We love 1985 part 3: WRC

In 1985, the world of rallying unexpectedly collided with that of…indie rock. Having been formed a year earlier (and splitting up, for the first time, only a year later) Half Man Half Biscuit’s Nigel Blackwell wrote Architecture, Morality, Ted and Alice, which would eventually appear on The Trumpton Riots EP (1986). The solemn opening line of this song went: “The wonderful dexterity of Hannu Mikkola/Makes me want to shake hands with the whole of Finland”. A sentiment whose simple truth was surpassed only by the following lyric that snarled: “But the nauseating bashfulness of early Diana/Makes me want to set fire to commemorative tea towels”!

Hannu died in 2021, but the incredible thing was that he’d only vaguely heard of this seminal work until I identified it to him during an interview many years ago (and tried at the same time, mostly unsuccessfully, to explain to the grateful yet confused 1983 world champion exactly what a tea towel was and why his devoted fan Nigel had wanted to set fire to one).

Perhaps Hannu, like many of his countrymen, was more into heavy metal. Hard-rock band Peer Günt, from Kouvola, also released their eponymous debut studio album in 1985 and would go on to become enduring heroes of the Finnish metal scene.

The point being, there was a lot happening in Finland and therefore in rallying that year: including future Toyota WRC team chief Jari-Matti Latvala’s birth on April 3, the day before the start of the Safari Rally. That year would become one of the most memorable and dramatic seasons in the history of the WRC, entirely emblematic of ’80s exuberance.

Not so slack

The man at the centre of the unbridled, hedonistic action of 1985 used to turn up to each event looking a bit like a geography teacher on a field trip. It was easy to underestimate the portly and genial chain-smoker who peered out at a world he made his own through thick glasses and an even thicker fringe, which seemingly made his use of a crash helmet redundant.

But Timo Salonen’s laid-back exterior – the Finns nicknamed him ‘Löysä’, which roughly translates as ‘slack’, due to his penchant for driving one-handed – belied one of the fastest drivers ever to sit in a rally car.

To this day, he is the most successful driver of the fearsome Group B era with seven wins: four of which were achieved consecutively during that incredible 1985 season. He capped that off with yet another win and three more podiums to crush the opposition. It was only the dogged consistency of Audi’s reigning champion Stig Blomqvist that allowed the Swede to get within 52 points of Peugeot’s unlikely superstar. Twenty points were on offer for a win at the time, but Blomqvist somehow managed to seal the championship runner-up spot with just three podiums: perhaps the most striking indication of Salonen’s breathtaking dominance.

France vs Germany

The manufacturers’ title was a different story. Peugeot won it by just 16 points, encapsulating the whole hare and tortoise fable of this remarkable season. True, Audi triumphed on just one rally all year, but they were always there or thereabouts. That solitary victory came in San Remo courtesy of Walter Röhrl, which tells the story of the season in just a single rally.

The mixed surface nature of the event played perfectly to the versatility of the Quattro, in its ultimate evolution, as well as the laconic German maestro driving it, who eventually finished third in the championship behind his team-mate Blomqvist.

Ultimately the Peugeot was the more agile and faster car, but had a narrower operating window to get the very best out of it – which Salonen mastered – as well as a tendency to bite when over the limit. Hence the increasing number of aerodynamic appendages added to the 205 with each evolution, in an attempt to keep it on the road…

The black hole

On July 31, Ari Vatanen found out just how hard that bite could be in one of the most harrowing accidents ever seen in the WRC: not so much for the physical, but more for the long-term psychological effects on the driver. Vatanen’s Peugeot hit a hole in the road while flat-out in fifth gear on the second stage of Rally Argentina, launching itself into a series of violent somersaults and shedding all its bodywork in the process (although the central rollcage remained intact: Group B was perhaps – slightly – safer than many people thought).

Vatanen and his co-driver Terry Harryman were both seriously injured, but while the Finn would go on to make a slow but full recovery from his multiple fractures, he was mentally scarred by a deep depression, sinking into what he described as “a black hole with no way out” and convincing himself that he had contracted the AIDS virus – very much in the news at the time – as a result of his blood transfusions.

The 1981 champion (who would eventually go on to become an MEP and stand for the FIA presidency) was never the same driver again, making a low-key return only two years later. And leaving Salonen with almost a clean run to the 1985 title.

Monte or bust

The year had started off so very differently. Vatanen won the Monte Carlo Rally in spectacular fashion, thanks to a fightback that’s gone into rally legend.
Sitting on a comfortable lead, Harryman lived through every co-driver’s worst nightmare: checking the duo in early to a time control in Gap, which cost them 8min with 16 stages and 280 competitive miles still to go. According to Harryman, Vatanen didn’t even get angry. He just breathed in, said it was done now, and that they needed to get on with it.

An inspired tyre choice – studs rather than the slicks selected by Röhrl and Audi – gave them a chunk of time back almost immediately, and they eventually went on to win the rally by 5min: which in reality was a 13min winning margin. This was probably the single-most impressive moment of 1985 – and it came right at the start of the season. Harryman later said that he felt the need to change his overalls “several times” during the final few stages…

Delta time

While the constructors’ title fight was all about Peugeot vs Audi, a sign of things to come arrived right at the end of the year when Lancia finally gave the long-awaited Delta S4 its debut on the RAC Rally. This urgently needed to happen: the previously dominant two-wheel-drive 037 was hopelessly outclassed throughout 1985 (the highlight was a second place in Portugal) after a traumatic year for the team.

