As the highest level of rallying competition in the world, safety is paramount in the World Rally Championship.
From the safest rally cars ever made in the shape of the current Rally1 machines, to the tireless effort to ensure spectator safety on the stages, the sport has certainly come a long way since the spectacular but incredibly dangerous times of the Group B era in the mid-1980s.
One person who’s at the head of the mission for stage-side safety is four-time World Rally winner and FIA safety delegate to the WRC, Michèle Mouton. As a driver who competed at the height of Group B, when spectator safety was seemingly almost left down to luck rather than good judgment, there’s nobody more qualified, and more driven, to do the job.
But what does a safety delegate actually do? As a panelist at last week’s DirtFish Women in Motorsport Summit, the 1982 WRC runner-up spoke in detail about her role.
“First of all, I represent the FIA in the championship,” said Mouton. “I have to make sure that all the safety measures are respected and that [the crowds] are in [the correct] place [on the stage].
“So I drive through each stage 30 minutes before the first Rally1 car with a safety caravan, we are many cars going through, and we look that people are in place.
Mouton drives through WRC stages before the competitors
“Then, I give the ‘OK’ to the clerk of the course to allow the stage to start.”
During her many years in the role of safety delegate, the job has changed considerably. It isn’t just Mouton who holds the responsibility of ensuring each stage is ready to run; the Frenchwoman now has a whole team around her.
“I don’t work alone; we are now having a deputy safety delegate [Nicolas Klinger] who is also in the race control, and this is a big improvement,” says Mouton.
“Nicolas, who is working with me, is behind the screen watching all the onboard cameras from all of the cars. So when the first car starts we are in radio contact together, so he knows already what is going on in the stage when I am going through it.
Mouton (right) explained her role at DirtFish's Women in Motorsport Summit
“And then we have a safety plan where we have all the marshal positions indicated and their number, so you can contact them and make sure that people haven’t moved after the passage of the caravan, and move people if we need to and make sure the WRC is running in a very good condition.
“We have cars which are going extremely fast, so we need to be sure of safety.”
It isn’t just during WRC events where Mouton’s expertise is called into action; she’s traveling around the world all year evaluating and helping to improve safety in rallying.
“It’s a very interesting role,” she added. “I also work of course with the organizers to try to improve the level of safety, and they are also evaluating all of the stages for new events.
“This year I will go to Poland and Latvia [prior to their WRC events] and check all the stages, and so it’s quite a busy role, but I like it. I like the challenge and I like to try to do the best [I can].”
Mouton’s quest for spectator safety is a never-ending mission – there’s simply always room for improvement on that front. But as the WRC’s most successful female driver can attest, the differences between how rally fans observed their heroes during Mouton’s career and in the modern era are enormous.
Mouton was familiar with Portuguese fans lining the stages in 1980s
And to prove that point, there’s one classic WRC stage in particular that comes into Mouton’s mind.
“You want to know about Portugal?” she smiled as she told her story to the Summit’s captivated crowd.
“It’s a big difference [between the Group B era and now] because you have a stage in the championship that I was doing in my time, Fafe, but when I was landing at the end of the jump, people were in the middle of the road and closing the road.
Spectators parted to open a path for cars as they crested Portugal's famous jumps
“You were jumping, and then on the landing from the jump, then the people were moving, so it was just crazy. But we were used to driving with people around, they were like barriers all the way down the road, they were everywhere.
“Today, when I arrive there on this jump in my safety car, and people are 30m away on each side, I always still have this image [of people in the middle of the road] in my head.
“It’s a stage that’s 11km [seven miles] long, but you have more than 100,000 people in the stage. It’s crazy.”
