Everybody's gotta start somewhere

This is a long story... BTW, backblipped yesterday.

Traffic museum Mobilia opened a new rally museum department in June. This year's exhibition is dedicated to Henri Toivonen. We visited there today.

This Simca 1000 was the first car which the Finnish rally legend Henri Toivonen raced with. He won his first ice track race with it in 1975, his father Pauli (European Rally Champion 1968) came second!

He had already won Finnish junior karting championship in 1971, his first year in the series, and both Finnish and Nordic junior championships the next year. Later he made it to the European championship finals, but crashed with someone called Alain Prost and had to retire from the race.

He raced in both rally and track in the late 70's. He even had the chance to test the March team's Formula One car, being faster than the team driver, but in the end he chose rally instead of track, and raced in the Talbot Sunbeam Lotus factory team in 1980, winning the RAC rally as the youngest winner in a World Rally Championship rally by then and long after that.

In 1984, he started racing in the Martini Lancia team. By then the Group B rally cars had become quite monstrous, and safety had not been number one priority in their development. The team's model 037 was competitive on tarmac as was Henri, but could not compete with the other team's 4WDs on gravel. A couple of accidents and injuries caused by them also delayed the success he was heading to, but as the team introduced the new 4WD model Delta S4 in RAC rally 1985, his time had come. He won the rally, and also the following Monte Carlo rally 1986.

After problems in the next two WRC rallies, the car had got an even more powerful engine and other refinements for the Tour de Corse 1986. The team's test driver had told Henri that the new engine is so powerful that he hesitates using all that power. Despite controlling all that power was a challenge also for Henri, he beat the others by a huge margin on the first day, and called his brother in the evening, telling that he's in no hurry any more, now it's the others who have to hurry.

On the second day of the rally, May 2nd, 1986, the car slipped out of the road and exploded. Henri and his co-driver Sergio Cresto died on the spot. With the car completely burned and no eyewitnesses, the exact cause of the accident remains a mystery.

In the 80's, in my teens, following the WRC series was very interesting, with many Finns competing and winning rallies and championships. Young and very talented Henri Toivonen's rise to the top made it even more interesting and his death was a huge loss. He was my distant relative, but we never met.