The new supercharged and turbocharged four-wheel-drive S4 had a long and complicated gestation that reflected its complex engineering and Italian political background. But once two examples of the new car from Turin showed up in Nottingham, they were devastating. Henri Toivonen led his team-mate Markku Alén home by 56sec, while the third-placed competitor finished more than a minute and a half behind them. Lancia could breathe again.

Pond life

About that third-placed competitor… This was the iconic Metro 6R4, also on its first event, which probably made the 1985 RAC the only rally in the world (apart from Monte Carlo, the traditional season-opener) where the podium was monopolised by cars making their debuts. The Metro was in all likelihood too little, too late, but an amazing third place from Tony Pond and Rob Arthur (a marked contrast to their day one RAC crash the year before in the ungainly Rover SD1 – yes, that was Austin Rover’s previous attempt at a rally car) lifted spirits. The stark reality was that the Metro would never equal that result again but it nonetheless became a folk hero of a car in Britain as well as a clubman’s favourite: the four-wheel equivalent of Roger Clark. The bark of the Metro’s Williams-engineered 3.0 V6 through a forest still sends shivers down the spine today.

The darkest hour

There was a very good reason why that momentous RAC result was so vital for Lancia, and it had little to do with dwindling results. The team suffered the worst setback possible on the Tour de Corse in May, when the calm, infinitely likeable, and gentle Attilio Bettega lost his life instantly after his 037 hit a tree on stage four, Zérubia.

It was simply unfair; the biggest stain on the 1985 season. Not Attilio. Anybody but him. There’s an incredible postscript to this story: in 2007, his son Alessandro Bettega won a prize drive in a Ford Focus WRC on the Tour de Corse. One of the stages passed by the exact spot where Attilio was killed; Alessandro stopped there to lay flowers on the recce. When it came to the actual stage, he blitzed it en route to a finish just outside the top 10 on his WRC debut in a World Rally Car.
I asked him afterwards to describe his feelings at the end of that stage, if he was able to. And he could, very eloquently. “I was happy, I was smiling,” he said. “That’s just what he was like… and that’s what he would have wanted.”

Since Attilio’s death, the Memorial Bettega Rallysprint has been run as part of the Bologna Motor Show. Previous winners have included Colin McRae (three times), Petter Solberg, Sébastien Ogier, Robert Kubica and Kalle Rovanperä.

So what was 1985 really about? Probably the incredible legacy of the Bettega family.

Tache-tastic

Alongside the duels between established stars from Audi, Lancia and Peugeot, there were some exciting new talents emerging from 1985. In particular, a fresh-faced 26-year-old Finn – who had recently developed the moustache that would become his Mansell-like totem in decades to come – enjoyed his breakthrough season.

At arguably the most tactically challenging rally of them all, Safari, Juha Kankkunen claimed his very first win (which was also his first podium). Making a speciality of those tricky and mud-covered African events, Kankkunen additionally won the Ivory Coast Rally later that year. On both occasions, his veteran team-mate Björn Waldegård was second – which equally showed how Toyota was increasingly a force to be reckoned with. But there was no doubt about the star, with Peugeot winning the battle to sign Kankkunen up for 1986. He would go on to win the title in his first full season.

Don’t cry for me

You could make a strong argument to say that Peugeot’s most talented star wasn’t a Finn, or even from anywhere near Europe. Instead, he was one of the most underrated drivers in Formula 1, and a man whose breadth of political talent surpassed even that of Vatanen (or of Peugeot’s then-boss Jean Todt).

We’re talking of course about Carlos Reutemann, who drove a 205 T16 to third on the 1985 Rally Argentina – keeping his nerve after his team-mate’s terrible accident – exactly five years after achieving the same feat in a Fiat 131 Abarth (as an active F1 driver). No other F1 driver has ever come close to doing the same as Reutemann, and even no other rally driver has returned from a five-year WRC lay-off and come straight back onto the podium.

Yes, it always happened in his homeland, but the scale of what the 43-year-old ‘Lole’ accomplished in WRC in 1985 really can’t be underestimated.

What we loved about 1985

The midpoint of the 1980s in rallying was a perfect metaphor for the rest of the decade: a glorious tipping point of tumultuous excess that foreshadowed a changing of the guard and a new generation. You had Quattros, 037s, Celicas, but it was the Peugeot 205 T16 that brought a Gallic cool and excitement that had never been seen in rallying previously, while icons like Henri Toivonen were genuine rock stars. You couldn’t fail to become hooked on the sport.

What we didn’t love about WRC in 1985

Just like an addiction, the hedonistic rush of Group B rally was as unsustainable as it was exhilarating, and there were already worrying warning signs – largely ignored – of the tragedies that would characterise the 1986 WRC season. Not to mention the politics that dogged every manoeuvre like treacle – and would even decide the outcome of the championship the following year, after the Sanremo Rally results were cancelled. And this was more than 30 years before ‘cancel culture’ had even been thought of…