Watching today’s World Rally Championship cars sliding at insane speeds on tarmac, gravel and snow, you marvel at the driving skills of the drivers. And rightly so: Formula 1 may be the king of motorsports, but it’s a two-hour sprint, while rallying is more akin to a three-day marathon.
Even so, while mustering the today’s beasts amid strong competition is quite a feat, it is a piece of cake compared to what rally drivers had to face three or four decades ago.
“We did one 36-hour section non-stop, leaving from Monte Carlo and back again”, tells Sympatico.ca Autos, one of the “Flying Finns” of the 1960s and 1970s, Rauno Aaltonen. “The 100 best competitors started the next day at around 5 or 6 p.m. on the Mountain Circuit.”
Makes today’s short rally stages with the teams’ motorhomes, service points and helicopters flying overhead seem like an entirely different world –which, in fact, it is.
Aaltonen, aka “the rally professor”, won the European Rally Championship in 1965 and finished second an amazing six times at the most demanding event of the World Championship Calendar, the Safari Rally.
His most amazing feat, however, came in 1967, when he won the Monte Carlo Rally – in a Mini! “It was David vs Goliath”, says the 73-year old Aaltonen. “Ahh, it was fantastic! The spectators in Monte Carlo were there with their hearts”, he adds.
In 1962, Aaltonen crashed his Mini at Monte Carlo: “I was stuck in the burning car”, he remembers. “I could see pastel colors, you know, and I was hearing classical music. Then I could hear my co-driver calling me to climb out, but the seatbelts were already melted, so I had to wiggle out.”
Yet, despite his narrow escape from a burning Mini, he wasn’t deterred one bit and returned. It was, as many refer to it today, rallying’s golden era. Aaltonen knew that the diminutive Mini had quite a disadvantage compared to the much more powerful cars of his competitors.
If the words “Mountain Circuit” don’t ring a bell, then maybe the famous Col de Turini special stage does. “We run it twice, both directions. It’s very difficult: cliffs, rocks, narrow roads…”
“We arrived at the beginning of the real stage leading by 12 seconds”, says Aaaltonen. “Vic Elford was second in a Porsche 911, but he was in front of the road, starting ahead. We listened to that six-cylinder, the feeling of power! He disappeared down the road.”
The details are etched in his memory: “It was our turn. The man with the flag counts down from 10, but he stops at four. There’s an accident on the hill, the ambulance rushes up.
“Then a snowstorm starts. You could see the snowflakes floating down. In theory, it could be beautiful. For us, it was hell. The spikes in our tires don’t work in the snow and we couldn’t see the road – everything was white.”
Today, the marshals cancel special stages for less serious incidents. Back then, the show just went on and the countdown resumed.
“First gear. Wheelspin. 8,000 rpm, hardly moving. Second gear. Wheelspin. We couldn’t get any grip”, he recounts. “Henry Liddon, my co-driver from Bristol, England, has a dry sense of humor. He says when we get to the top of the hill, ‘two and a half minutes down’. No way – but in rally, you never give up.”
What Aaltonen, and Liddon for that matter, didn’t know is that this joke would become reality in the most spectacular way.
“We drove back down the mountain really fast: third gear, 140 km/h. The spikes were working better now. Suddenly, under the snow there was a patch of ice. We started sliding, rocks on the inside of the turn, cliffs on the outside. I saw that there are these concrete blocks that would be safe to hit: they would stop the car from going over.”
Any sane man would have done the same. Going down a cliff at the Col de Turini is something you simply don’t want to do even if they paid you a million dollars.
Aaltonen wasn’t paid that much, but he made an almost suicidal decision: “You never give up. So I aimed between the concrete blocks. I knew it wasn’t a sheer drop, maybe 45 degrees and with trees.”
Ah, no problem there, then…
“We were flying in the air”, says the (literally, at that point) Flying Finn. “It looked like we were in a fairytale. These boulders looked like giants.”
Amazingly, the Mini and its crew survived the drop: “We landed on soft snow between trees and huge boulders. This was purely good luck, as one cannot steer the car while air-born. Had we already left the road, there was no point in stopping, as the Mini would instantly sink deep.”
He admits that they had no idea where they were going.
“Once we had found a road and noticed it was the special stage, we understood how lucky we had been. Nobody could purposely find that kind of route between the trees and boulders – yet, in fact, it shortened the route.”
The accident worked to Aaltonen’s advantage: “We won by five seconds. It was a huge shortcut. That was not skill, it was good luck”, he concedes. “I told my co-driver to shut-up his mouth and don’t tell anything.” It’s something Aaltonen revealed only after 20 years.
So, did Aaltonen really cheat? Technically, maybe, but in reality he didn’t do it on purpose: no one would risk his life and dare dive down that cliff, snow or no snow, just to gain a few seconds.
Maybe it was pure luck. Maybe it was destiny. Maybe it was a rare case of the universe conspiring to help David beat Goliath and give rally fans something to talk about for many years to come…
Story References: Sympatico.ca Autos
[Thanks to Michael Banovsky for sending the story over our way]VIDEO
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