying again.

Rally fans and aficionados of sporty Italian marques may well be familiar with Lancia’s HF badge. Signifying particular performance and with an enviable history of adorning very fast entries in the World Rally Championship, it was perhaps most notable on the now-legendary Delta Integrales.

We already knew that the little red elephant was making a return on the new not-likely-to-come-to-the-UK Lancia Ypsilon HF, but now we know that it’ll have 276bhp (more than the 237bhp previously suggested), and we’ve got a full suite of pictures of the road-going electric model. Lancia is taking it back to rallying, too, albeit with a petrol engine instead of an electric drivetrain.

The Elephant In The Room

The on-road Lancia Ypsilon HF is a 276bhp electric hatchback that shares its underpinnings with fellow Stellantis electro-hatches like the Abarth 600e and the Alfa Romeo Junior Veloce. That’s no bad thing, because both those cars are pretty cracking to drive. Equipped with a 54kWh battery it’ll make 62mph from standstill in 5.8 seconds, and shares a Torsen mechanical limited-slip diff on the front axle with the Alfa and the Abarth. The standard Ypsilon’s look has been beefed up to match the rise in the performance.

The rally model, meanwhile, goes by the name of the Lancia Ypsilon Rally 4 HF and could be seen on rally circuits as early as next year. The Rally 4 in the name refers to a specific category of rallying for two-wheel-drive machines and is designed for young rallyists getting into the sport. This version of the Ypsilon has a 1.2-litre three-cylinder petrol engine with 209bhp and a five-speed manual ‘box. Will it make pops, bangs and flames? We don’t know. But let’s hope so.

So, What’s HF Then?

For the young/uninitiated, HF is Lancia’s performance badge, or rather it used to be, ages ago. First introduced in 1960, it was used by a group of Lancia owners that founded the Lancia Hi-Fi club for owners that had bought at least six brand new cars from the brand. Lancia first put an HF name on sportier models, and by 1963 it was used for the HF Lancia Racing Team, created by a group of drivers and owners.

The team used four red elephants on its logo, and that formed the basis of a single-elephanted badge that was used on increasingly legendary rally cars, including the Stratos HF and various Deltas.

Why elephants? Lancia legend says that a little elephant was chosen as a lucky charm by Gianna Lancia, the CEO of the company in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The idea is that once launched into a race, elephants are unstoppable. What a race that would be.

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