Can you get much cooler than a very sideways Opel Manta 400 with Henri Toivonen at the wheel? Adorned in that iconic livery too, there isn’t a lot that beats it.
Listen carefully and you can hear the bark of its 2.4-liter normally-aspirated four cylinders. You can smell the mud on its hot exhaust, even on this relatively dry Tarmac stage. And just listen to the screech of the big, fat Michelin rubber breaking traction over the fall leaves.
Exactly 40 years ago this week, Toivonen was throwing this car around the early spectator stages on Great Britain’s round of the World Rally Championship.
Look at that packed crowd behind him, soaking it all in. Much of the first day-and-a-half of the event, which began on a Saturday, were spent on these relatively short crowd-pulling tests.
Based on country parkland and estates, such stages proved that ‘taking the rally to the people’ doesn’t have to mean running in city centers.
No, the likes of Longleat, Weston Park and Sutton Park were vastly more accessible than Welsh forests and attracted huge crowds.
OK, maybe what these spectators saw wasn’t quite as spectacular as the diehards in Clocaenog, Dyfi and Resolfen. But, as this fantastic shot from the Girardo & Co. Archive proves, spectacular it still was – and more authentic than a quick blast around a few plastic barriers and a roundabout.
Toivonen is manhandling the Group B Manta with typical flamboyance. Let’s not forget, Group B wasn’t solely about four-wheel-drive monsters. There were plenty of snarling beasts that were driven – and steered – only from the rear, too.
Admittedly, by the time that Opel’s lower, more aerodynamic, lightweight replacement for the Ascona made its debut in 1983, you needed four driven wheels if you were going to win on the world stage.
But this car was competitive on sealed surfaces and could also hold its own on some of the more specialist events in the WRC.
Co-driven by Ulsterman Fred Gallagher, Toivonen was running second when he went off the road on the second day and, though he rejoined, he would retire that night with engine failure.
Team-mate Jimmy McRae – who rated the Manta as the most fun car to drive of his career – took his to third place, beaten only by the Audis of Stig Blomqvist and Hannu Mikkola. The following year, Rauno Aaltonen’s second on the Safari would stand as the Manta’s best WRC result.
