RallySport Magazine April 2017

But she still had to drive it and she did a
fantastic job.
The last of the Quattros, the S1, had all
the wings and spoilers and was the most
awesome of all the Group B cars. What was it
like to drive?
You know with the long Quattro,
the old one, it was very difficult to get
through the narrow roads of Corsica.
The whole short Quattro was done - I
don’t know when, because I didn’t do
any testing for it – it was very much a
quick, quick, quick job, but then they
started to test it and they noticed it was
too short. It was very, very difficult to
find the balance: the
most difficult when you
are in a bend and you
have 400 horsepower
in that car already and
you put the foot down
it sits down and starts
to understeer, and
when you lift the back
end comes around. You
couldn’t get around the
bend nicely. It was a
very nervous car.
When you were doing
240 or 250 km/h the
front would start to
lift and you’d lose the
steering.
Then we got a new
engineer – an ex-racing
car engineer – he saw
what we have to do to
try to save the car, and
that was the wings and
to get the aerodynamics
right, and we did a lot of
work with that.
Then, of course, we increased
the power and, finally, we had 550
horsepower in it. Actually I owned an
S1, but I sold it one year ago to Juha
Kankkunen because he’s got a museum
and he likes to have it there, but it’s a
beast to drive.
Was it literally a car you drove by the seat
of your pants?
It took 2.7 seconds to 100km/h, and
9.4 seconds to 200!
I did testing for the last car in Greece,
when we pulled out in 1986, and at
that time we had already this PKVW
gearbox with the two clutches and 600
horsepower.
It’s funny, in the morning when I
tested it I thought it had absolutely too
much power, but in the afternoon I
thought maybe it could have a little bit
more! (laughs)
Walter Rohrl said that it was a car that you
had to drive on your instinct – that if you had
Hannu Mikkola thrills the
crowds at the Otago Classic
Rally in 2003.
Photos: Peter Whitten
to think about what you were doing you’d be
off the road.
We did quite well with it, like in Monte
Carlo, but the whole thing then with the
Audi was that it had a front engine and
the whole engine was hanging out from
the front wheels.
At the time it was Audi’s
idea that we should use
the same layout for the
production cars as for the
rally cars, but they had
already built a mid-engined
car that is now in the
museum in Ingolstadt. It’s a
very good looking rally car,
but I never had the chance to test drive
it or anything.
Were those days, the Group B era, just too
crazy?
Oh it was. But it was fun! Actually
when you have a lot of power it’s
easy to drive because you can correct
everything with the power – you haven’t
got the situation that when you come
to a bend and put the foot down there’s
nothing there.
But I have one stage that I will never
forget with the S1. I had some problems
in the 1000 Lakes Rally and I came to
one of the legendary stages – it’s 26km
long, over the crests and very difficult.
I did the stage in the early days in an
Escort and the time was 12m52s or
12m58s – that was a good time. With
the S1 I did the stage in 11m32s.
That was the only time I had the
feeling that for part of the stage I
wasn’t sitting in the car, I was sitting
somewhere else.
The wings just made the car that
when you go into a bend it was pushing
down and down and you don’t find the
limits really – you just go around the
bends and the car’s going faster and
faster.
Still people in Finland come to me
and say that they were there: “When we
could hear you coming 3km before, we
knew you were trying”.
FAVOURITES
Over all the years, is there a favourite car
– one that stands out more than the rest?
Escort, that is my favourite car. Audis
and the other four-wheel drive cars,
they were a little bit beasts to drive with
their understeer – especially with the
Audi as it comes from a front-wheel
drive car.
In slippery conditions it was very
difficult, and that was where Stig was so
good. If you had ice or snow, you knew
you couldn’t beat him because he had
the experience from the Saab.
I still had in mind the Escort driving,
and over the seven or eight years of
four-wheel drive I never really thought
that I mastered it.
Of your rivals, who were the toughest to
beat over the years?
Markku Alen was very hard to beat –
he was always “maximum attack”. Timo
Makinen was one of the best also, he
never really put a foot wrong and he
was very consistent and very quick.
- PETER WHITTEN
APRIL 2017 - RALLYSPORT MAGAZINE | 61